September 2008 Archives
The last day of this year's second CTIA show in San Francisco featured an interesting new focus: teenagers. Friday boasted two sessions about teenage mobile use: First, there was a panel discussion with seven teenagers (between the ages of 13 and 19), who answered questions about their relationships with their mobile devices; second was a session titled: "A Generation Unplugged--Insights to Improve Your Business Performance," which focused on data gathered by a Harris Interactive/CTIA survey.
The information presented in each session overlapped, but the second session's motto sums it up nicely: "Mobility--The Biggest Thing Since Rock n' Roll."
To someone who constantly uses lyrics by The Who in her headlines, this claim seems specious, but obviously I'll waive a discussion of historical musical importance. The gist of it is (and most of us will not find this shocking), teenagers are primarily concerned with their status in social hierarchies which, to paraphrase Dave Barry, overhaul themselves entirely about every 12 seconds. Indeed, 47 percent of the teenagers in the CTIA teen study said
their social lives would end without mobile communications. In a virtual world, taking away kids' mobile devices is virtually grounding them.
The study proferred other statistics proving that teens are driving device and app sales, but what's that got to do with enterprise applications?
The theory I thought was the most interesting had to do with how teens are very trusting of technology. Looking at the desired features listed by surveyed teens, it's pretty clear: flexible material, just software, paper thin, appended to your eyes, wearable, a projector screen. "They redefine the entire industry since they were raised on Star Wars," said one panelist. Sounds like science fiction to me. But if that's the case, one needn't engage in the debatably distasteful activity of talking to a teenager to figure out what the next great innovation will be. Just get out your Red Dwarf DVDs and your Douglas Adams and get to work.
A recent Gartner Research study found that 10 percent of the PHP community are corporate IT developers, and predicted that during the next five years, that number will grow to 40 percent. That's good news for PHP developers looking for corporate gigs--and very good news for PHP tools maker Zend Technologies, which cited the Gartner finding at the Zend/PHP Conference last week as evidence of widespread, more strategic adoption of PHP in enterprises.
Zend is trying to position its products, the PHP development framework Zend Framework and the PHP IDE Zend Studio for Eclipse, as the de facto standards for enterprise PHP web development as the language becomes more mainstream. If Zend is judged by the company it keeps, then it has chosen its allies well, forging relationships with IT heavyweights such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and most recently, Adobe.
Zend co-founder and CTO Andi Gutmans told me the products resulting from these partnerships position Zend to deliver interoperability in an enterprise environment. He added that its move to Eclipse with Zend Studio will get the tool into traditional enterprises where Eclipse is a standard, and developers are familiar with it. The main product announcements Zend made at the conference were:
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The collaboration with Adobe, in which Action Message Format (AMF) support will be integrated into the Zend Framework: AMF support enables data integration between Zend's server-side PHP and Adobe's client-side Flex data and logic components. The companies will also enable their respective IDEs (Flex Builder and Zend Studio for Eclipse) to work as one.
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General availability of Zend Core for i5/OS 2.6: This Zend-certified PHP stack is designed for IBM i5/OS, with extensions for PHP to access native i5 resources.
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Zend Studio for Eclipse: The first version of the IDE built on Eclipse, Zend Studio for Eclipse includes support for the Zend Framework and integration wih the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit.
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Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) for Zend Framework: This is a new Zend certification to go along with the existing ZCE for PHP certification.
Zend's efforts seem to be paying off. Gutmans and (during his opening keynote) Zend CEO Harold Goldberg shared customer success stories from organizations including Bell Canada, Magento, and Fox Interactive Media. But the growth of the PHP language is a credit to the work of the entire PHP community, which includes not only Zend, but also alternatives such as CakePHP and projects like the PHP Extension Community Library (PECL) and the PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) as well. Members of the PHP community, who already may be uneasy with media types (like me) conflating PHP (the open source language and community) and Zend (the PHP product vendor), may not be as supportive of Zend's relationships with the likes of Microsoft--anathema to the most virulent open source advocates in the PHP community.
Still, Microsoft had a clear presence at the conference, stepping up as a Platinum sponsor via its open source community web site, Port25, and hosting a session titled, "Microsoft's PHP Community Involvement." Presented by the Director of Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center Tom Hanrahan, a more accurate title of the session would have been "How Microsoft Plans to Support Open Source Software on the Windows Platform." Hanrahan devoted most of the hour to Microsoft's open source efforts on all fronts. The PHP-specific news saved for the end included:
- An ADOdb patch contributed under the LGPL
- A SQL Server PHP Driver
- An IIS7 + Fast CGI module, which fixes IIS (Internet Information Services) compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications
- A new site, windows.php.net, dedicated specifically to Windows support for PHP
One representative from the PHP community who attended the Microsoft session was Paul Reinheimer, the host of a popular radio-style PHP podcast called P3 (php|architect's PHP Podcast). Reinheimer began his career as a Java developer, but discovered PHP eight years ago when he grew frustrated with the rigors of "Java casting." He, for one, took a pragmatic view toward both Microsoft's open source pitch and Zend's PHP drive into the enterprise.
Reinheimer acknowledged that some of his peers in the PHP community would not have stepped foot into a Microsoft session, but praised Redmond for "doing a lot of good work." He also views enterprise adoption as "good news for PHP." Reinheimer said, "More eyes looking at the problems makes the language better."
He explained that the larger companies have the resources to allow their engineers who make fixes to contribute them back to the community, whereas smaller organizations may not have the bandwidth to do so.
"By and large, people are no longer writing traditional Windows applications," said Maritz. "People are increasingly looking at different ways of writing and provisioning applications."
This statement should both surprise and disappoint DevX's huge developer audience—and not just those writing applications for Windows. Maritz went on to say that "we are going to see the traditional operating system, in fact, deconstructed and made more customized and relevant to the particular application framework."
While there's no doubt that other application types running on other OSs are more common than they once were, the statement that "people are no longer writing traditional Windows applications" simply indicates how far out of touch Maritz is with the mainstream efforts of working developers.
The truth is that more Windows applications are being written than ever before: Office automation programs, web applications, games, database applications, communication, embedded, robotics, and mobile applications, and yes—standard desktop/laptop business applications. In any case, Windows has already been "deconstructed" in the process of expanding Windows programming into other devices. Again, it's not just Windows; there are also more desktop, mobile, and web applications being written for other OSs, most of which were adapted from existing OSs specifically for those types of devices.
Virtualization definitely has an important and a growing place in the IT stack—but that place is supplemental to existing OSs, not a substitute for them.
I had the opportunity to attend Yahoo’s second Open Hack Day at the Sunnyvale, CA campus. This was my first time visiting and I was impressed. It’s a big campus, with several buildings, a cafeteria with better food than some restaurants, free sodas, a fitness center that could rival certain fitness chains, and of course, purple chairs with yellow trim. How could you ask for anything more?
How about a 24-hour hack fest complete with kegs, old-school video games, an outdoor concert, and an open, collaborative, community atmosphere for developing the next great application? That’s what Open Hack Day is all about. Over 400 attendees registered for the event and 40 of them signed up for a camping spot on the Yahoo lawn. Walking around on Friday afternoon, I spotted giant bins filled with purple Frisbees, basketballs, and racks of T-shirts and pullovers. Yahoo really pulled out all the stops to keep the developers entertained while they worked (they call this work?) on their hacks.
During the press conference, Yahoo executives updated the media on the Yahoo Developer Network. The short of it is: Yahoo is alive and kicking. The executives presented us with a laundry list of API’s and applications that developers can use in their every day work—some of which I had no idea Yahoo even owned.
Let me list just a few: MyBlogLog, Delicious, FireEagle, SearchMonkey, BOSS, Flickr, and YUI. A developer can build a fairly sophisticated web site using the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, which is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. An extremely brief demonstration left me impressed.
During my visit, I was handed a map of the Yahoo Developer Network. I found it interesting that Yahoo lists Open Social, My Space, and Google on their map. Yahoo connects to Google through Yahoo’s address book APIs, MyBlogLog, and Yap. Why would Yahoo advertise Google on a list of their web services? Perhaps Yahoo truly does want to foster open, collaborative, community-oriented development for the web.
Check out Yodel Anecdotal for more information on Open Hack Day, including a link to the list of winners.
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