Thursday, November 29. 2007

Recently I've had Microsoft on my radar a lot, mostly because I'm wrapping up development of the Zend_InfoCard component for Zend Framework, but also because everyone has been talking about the recent release of the FastCGI support in IIS.

Wonderful, now I can also run PHP in a reasonable fashion on IIS -- that's good for everyone right?

I'm not so sure, to be honest. I mean let's face it there is competition out there for the web. A company like Microsoft would be simply neglectful if they didn't do everything in their power to sway, control, and if at all possible dominate this space right? Over the years when it came to public-facing web development PHP has been without a doubt been the leader, but why? I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that Microsoft didn't have a reasonable platform for their web development technologies then it had to do with PHP just being better..



...Continue reading "The Microsoft Trojan Horse?"

Tuesday, November 27. 2007

Zend needs, pretty much immediately, a part-time trainer who can do online trainings periodically (generally in two hour blocks starting either at 11am or 2pm EST). Must be able to speak intelligently and authoratively on various PHP subjects you know and have the time to learn any subjects being taught you might be lacking in.

If you think you can fit the bill, e-mail me: john at zend dot com.

Monday, November 19. 2007

I've seen this about a million times at various clients working in the services business, so I thought I might take a moment to mention it on my blog -- perhaps someone will find it valuable. From where I stand, there is a huge portion of the development community in general (not only PHP really either) that seem to think their job is nothing more then to write code without consideration for anything else in the organization.

Guess what? Your boss doesn't care how awesome your code is, or how slick your super-duper AJAX auto-complete wiz-bang thing is if you write something which doesn't support the business needs of the company.

Here are some of the classic blunders I've seen:

* Spending two days refactoring a piece of code which not only were they not asked to refactor, but it was working just fine before (no, the fact it was ugly is NOT always a good enough reason to refactor)

* Trying to be the developer version of Vincent Van Gogh -- code can be art, but it is always a means to solve a real business need. Over-architecture doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look like an idiot when the next guy shows you how to solve the same business need in 30 lines of code instead of 400.

* Not understanding you are responsible for your own time lines. I don't care if you have a project manager or not working in the group -- ultimately at the end of the day as the guy writing the code if you say it's going to take 3 weeks to develop something and it takes you 3 months that is entirely your problem. What does that mean? It means when your boss comes over and constantly changes the scope or features of what you are trying to build if you don't push back and make him decide between getting the project done in 3 weeks or his feature that's your fault.

* Know your business - its amazing how many developers are out there writing code without having any idea what-so-ever why they heck they are getting paid to write it. If you can't speak intelligently about the business your company is in and why your application is going to benefit that business for at least 30 minutes then you aren't being a very good developer. We all sometimes like to imagine that the world revolves around us, but let's face it -- you're working in a company and that company is trying to do something which you probably should understand before you try to write the code to do it.

I'm sure there are more if I had more time, but that's good enough for now. Bottom line: Code is not the most important thing in business, even though it might be in OSS. If you want to be a successful professional OSS developer you need to understand both and react accordingly!

Friday, November 16. 2007

Hey Planet PHP! I sent an e-mail and used your form on the site but I still don't see my blog back on the blog roll... Did I do something to upset the syndication Gods?

Thursday, November 15. 2007

Alan, I think you were smoking way too much PHP when you wrote this post.. This in particular really surprised me to hear you say:

"...if there was an apache module that did mysql stored procedure calls based on the request URL, and returned JSON, I suspect PHP would be practically obsolite....."

While I do understand the concept your explaining, I simply can't see how the model is practical at all for two big reasons:

Reason 1: Businesses will never build applications designed to make money when the entire application is transmitted open-source to any client which requests it.

Reason 2: Without a server-side language such as PHP, there is not a viable security model. Javascript data validation is a half-measure at best, and do you honestly believe that it makes sense to use stored procedures written in SQL to scrub data?

While I think Alan really did go a bit off the deep end, he has touched on a pretty interesting point though. While I can't see the server-side ever going away I do think that in the near future the development model will change from what it is today to a completely event-based model based on a json-powered message bus between the client and server. IBM's QEDWiki uses Zend Framework to create such a bus and I have to say it's a very impressive architecture. The idea that PHP programming will for a lot of people resemble Visual Basic is really a lot closer then a lot of people might think.

Monday, November 12. 2007

Hey everyone, I'm back!

Wow it's been a long time...

As you can see I've updated coggeshall.org, I hope everyone enjoys the new look and feel! It's been a very long time since I've blogged (or for that matter, had a decent web site).. but its time to get back on the horse and start getting more involved again in the public eye.

There are a ton of things that have happened in the better half of the last two and a half years.. so much so that I don't think I'll even try to update everyone on what's been going on. Instead, let's just start from scratch. I have managed to import all of my old blog entries going back to 2003 when I first started blogging, and I promise that I'll make it a point to continue to blog on an ongoing basis.

Regarding the web site itself, most of what was here before is back. If something is gone I've either determined it was no longer useful and took it down (please send me an e-mail at john at coggeshall dot org if you want to see something I've taken down) or its moved to a new section. Some of the cool new things about he site are as follows:

Integrated with Web 2.0 stuff: I've decided to start getting more involved in the social aspects of Web 2.0 and have integrated this site with all of the latest and greatest social networking technologies. That means you can now follow me (I update twitter regularly from my cell), or become my friend on Facebook (just search for my e-mail address john at zend dot com). You can also Digg my posts and just about anything else Web 2.0-ish... It took a little work, although the hardest part there was just getting all of my photos uploaded to Flickr to begin with, and I'm glad I made the effort because its much easier for me to manage everything now. I may look into some integration with things like LinkedIn as well in the near future as I do use that pretty regularly. Let me know if anything is giving you any problems!

OSS Projects: OSS Projects are now located in the code section and I've created Google code repositories for them all so people can actually contribute fixes themselves.

Resources/Slides: I've gone through my collection of speaking materials I've used over the years (at least the ones in Powerpoint format) and uploaded them all to my SlideShare account. You can find them syndicated on my site in the Resources section.

I promise I'll keep blogging regularly now! Oh, and one more thing -- except the blog itself (which is based on Serendipity) the entire site is running on Zend Framework.

Stay tuned!