Thursday, April 20, 2006

Zend Framework surpassed the .NET Framework!

Mike brought to my attention that according to Microsoft sources the Zend Framework has surpassed the .NET Framework. Think it's a joke? Go to MSN.com, search for "framework", and you'll see the Zend Framework appears first, and .NET Framework second.
And we're not even close to a release yet! :)

Monday, April 17, 2006

New Zend Framework Website look launched (almost)

After my talk at Scale 4x, the Southern California Linux Expo, Roy Rubin from Varien got in touch with me. A synposis of what he said was "The Zend Framework is very exciting, but its Web site is not". He was being polite as I'm sure he really want to say "Your Web site's look sucks".
In the spirit of community, Roy offered to contribute to the Zend Framework by having his team help with a new design. From seeing the sketches it was clear that Varien could deliver something far more appealing (a.k.a sexy) than what we had created. So after hard work by them and Mike from the framework team, we've almost got it done.
In the spirit of release early, release often, we've decided to launch it a tad bit prior to its completion. We still have some work to do in order to get the manual integrated into the new site. The new manual look is MUCH nicer. So sorry, it looks a bit weird, but actually it's kind of cool in that it allows you to jump between the old and new look and actually see the huge difference in what the Varien team did.
Another thing we REALLY wanted to have done for the launch was a bug tracker. It's still top priority and we'll hopefully be able to launch that in the coming days (using the new look of course).
So I'd like to thank everyone who helped on this project especially Ben Blumenfeld and his team who did the design. It shows how outside contributions can make a big difference.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

PHP coming to i5/OS

As many might have seen, Zend and IBM announced the support for PHP on i5/OS, or previously known as AS/400. Although this platform might be foreign to many in the PHP community, over the past few years I have discovered quite a few who have either worked with PHP on this platform by following IBM's Redbook instructions or have installed PHP on a UNIX/Linux server and then interoperated with the i5/OS.

As part of this project we will be providing all i5/OS users Zend Core for i5/OS for free. This will very much lower the barrier of entry to get up and running with PHP. We will also be providing ways for them to access their existing code-base by creating language bridges (such as an RPG bridge), native drivers for accessing DB2/400, and various other bridges to operating system services. I believe this initiative will have a huge impact on the i5/OS community, which has primarly been offered Java as a way to Web and Web Service enable their platform, but as most of us PHPers know, Java is just too damn hard and takes too much time... :)

There are many interesting parallels between the i5/OS developers community (mostly developing in RPG) and the PHP community. First of all it's also a very passionate community which deeply cares about their platform. Having been at their last user group conference it's clear that it translates into a very vocal and honest dialogue. Second, it is a community that also tends to have less formal computer science education, but learns what it needs in order "to get the job done". So I look especially forward to seeing the i5/OS and PHP communities mix on the basis of these and other similarities.

I've already talked to some of you in regards to the PHP & i5/OS work you've been doing. I'd love to hear from additional people who might want to use PHP on this platform.

The early access version (no language bridges yet) can be download from the Zend Web site.
You can catch me at andi@zend dot youknowhwat.