January 2009 Archives

You can use Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), which gives you control over multimedia and text elements in a browser over time, to create a slideshow on your Web site. Add some PHP, and now it's dynamic and you get server-side support.

Octavia Andreea Anghel explores the use of PHP and SMIL in an article on DevX.com. By the end of the article, it shows how to write an HTML/PHP application that generates a custom SMIL presentation.

The basic idea is to let users select some of the SMIL customizable aspects (images or audio files, transition times, and durations) from an HTML form, and then use PHP to capture the user input and generate the corresponding SMIL document.

Internet Explorer versions 5.5 and higher can play SMIL presentations natively.

If you're working with PHP and you feel like it's been awhile since there was an update to the Eclipse Foundation's PHP Developer Tools (PDT) project, you're right. There hasn't been an update since version 1.0 was introduced in 2007.

That's no longer the case, says Sean Michael Kerner over at InternetNews.com.

PDT 2.0 expands on the first release with new usability and object-oriented programming features for PHP developers. The new PDT 2.0 release comes as the PHP language itself continues to evolve and as new languages like Ruby challenge PHP in the web application development space.

Key additions to the new release include:

• a new caching and indexing engine that improves the overall performance of PDT
• improved code completions options
• a code searching element called Mark Occurrences that identifies where a particular item is utilized.

In case you missed it, MITRE and the SANS Institute released a list of the 25 most programming errors, as part of an effort to promote a more secure Web. Funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this list is available on the SANS Institute Web site.

Among the Top 25:

• CWE-89, failure to preserve SQL query structure, which gives rise to SQL injection attacks, one of the favorite attacks of hackers.
  
• CWE-79, which enables cross-site scripting, another common and dangerous vulnerability in a Web application
• Improper authorization, an issue that leads to insider data breaches.
  

Datamation's Kenneth van Wyk weighed in with his thoughts on the list this week.

We all need to also ensure that software developers understand the underlying sound engineering principles that are implicitly referenced in the list. Things like the principle of least privilege, compartmentalization, and so on—think Salzer and Schroeder circa 1975. You know, the things that instantly and irrevocably cure insomnia among software developers. Well, you can use the Top-25 list as a way of drawing attention to those principles in an interesting and engaging way.

Now that Windows Server 2008 is optimized to run PHP applications, you may be interested in exploring some of the tools to help you quickly and easily build those applications.

PHP Builder has a quick review of Michael Pham's PHP Designer IDE:

PHP Designer is a powerful PHP IDE that enables developers to learn, edit, debug, analyze and publish websites that utilize PHP 4, PHP 5, Smarty, HTML, XHTML, CSS, SQL, XML or JavaScript.

If you're new to PHP, the IDE includes tutorials on PHP development and Web development in general.

If you're looking for more information or want to check out the software, you can find it at http://www.mpsoftware.dk.

 

Writing over at Datamation, Jeff Vance has "10 Virtualization Predictions for 2009." It's hard to argue that 2008 was a huge year for virtualization as a whole, and the release of Microsoft's Hyper-V was only one of the highlights.

Among Vance's predictions:

• The bad economy will be a boon for virtualization
• Storage virtualization will have a big year in 2009
• Desktop virtualization will ramp up
• Management tools for virtualization will become huge

And of course, no column on technology predictions is complete without a little speculation on possible acquisitions. And in the virtualization world, that means VMware.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Microsoft released a pair of operating systems in late 2007 and early 2008, and in case you've been living under a rock or had so much fun over the holidays you forgot how this ended, we'll let InfoWorld's Doug Dineley take it from here:

We suppose it happens in families too, where one twin seems charmed from the start while the other lives under a shadow. Certainly that's the case with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista, the one almost universally heralded and the other widely snubbed. Still, isn't it odd? How do two operating systems, born together and sharing so much DNA, arrive to such different fates?

With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft listened to the features and capabilities that IT customers said they wanted, and the company delivered. With Vista, not so much.

Windows Server 2008 has been widely praised as a mature and polished Linux killer and a no-brainer upgrade from Windows Server 2003. J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld's Enterprise Windows blogger, minced no words: "You must move to Windows Server 2008."