Makara's Cloud Application Platform, now available as a developer release, helps developers easily deploy, scale and monitor mission-critical applications in the cloud

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. - February 2, 2009 - After months under the radar, Makara today unveiled a brand new approach to cloud computing's most difficult problem: application deployment and management. Rather than retrofit system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara's Cloud Application Platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product is freely available today as a developer release at www.makara.com.

"The widespread adoption of cloud computing is hitting a wall in terms of ROI because companies are not able to effectively manage applications, both inside and outside the enterprise, in a cloud environment. No one's going to run mission-critical apps without management, not in the data center and definitely not in the cloud," said Tim Guleri, Managing Director of Sierra Ventures. "Makara's Cloud Application Platform provides that missing link, enabling developers to deploy their apps and make them work with full management capabilities. Makara will get the cloud past the ROI hurdle."

Continue reading "Makara Leverages Virtualization to Simplify Cloud Application Management" »

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

Zend Technologies have just announced version 1.1 of Zend Framework including support for Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services and the Deutsche Telekom Developer Garden platform. The new release also provides documentation and tutorial enhancements.

Microsoft Interoperability team noted on their blog :

With the new Zend Framework 1.10, by simply using the new Zend_Service_WindowsAzure component, developers can easily call Windows Azure APIs from their PHP applications and leverage the storage services, including Blob Storage, Table Storage and Queue Service, offering them a way to accelerate web application development and scale up on demand.

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Jean Paoli, General Manager Interoperability at Microsoft offered a comment about this announcement: "PHP developers find the Windows Azure platform compelling, Microsoft's decision to contribute PHP-based Windows Azure components to Zend Framework helps demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability by providing greater choice and opportunity for Microsoft customers and partners."

Continue reading "Zend Framework Adds Support for Microsoft Windows Azure" »

Posted by Hatem at 6:01 AM to Development tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

Businesses Also Increase Online Hiring of Professionals with Translation, Illustration, and Android Application Development Skills

Mountain View, Calif. (November 17, 2009) - The Elance Work Index, which ranks the hottest 100 skills in today's online labor market, today revealed that for the third month in a row PHP (Personal Home Page Tools) captures the number one spot on the Index, placing PHP-skilled professionals as the most sought after independent workers online today.

Elance is also expanding its skill testing platform to augment Elance's existing 250 tests with new "Code Tests" that give technical experts in top programming languages like PHP a way to demonstrate their expertise in writing and debugging actual computer code. To launch the new PHP Code Test, Elance is sponsoring a 14 day "code-off" in PHP for its pool of skilled PHP providers-- offering $250 and a full-year premium membership to each of the coders who score in the Top 10 for PHP programming. The PHP "code-off" begins now and ends at Noon PST on November 30, 2009.

Despite the difficult economic environment, year over year hiring on Elance is up 40% in October and demand for online contractors in areas such as IT, marketing and administrative continues to grow as evidenced by the over 300,000 jobs posted on the site in the last 12 months.

Continue reading "Elance Work Index Reveals Strong Demand for Qualified PHP Programmers" »

Posted by Hatem at 5:34 AM to General | Permalink | Comments (0)

Generating print-ready well-formatted PDF documents with PHP is not an easy task. Traditionally, there are two main approaches to PDF generation with PHP. Given sufficient time and patience, both partially get the job done, but still leave a lot to be desired:

HTML-to-PDF: This approach is widely used in mainstream applications. Here an HTML document is programmatically created and converted to a PDF, using one of the many open source libraries ¹. Since HTML, however, is not a page-oriented format (as is PDF), it is impossible to perform a 1-to-1 mapping between HTML and PDF. Typical word processing file format features, such as header and footers, orphans and widows or even page numbers can simply not be represented in HTML.

Programmatic: This approach offers total control of the resulting PDF. However, it requires that the x and y coordinates of every line of text, every geometrical shape and graphic be set from program code ². Not only is this an extremely time-consuming solution, but is also very brittle: Every time a graphical designer changes the layout of a document, a programmer must re-work his or her program code.

Continue reading "PDF Generation with Zend Framework" »

Posted by Hatem at 10:49 AM to Tutorials | Permalink | Comments (0)

jcx.software released today VS.Php 2.7 for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005. New features in this release :

• Silverlight 3 tools intergation
• Improved IIS 7 and IIS 7.5 integration
• New built-in web server engine
• Internet Explorer 8 support including debugging JavaScript
• Improved support for editing very large PHP files
• Improved smart indenting and document auto indenting functionality
• Bootstrapper installer automatically downloads and installs the Visual Studio shell if not present. Available for both 2005 and 2008 editions.

Below the press release :

August 3rd, 2009 - We pleased to announce the release of VS.Php 2.7 for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005. This release introduces a number of new key features and enhacements of existing features.

Silverlight

One of the most exciting new features is Silverlight integration. With VS.Php 2.7, you can develop Silverlight applications and host them in your server side PHP application. VS.Php makes it easy to develop, debug and deploy these types of applications.

With VS.Php 2.7, you can easily debug your server side native PHP application and your client side Silverlight application within a single debugging session. Silverlight and PHP can interact using a number of standard technologies like REST, SOAP and JSON.

Continue reading "VS.Php 2.7 Released with Silverlight Integration" »

Posted by Hatem at 7:48 AM to Commercial Software | Development tools | Permalink | Comments (0)

Zend Technologies released today version 7 of Zend Studio IDE with support for PHP 5.3 and a reduced memory footprint which make it faster. New features in PHP 5.3 are now supported by ZendStudio including namespaces, late static binding and closures; in addition to bundled PHP executables and debugging capabilities.

The new release provides also enhanced integration with Zend Framework, stronger object oriented capabilities with enhanced editing features, easy integration and support of ZendServer including local deployment for debugging, and finally the use of Eclipse Indexing and caching architecture, a better workspace modeling, and removed unneeded dependencies to speed up the IDE.

Posted by Hatem at 7:43 AM to Commercial Software | Development tools | Permalink | Comments (1)