All news about PHP

Yesterday, php.net announced TestFest 2008!

The PHP-QA team would like to announce the TestFest for the month of May 2008. The TestFest is an event that aims at improving the code coverage of the test suite for the PHP language itself. As part of this event, local User Groups (UG) are invited to join the TestFest. These UGs can meet physically or come together virtually. The point however is that people network to learn together. Aside from being an opportunity for all of you to make friends with like minded people in your (virtual) community, it also will hopefully reduce the work load for the PHP.net mentors.

All it takes is someone to organize a UG to spearhead the event and to get others involved in writing phpt tests. The submissions will then be reviewed by members of php.net before getting included in the official test suite. Please visit the TestFest homepage to get additional details on the TestFest on how to get involved, either as a UG or by setting up the necessary infrastructure.

Atlanta PHP will be taking part in TestFest 2008! As a preview for our May 1st meeting, we will have a workshop format catering to two different groups of developers. For beginning PHP developers, we will help you get started developing PHP applications by helping to set up your environment and teaching a few of the basics. For intermediate-to-advanced developers, we will discuss how you can assist the PHP development community by writing phpt tests. More details to come in the future.

Tell your PHP user group organizer about TestFest 2008 and get your members started writing PHP tests today!

atlanta, atlantaphp, php, php qa, phpt, qa, testfest2008

Two distinct paradigms of AJAX use have emerged in the last few years of AJAX innovation. At one end of the spectrum, we see vast use of AJAX for enriching Web pages - adding some interactive features on top of the basic model of an HTML Web page. At the other end of the spectrum we’ve seen a growing set of solutions that rival the features and functionality of desktop software - full AJAX software applications.

IONA announced that it has become a Silver Sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to consensus-based, collaborative software development. Financial sponsorship will help ASF to acquire servers and hardware infrastructure, purchase bandwidth and needed resources, and increase awareness of ASF projects and incubating initiatives.

The US Postal Service has started piloting a program that will let people recycle small electronics and inkjet cartridges for free by mail. The postage will be paid by Clover Technologies Group, a company that recycles, remanufactures and remarkets inkjet cartridges, laser cartridges and small electronics. If the electronic item or cartridges can’t be refurbished and resold, its component parts are reused to refurbish other items, or the parts are broken down further and the materials recycled.

Veeam Software and Infotronics announced they have formed a partnership to better serve the Australasian virtualization market. Infotronics will now make Veeam products available as part of its portfolio.

VMware demonstrated the future of desktop computing. Across the globe customers who have standardized on VMware for server virtualization are now poised to bring the benefits of virtualization to the desktop. By extending the VMware platform to the desktop, IT administrators can deploy virtual machines on every PC and deliver a complete desktop experience that is easy to manage, fast to deploy, less costly to maintain, always-current and more secure.

This article from a Swiss newspaper recounts the appearance of Christopher Tarnovsky at the European Black Hat conference (link is to a Google translation of the French original). Next month Tarnovsky will testify in a lawsuit brought by a maker of satellite TV encryption systems (Kudeslki) against an Israeli company (NDS), for whom Tarnovsky worked until recently. (NDS is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) While with NDS, Tarnovsky cracked Kudeslki’s crypto, but claims he didn’t post the result on the open Net. His responses to audience questions are amusing, in particular when someone from Microsoft asks him about breaking the Xbox 360 console. Tarnovsky replies (in the translation): “I have been offered 100,000 dollars for the break, but I replied that it was not enough.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a good chance to jot down my experiences during AJAXWorld. I had braced myself to stand in front of a large room full of suits that needed to go to the conference rather than wanting to go. Turns out I was wrong. The audience was a mixed crowd of company owners, project managers, designers and developers and everybody was very involved and interested. I met a lot of companies selling developer tools like frameworks and IDEs, a few implementing companies and really surprising edge developers like someone who ran software that controls geostationary satellites!

Douglas Crockford gave a keynote at the AJAXWorld East 2008 conference in New York City last week. As ever, Douglas was pulling no punches - his title: ‘Can We Fix the Web?’ The browser, Douglas says, was behind the times when it was introduced, and it hasn’t aged well. It wasn’t designed to do the kinds of things we’re trying to make it do; we’ve exploited most of its potential and we’re hitting a natural wall now that we’ve extracted from the browser about as much as is possible.