Think Different

PHP is already popular, used in millions of domains (according to Netcraft), supported by most ISPs and used by household-name Web companies like Yahoo! The upcoming versions of PHP aim to add to this success by introducing new features that make PHP more usable in some cases and more secure in others. Are you ready for PHP V6? If you were upgrading tomorrow, would your scripts execute just fine or would you have work to do? This article focuses on the changes for PHP V6 — some of them back-ported to versions PHP V5.x — that could require some tweaks to your current scripts. If you're not using PHP yet and have been thinking about it, take a look at its latest features. These features, from Unicode to core support for XML, make it even easier for you to write feature-filled PHP applications. New PHP V6 features PHP V6 is currently available as a developer snapshot, so you can download and try out many of the features a...

The internally-developed HipHop for PHP source code transformer is being offered via open source Technologists at Facebook on Tuesday are releasing a source code transformer intended to boost the performance of PHP . In development for the past two years, the technology, called HipHop for PHP, has been used to reduce the CPU usage on Facebook Web servers by an average of about 50 percent, said Haiping Zhao, senior server engineer at Facebook. [ InfoWorld reported on PHP 6 highlights, including internationalization, that were detailed at a technical conference late last year. ] "The project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large, complex Web sites with PHP," Zhao said in a statement on the Facebook Developers page . The technology is not complete and users need to be comfortable with HipHop before trying it ...

Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP helps developers build apps for Web, desktop, and mobile systems, including Apple's iOS devices. But you can use Eclipse with plug-in available along with Flex sdk to compile in Eclipse itself. Zend Technologies and Adobe Systems today announced Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP, which enables developers to use PHP and Flash development skills to build rich Internet applications for mobile, Web, and desktop platforms. The product provides an IDE combining Adobe's Flash Builder 4.5, for ActionScript-based Flash client development, and Zend Studio 8, for server-side PHP capabilities. Accentuating the use for mobile deployments, the two vendors said applications can be delivered to Google Android, Research in Motion BlackBerry Tablet OS, and Apple iOS systems. For iOS, the IDE exports the applications into native code, rather than run in an the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software, which Apple prohibits on iOS. Android apps are also exported to a na...

Developers still see it as the future, but they think it is currently overhyped and vendor-driven While technology vendors continue to pound home the message of cloud computing, PHP developers Tuesday viewed the concept as overhyped and were not in agreement on its benefits. Developers at the ZendCon 2010 PHP conference in Santa, Clara, Calif., heard Zend Technologies CEO Andi Gutmans tout the company's cloud computing plans, which involve developing Zend PHP Cloud Platform. During his presentation, however, developers appeared mostly underwhelmed when Gutmans asked if cloud computing was game-changing or just hype. Afterward, developers gave cloud computing mixed reviews. [ Oracle discussed its cloud plans on Monday . | Stay on top of the latest app dev news with the Developer World newsletter . ] "I guess I have a feeling that 10, 15 years from now, maybe we'll all be using this stuff, but right now, it's entirely pushed by vendors," said Phillip ...

Google has released the code for WebRTC, a voice and video codec for the Web Google has released the source code for a technology that it hopes developers will use to embed real-time video and voice chat functionality in their Web applications. Google acquired the technology, called WebRTC (Web Real Time Communication), when it purchased VoIP (Voice over IP) software developer Global IP Solutions in 2010, for approximately $68.2 million. The company said it would open source the technology early last month. [ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog and Technology: Open Source newsletter . ] WebRTC is a set of voice and video signal processing technologies, which can be accessed by developers through HTML tags and JavaScript APIs (application programming interfaces). Today, Internet audio and video chat services from companies such as Skype are chiefly proprietary, accessible through plug-ins and client downloads. Last month, Micros...

When developing a Web application, it's standard practice to create a database structure on which server-side code is placed for the logic and UI layers. To connect to the database, the server-side code needs to do some basic creating, updating, deleting, and — most importantly — reading of records. As databases behind Web applications are typically relational databases, these CRUD operations are done using the well-known language, SQL. However, as Web development is increasingly occurring through object-oriented programming (OOP), the model is changing. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a perfect way to describe objects while maintaining the meaning of that data. Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL — pronounced "sparkle") is the language typically used to query against that data, as it syntactically matches the structure of RDF itself. Both RDF and SPARQL are technologies within what has been dubbed the Semantic Web stack. To fully e...

Not everyone agrees on exactly what Web 2.0 entails. As with all great buzzwords and concepts, people are already predicting what Web 3.0 will be. Will rich internet applications dominate it? RIAs are still in their infancy, but when done right they're incredibly powerful tools. When Google launched Google Maps a few years ago, it opened people's eyes to the fact that web browsers can do much more than merely display pictures and text. Currently, there are four mainstream mechanisms being used to develop RIAs. AJAX/JavaScript: AJAX is a web development technique for using JavaScript with XML to create a rich internet application by dynamically and asynchronously exchanging data in the background without having to refresh the page. Google Maps and Gmail demonstrated what could be done with simple existing technologies like JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all now promote their own AJAX toolkits to assist in building AJAX-rich media functionality. Flas...