Davey Shafik posted recently a very interesting article making the case for PHP. It's not about comparing programming languages capabilities, but especially concerning access to people and market penetration. Davey pointed to an old post that gives an estimation of Perl, Php, Python and Ruby Programmers availability according to most popular search engines. I updated the estimation so we can have most accurate results. The table below illustrates the results found, I have just truncated Bing results to 1M to have more readable chart, after all I don't believe there are 50M resumes indexed by Microsoft - and that's another topic.

Programmer's Resumes in Search Engines

Posted by Hatem at 7:23 AM to Case Study | Permalink | Comments (2)

Stefan Priebsch and Sebastian Bergmann, are writing a book on "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects". The book will be published in English and German at the same time later this year. The idea for the book is that Stefan Priebsch and Sebastian write the introductory as well as the concluding chapters while other authors contribute case studies for the middle part of the book.

An excellent idea that will provide amazing information and experience in quality assurance within any PHP project. It's interesting to see how different developers approach differently quality assurance in their PHP projects. The book target intermediate and advanced developers who are looking for Unit Testing best practice to help making stable and successful projects.

No need to mention that Sebastian Bergmann is the creator of the PHPUnit in addition to many others open source tools. Sebastian Bergmann and Stefan Priebsch are both Co-Founders and Principal Consultants with thePHP.cc that we have previously announced here. You can find abstracts of some case studies on the project website.

Posted by Hatem at 12:51 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new Zend Server is a complete Web application solution that includes PHP, native install, an enhanced code accelerator, and advanced monitoring and problem diagnostics for applications designed for deployment on a single server. In addition, Zend Server automates software updates, hot fixes, and security patches on both Linux (native RPM and DEB based repositories) and Microsoft Windows (MSI), for quick and easy installation in less than 5 minutes. Zend Server supports the most popular databases, including Oracle® Database, MySQL, and Microsoft® SQL Server, as well as leading operating systems from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu/Debian to Microsoft Windows Server and more.

Zend Server CE is a completely free version of Zend Server that runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X, specifically tuned to address the needs of non-critical server deployments and for developer desktops/laptops everywhere. Zend Server CE comes with the same high-performance opcode caching and easy-to-use PHP administration capabilities as the commercial Zend Server.

Zend Server Pricing starts at $1,195 for an annual product subscription. More information and download www.zend.com

Posted by Hatem at 8:29 AM to Commercial Software | Development tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

In times of tight budgets, quality is a key success factor to reduce risks in IT projects. Three successful IT consultants and trainers have joined forces and founded thePHP.cc, The PHP Consulting Company.

thePHP.cc helps businesses and enterprises to reduce IT costs in the long term with Open Source technologies and PHP in particular.

thePHP.cc supports their clients in improving their employee's qualification to overcome skills shortages.

The three founders of thePHP.cc have long-standing experience in consulting, coaching, and training and are sought-after speakers at international IT conferences. They previously helped clients such as Cisco and Digg as well as government agencies.

Posted by Hatem at 5:12 PM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Website Scripts have recently released the Pro edition of their PHP Knowledge Base Manager. Knowledgebase Manager Pro is an web-based system developed to support and enhance the organizational processes of knowledge creation, storage, retrieval, transfer, and application.

It is featured with user and group management support, allows unlimited publications for your knowledgebase content, supports multiple ways of visitor feedback gathering, provides high safety of your data with built-in automatic database backup system, article versions history, and allows recovering of deleted articles. We made use of modern Ajax technology and followed Web 2.0 design and usability trends to make Knowledgebase Manager Pro knowledge base management software fast and convenient.

You can check the feature tour for more about the product features, and try out their online demo here

Posted by Hatem at 7:47 AM to Commercial Software | Permalink | Comments (5)

Miami, FL, January 25, 2009: Jcx.Software announced today the release of VS.Php 2.6 for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. VS.Php is the PHP integrated development environment (IDE) for Visual Studio developers. This version includes a number of features for the enterprise developer including:

• Seamless integration with Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS 7), which allows developers to host their PHP project on their local IIS server. VS.Php configures PHP, Fast CGI and XDebug automatically. It also provides unique configuration for each Php project hosted in IIS, allowing developers to utilize custom settings in the php.ini for each project.
• Support for very large projects with over 10000+ files. VS.Php is now optimized to load large projects quickly.
• Project-wide IntelliSense, providing the developer with quick access to all classes, functions, methods and constants defined in the project. VS.Php provides two tabs in the IntelliSense pop-up, one for frequently used entries and another for project wide entries.
• The ability to drag and drop files within the solution view, which allows the user to quickly copy or move files within the project. Also, the user can drag files to the references node for quick access in IntelliSense for the symbols defined in the file.
• The latest version of Zend Framework, Php 5 and XDebug.

Jcx.Software continues their commitment to provide the best PHP development experience for enterprise developers. "With added support for handling very large projects and project-wide IntelliSense, VS.Php is a powerful tool for enterprise developers. We are pleased to leverage Visual Studio's ability to handle very large projects in the latest version of VS.Php." said Juan Rivera, Jcx.Software Founder.

Continue reading "VS.Php 2.6 Release Focuses On The Enterprise Developer" »

Posted by Hatem at 9:36 AM to Development tools | Permalink | Comments (0)