Monday, January 30, 2006

Expose for Firefox...

This might be old news, but I was just reading Stephen O'Grady's blog and found mention of a very cool Firefox extension called Reveal.
Reveal is to Firefox what Expose is to Mac OS X (don't kill me if that didn't come out well :)

I highly recommend it. It's making it much easier to navigate my millions of Firefox tabs.

Friday, January 27, 2006

php|architect's Pro PHP Podcast

Today Marcus Whitney hosted me on his Pro PHP Podcast show. I was really impressed by his professionalism and think he had some very good questions. I'd like to apologize to the people who were trying to listen in on the live session which was cancelled after I got cut off twice. There must have been some problem with the "conference" mode of the Podcast. When I redid the interview with Marcus directly, it all worked fine.
For those who are interested, you can listen to the interview here.
If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to email me at andi@ you know where...

Monday, January 09, 2006

I belong to the ZCE 1000

Not to be confused with the Fortune 1000 :)
It's been about a year and a half, since we launched our Zend Certification program. Within a few days we'll be surpassing the 1000 mark of certified engineers. To celebrate the event, we have created a new logo, themed as ZCE 1000, for use by the first 1000 certified engineers. If you're past the 1000 mark, we'll sue you if you use it :) Just kidding...
Here's what it looks like

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Woody Allen's Best!

Just got back from seeing Woody Allen's latest movie, Match Point. Although I've enjoyed some of his movies, I've never been one of his greatest fans. This movie though is truly a masterpiece. It's completely different from his other movies. It's not in New York but in London, not a comedy but a drama, and just in general, is quite different from any of his other movies.
I highly recommend you see it! It's one of the best movies I've seen in the past few years.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

PHP is a great language!

One thing I have noticed, is that quite often, PHP developers who are seeking for new PHP features are prematurely trying to implement them in C. Although, there are definitely cases where you want to write your code in C, I think in some cases PHP is too quickly dismissed. Developing features in PHP not only takes less time, but is also less prone to bugs, easier to maintain, and more stable and secure. Also, in the majority of cases, whether such a feature were implemented in C or PHP, would not make a significant different to overall application performance.

It is for this reason, and for reasons of ease-of-deployment, that in the Zend Framework we are actually taking full advantage of the PHP language. We want to showcase what the language can do, and not drop into C when we feel challenged. Also, the fact that we are implementing everything in PHP will make it also much easier to deploy, as we will aim not to have dependencies on non-standard extensions. Of course we will depend on what we consider mainstream PHP 5 extensions such as SimpleXML, DOM, PCRE, sessions etc.

ZSearch, one the components we presented in the php|architect Webcast, is a great example of this. Despite the fact that a Lucene implemention does a lot of bits and bytes file access, we implemented it fully in PHP. Is it as fast as a C implementation? Most definitely not. Is it good enough for use on high-traffic Web sites. We believe so. Same can be said for our PDF implementation, ZPdf. As we wanted to make it eas easy as possible to manipulate Pdfs, without requiring users to have to recompile PHP, we decided to implement it 100% in PHP. Not only are we implementing the creation of Pdfs, but we are also going to enable reading Pdfs, traversing them, manipulating and then writing the changed document back to disk. The implementation will even include a PHP-based LZW implementation needed to support the latest Pdf standard.

I believe PHP is a great language and from my experience a lot of needed functionality can be written and maintained much better on the PHP level, and except for limited examples, we all know that most often the bottlenecks in Web apps don't lie in a bit more or a bit less code, but in a lot of variants of the stack such as database , file system and network acccess, and more...

Long live PHP!