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Zend Studio is my IDE of choice for PHP. It is super stable, has great background checking, remote debugging, and it runs great on OS X to boot. One of the reasons I pushed for the full version at work and not just the personal edition was because of cvs integration. Some of my coworkers are hesitant to access a command line so a cvs client in the IDE is a Good Thing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Zend, you can browse your entire filesystem in a pane, or you can arrange files as you see fit in a project pane. Nothing new here, most IDEs give you that kind of flexibility.

The frustrating part, which I’ve been working up to, is that you can not use cvs commands on files that aren’t in a project. This isn’t intuitive at all, and even right after you use Zend to check out a module, the menu options to perform cvs commands on the recently checked out files are greyed out. You have to then take all those files you just checked out and add them to a project before Zend’s siloed cvs will work on them… Took me a while to find that out.

John Lim writes an interesting defense of PHP’s flexibility as a virtue, and it’s worth a quick read.

This is a warning for developers condsidering the upgrade to PHP5. While the new version is tempting, I’ve found out it’s not all roses and painless as it seems to be.

I’ll admit that I’m quite smitten with many of the new features in php5; in particular there’s the MySQLi extension, the new SOAP extension, and some decent object-oriented functionality that’s been long overdue. However, I’m sad to report that if you have used the xslt extension at all in php4, you have no choice but to update your code to use the new improved XSL set of functions.

In many cases, it’s very hard to justify breaking backwards compatibility in a language or any other program, and to some extent in certain cases, I can agree with changes that would require very little time to refactor on the developer’s end. Sadly, the decision to completely drop support for the xslt library in php5, in my opinion, is beyond excuse, and I can find no good reason as to why it was abandoned.

To make matters worse, I read the migration guide written at Zend and it made no mention of the xslt abandonment. When I realized that the extension had been dropped, after I built php5, I headed to the online documentation and found a note saying it had been supposedly moved to PECL.

All the recent talk of php’s viability as an enterprise solution doesn’t really hold up when large portions of code break between releases. Yes, we’ll be porting our code at work, because we need the new features of PHP, but we do so grudgingly.

Update: Looks like they made an even larger screwup with making people lose their old set of functionality for a new set of undocumented functions.

I’ve recently started looking for some high quality photo management software that’s web accessable, Free, and written in PHP. Photos by Alex King looked to be the most promising but doesn’t have all the features I’d like. “No worries,” I thought, “I’ll just add a patch for what I want.”

Well, it turns out the license allows you to change your copy all you like, but you can’t redistribute his code with your changes, and if you give your patches to him, they become property and copyright of Alex King. Undeterred, I figured I’d at least give a shot at trying to plead with Alex to change his license. The emails went cordially enough and no hard feelings are to be had, and he has his reasons for keeping the license as it is. I wouldn’t be forthcoming though, if I didn’t say I was dissapointed. C’est la vie.

Alas, the search continues, and I’m looking for a decent photo organization suite. There’s been some talk about using the digital object repositories (Repos or ProjectBuilder) we’ve built here at work, but those are probably my last resort as they’re quite bulky and suited for a more broad collection. Again, I need something with a Free license as I’m pretty sure nothing out there will do all the things I’d like, so modifying it will be a must.

I stumbled upon LAMPPIX today, a specialized bootable cd linux distro. It’s claim to fame is being able to drop your dynamic web demo (read only, I presume) into a folder and burn the image to disk. This way all the client has to do to demo your software is put the cd in, reboot, and voila, instademo.

I can see how this would be extremely useful in our projects at Matrix when working with groups in low connectivity areas like Africa. It could even be used for reference software, again in a place you’re on unfamiliar computers without connectivity. Sadly, it doesn’t look like it’ll work on PowerPC, a big minus since a lot of our travelers at work use powerbooks. Still, it’s simple enough for us to send someone away with x86 architecture…

Found out about LAMPPIX through Harry Fuecks, who is syndicated on PlanetPHP, a roll of php developer blogs.