Coggeshall.org - Comments

David: Interesting Developments at Zend

nospam@example.com (David) — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:03:44 -0700

Just want to mention that 60-80k x 10 would be 600x800k not 6-8m :)

Lukas: Interesting Developments at Zend

nospam@example.com (Lukas) — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:38:37 -0700

I agree that Microsoft seems like a very likely candidate for a buy up. However the reasons why you state that IBM is unlikely seem off. Number one, IBM is a beast with many heads. Project Zero is one thing, they could be looking at other stuff at the same time. Also the collective PHP expertise (and community standing) could be very beneficial to IBM's Project Zero team and they could even afford to just kill all of Zend's current business (possibly open sourcing a few things in the process).

carollion: Clinton Campaign Checking Acc!

nospam@example.com (carollion) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:17:33 -0700

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sf: Compiling extensions for Zend Core

nospam@example.com (sf) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:50:51 -0800

Thank you a lot :)

Adam: Compiling extensions for Zend Core

nospam@example.com (Adam) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:16:45 -0800

Very handy indeed. Just what I was looking for. Thanks a lot! Right, back to Zend :-) !

Evert: Compiling extensions for Zend Core

nospam@example.com (Evert) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:12:01 -0800

This article makes one wonder why to use Zend Core in the first place..

John Herren: Compiling extensions for Zend Core

nospam@example.com (John Herren) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 23:06:24 -0800

Thanks for this, John. Documentation for building extensions seems to be scarce, and this can be a daunting task for folks not used to building from source all the time.

Alton Crossley: Compiling extensions for Zend Core

nospam@example.com (Alton Crossley) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:33:59 -0800

Hay, works for me! Great Stuff!

Esonnocaggini: Zend_Service_SlideShare approved

nospam@example.com (Esonnocaggini) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:01:06 -0800

I'm looking for a payday loan. Anyone know of a site that does Payday Loans Guaranteed No Fax?

sf: Zend_Service_SlideShare approved

nospam@example.com (sf) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:23:14 -0800

I have to try it.

Cal Evans: Zend_Service_SlideShare approved

nospam@example.com (Cal Evans) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:35:32 -0800

John,

Cool! This will come in handy for the ZendCon Sessions. I was real unhappy just posting links to the slides.

I look forward to playing with it.

=C=

Stuart Herbert: The Microsoft Trojan Horse?

nospam@example.com (Stuart Herbert) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:16:27 -0800

Hey John,

Erm, doesn't that graph only show market share, rather than total installations? If so, that graph doesn't prove that we've seen an increase in actual MS installations - only a shift in overall market share. It also doesn't provide any context to the shift; for example, large ISPs moving their domain holding pages from Linux to Windows will have an effect on that.

I wouldn't get too worried just on that one graph :)

The Apache Foundation has disappeared up its own arse ... well, it's decided to be a major player in the Java world, which is the same difference :) Can't speak for other countries, but over here, the larger organisations are .NET *or* Java - not both. By positioning as a Java provider, Apache is naturally ruling itself out of Microsoft-orientated organisations. And, to be fair to them, there isn't really any innovation in the web server world atm anyways from any direction. Microsoft are playing catch-up, Apache's Linux-based competitors are offering higher performance in return for reduced functionality, whilst Apache itself (thanks largely to PHP) is stuck with mod_prefork and the inherent performance limitations it brings. What Apache could do is focus on being absolutely rock-solid, and on supporting mixed mpm models so that we can use mpm_prefork for mod_php but still hand off image downloads to mod_worker et al.

Microsoft already have a native replacement for PHP .. the DLR. Unless I've missed it, it's interesting that there's no IronPHP for the DLR. With Silverlight able to run DLR languages such as IronPython and IronRuby, there's a real possibility that Microsoft could own the entire web stack as never before, at least in commercial environments. I'm not sure what Microsoft could actually do with it once they achieve that. I reckon they'd have to make Silverlight the default rendering engine for IE, with HTML support treated much the same way that Flash is a plugin today, to have any chance of owning the web. With enough sexy websites supporting the rich rendering capabilities of Silverlight, maybe they could cause a shift away from HTML - maybe.

Thankfully, whatever misgivings people have about PHP syntax or extensibility, the one thing none of PHP's competitors really get is the share-nothing-scale-horizontal architecture that PHP excels at. Everyone else keeps going for the application server model, and as long as they do, the resulting applications will continue to be more complicated, more expensive to support, more expensive to scale, and more trouble.

Best regards,
Stu

John Coggeshall: The Microsoft Trojan Horse?

nospam@example.com (John Coggeshall) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:17:18 -0800

I think this is a great discussion, let me try to respond to a few different points in the thread:

Sean: No worries

Stu:

It's a double edged sword for sure, on one hand you need to be able to sell to "Microsoft Shops" but on the other hand it also means Microsoft can sell to non-Microsoft shops. That's fair, but its dangerous if in the next 6-8 months we don't see an increase in PHP installations on Windows platforms (commercially specifically) because clearly Microsoft has seen an increase in IIS usage in the last 6-8 mos.

Which brings me a bit to Jay:

While I don't disagree that competition in the web server market is inherently wrong, it does concern me is going back to what Stu said -- we haven't seen anything particularly sexy from Apache lately and it shows.

I do disagree with you though when you say MS isn't interested in dominating the world web server space -- especially when you follow that up by saying they want to make money. I think ensuring PHP developers have a workable platform in the Windows environment is a short-term necessity to achieving that goal, but there will come a point where PHP as a technology offers nothing to help "sell" IIS and then I fear it would be simply replaced with a native Microsoft technology.

You have however hit on something I myself have thought a great deal about -- Windows *does* dominate corporate intranets, and by proxy ASP.NET is by far the winner in that space.. it's a very important point to me and here's why:

You claim that IIS support for PHP is to keep shops which run Windows intranets and Linux extranets from switching entirely to Linux... couldn't it just as reasonably be to get shops running Windows intranets and Linux extranets to switch entirely to Windows? To me that seems like a more financially sound goal for a company like Microsoft and, at least for now, it seems to be backed up by Netcraft's figures.

Perhaps I'm looking at the glass half-empty, but I think all of this discussion is really interesting and healthy for the industry regardless.

Jay Pipes: The Microsoft Trojan Horse?

nospam@example.com (Jay Pipes) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:22:48 -0800

My opinion is that there is nothing inherently wrong with competition in the web server market; it drives innovation by forcing developers (of various web servers -- Apache, IIS, lighttpd, tux, etc) to think of ways to differentiate their projects/products.

And that is A Good Thing, IMHO.

That said, I don't particularly think MS is out to dominate the world web server space. Instead, they are interested in 2 things:

a) Making money, and
b) Ensuring that PHP developers have a workable platform in the Windows environment.

Let's face it, Windows platforms dominate corporate intranets. If a company has been running Linux-based public web sites with PHP, and running Windows-based PHP application internally, it behooves MS to enhance the functionality and performance of PHP on IIS so that they remove any motivation to replace those internal IIS machines with Linux...

Just my 2 cents.

-jay

sapphirecat: The Microsoft Trojan Horse?

nospam@example.com (sapphirecat) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:29:24 -0800

I think a huge factor in PHP's success is also the fact that it's shared-hosting friendly. It doesn't let anyone keep anything in memory, which prevents all kinds of resource leaks. Just thinking about turning random non-programmers loose in mod_perl (or python) makes me shudder. Doubly so, since those modules allow you to hook your code directly into the Apache processing pipeline.

If PHP was vastly more complicated (say, twice as bad as Perl), then there would have been enough pressure to make Perl/Python as friendly to hosting companies as PHP. But since it wasn't, its own friendliness makes it a clear win.