From this preview you could see an endpoint and a parameter, so Niall tried and it worked for everyone. That inspired me to make this fast PHP implementation of it, using the Zend framework JSON library. If you’re interested, have a look at the code.

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Joost de Valk is an SEO from Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who works for Onetomarket, an online marketing company. He has experience as a sales manager for several IT companies, is involved in open source projects like WebKit and Mozilla, and is the creator of the biggest online resource on CSS3. Joost blogs about web design and SEO, and writes all sorts of scripts for webmasters.

You’re correct that OSS is changing the game, but if the OSS community sticks to its vision of a 100% OSS world, in which commercial software is something your father used, then you’re going to see aggressive moves by vendors like Oracle & Microsoft bent on protecting their turf. The truth is that the future of the software market lies in the mutual existence of the OSS & commercial software business models. Neither is going away anytime soon, or ever. So, if we accepted this outcome, and toned down the rhetoric, there would be a better chance of educating vendors like Microsoft & Oracle to the benefits of adding open source products into their product lines without poisoning the communities that develop said products.

At the end of the day, customers want high quality software, support, performance, reliability, scalability and availability for the best price. Sometimes OSS will be the answer for the project. Other times it will be a commercial product. It comes down to customer choice.

One can argue that customers are better off with OSS because they can see the code and aren’t locked-in. However, I think that’s a simplistic view, and for the average customer, one that isn’t supported in practice and especially since mature OSS vendors inevitably start looking very much like mature commercial vendors.

Take a look at what IBM WebSphere did with our support for Apache Geronimo, and building an IBM product based on Geronimo. Not only has the WebSphere Application Server revenue growth remained healthy compared to our commercial & open source competition, we’ve been able to truly get involved and help the Geronimo community innovate. Customers have been big winners here (well, so have we!).

There’s a lesson for Microsoft & Oracle in the success of IBM WebSphere & WAS Community Editionif they’d only peer out from under the bed.

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I am taking a semi-break from IBM life as I return to finish a PhD in Industrial Engineering. I’ve held roles in market intelligence, strategy and product management. I’m ex-product manager of IBM WAS Community Edition, and blog about enterprise open source topics.

Amongst all the industry buzz worthiness of the day, Google purchases a wiki development company, Sony getting sued but once again, this time for price fixing memory chips, and Dr. Who sweeping the British TV awards show, the PHP Windows news takes the #1 slot on news that was good to hear.

The use of PHP on windows is a good thing, many programs like Drupal, BASE, Acid, Wiki’s, just about everything useful in Open Source web apps use PHP in one form or another. People who have tried to configure PHP on a windows 2003 server knows the pain of getting it to run at all, let alone nicely. With Zend support (Zend is a cool way of making PHP work faster on windows, and already exists and is usable with a number of IIS versions) actually being developed to work in the windows environment, the expectation is that the system will work in a much faster more stable environment.

Paul Krill writes:

“The Microsoft-Zend collaboration will open doors for more people to consider running PHP on Windows in production applications, said RedMonk analyst Michael Cote. “It looks like they’re just taking care of some of the architectural things,” he said.

Microsoft, Cote said, realizes that people want to run dynamic languages on Windows.

Other facets of the collaboration involve technical improvements for PHP on Windows Server, which will be submitted under a PHP license to the PHP community for feedback. Zend will establish a Windows testing lab to maintain high performance of PHP on Windows Server.

The two companies also plan to work to ensure a production-quality PHP runtime environment for IIS 6.0 for Windows Server 2004, and for IIS 7.0 on Longhorn. Both vendors will participate in the PHP community to help developers planning to deploy PHP applications on Windows Server.

Zend in the first quarter of 2007 plans to start using the PHP improvements in its Zend Core product line. A technology preview of an updated Windows version of Zend Core is available here. Also, Zend will use the technology for its Zend Platform product line to support business-critical PHP environments on Windows Server.” (Paul Krill, 2006).

Check out the Zend Open source Conference here for more information (notice that Microsoft is a sponsor this year as well).

Good news for everyone who develops PHP and then ports over to a windows server system. I can’t wait to download it and see what it will do on our test servers, this should be really interesting to see how easy this will be to install, and if there are any noticeable performance improvements.

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Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
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Zend received a vote of confidence from the venture capital firms that fund it. The latest round of funding announced by the company will be used for several purposes, they disclosed:

Well-known venture firm Greylock Partners, a long-time fixture in the technology world through having backed numerous companies, signed on for this investment round. It is their first investment in Zend, and also places Greylock partner Moshe Mor on Zend’s board of directors.

GigaOm lead writer Om Malik noted that many Zend investors have also invested in MySQL AB, the company behind the MySQL open source database. PHP and MySQP have been very popular with startup companies.

Red Herring sees good things for Zend. In their story on the infusion of capital, they cited Gutmans on some of Zend’s forward-looking thoughts:

Whatever transpires will take place with a new CEO heading up the company. Former CEO Doran Gerstel left Zend in April 2006, and that corner office has remained open. CNet blogger Stephen Shankland posted that Zend should have something to announce about that in the coming weeks.

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“We are encouraged and excited to see a tremendously positive response from the PHP developer community for Zend Core for Oracle,” said Michael Hichwa, vice president of database tools, Oracle. “Zend Core for Oracle delivers increased web application performance and reliability using Oracle Database as a comprehensive, easy to develop and deploy infrastructure. We anticipate an increasing percentage of the PHP developers will take advantage of Oracle and Zend’s efforts to support their database-driven applications.”

The Zend Core product is essentially a middleware type of product. It optimizes and manages PHP applications. Zend Core for Oracle is free but support is where the money comes in. The cost for support is $199 per server up to 30 and $149 for 31 to 100. Anything more than 100 is a custom pricing package.

“The StepUp Commerce local shopping service exposes local inventory information from retailers of all sizes to consumers wherever they are browsing products online”, said Mike Bertrand, Chief Technology Officer for StepUp Commerce. “The Zend Core for Oracle GA release represents a solid platform upon which we can rapidly expand our offerings. The combination of PHP and the Oracle database, certified and supported by Zend and Oracle, gives us the flexibility and scalability we need to confidently serve consumers and retailers with a strong, differentiated online presence.”

PHP is an open-source scripting language and is widely used to power a variety of websites. The language caught on because many felt it was easier to learn than PERL or Python. It allowed HTML programmers to learn more quickly to develop dynamic websites.

As ZDNet pointed out, Zend’s work shows the growing commercial aspect of open-source software and advancement of “collaborative programming technology to higher-level server software.”

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

A free download of Zend Core for Oracle will allow PHP developers to write applications in PHP that will work with Oracle’s database offerings. Availability will not be until the 3rd quarter, though.

“Oracle continues to support the open source and PHP developer community by providing them with a robust and proven infrastructure for development with our industry leading technology products including Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database,” said Christophe Job, vice president, Oracle Application Server Development.

Zend Core will be compatible with other software from Zend, such as Zend Platform and Zend Studio. Doron Gerstel, president and CEO of Zend Technologies, said: “Through our partnership with Oracle, PHP developers now have access to all the infrastructure necessary to build and deploy highly-reliable applications for enterprises of all sizes.”

The PHP scripting language, an open-source development, lets developers quickly build web applications capable of working with back-end databases.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.