Think Different

If you have ever had to set up a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP or Perl installed and running at the same time you know what hassle it can be. If you are new Linux it can be a rather daunting experience just trying to set everything up, nevermind learning scripting languages like PHP, Perl and a database like MySQL or SQL Lite. XAMPP is a single packaged download from Apache Friends which provides all of the pieces of software needed, plus more you probably don't need, to make Apache installations with server-side scripting and a few database options ready to go in a testing or development environment. In this article we will focus on getting XAMPP running on Linux, it will also work on Windows and a version for Sun’s Solaris is also available. For our example we will use a Debian-based Linux distribution, but just about any flavour of Linux will work. To start, you will need to download the XAMPP package for Linux from the SourceForge Web site . The XAMPP includes the following so...

Following the introductory presentation on OpenSocial at the Google Developer Day conference in Sydney, Dan Peterson and John Hjelmstad delved into the workings of Shindig with their presentation "Apache Shindig: Make your social site an OpenSocial container". What is Shindig? Shindig, a project in Apache Software Foundation Incubation is an open source implementation of OpenSocial and gadgets. At present Shindig provides two ports, one in Java and one in PHP, both of which support version 0.7 of OpenSocial. There is work in progress for version 0.8 which will introduce the RESTful API. Some containers using the Java version of Shindig are hi5, iGoogle and orkut. There is a strong open source community behind Shindig, producing some high quality code, with updates occurring as OpenSocial evolves. Shindig Architecture Dan and John showed a diagram similar to the one below to illustrate the structure of Shindig. It is made up of three main components. |> Gadge...