Daily Bitekletas

Because slow adoption rate of PHP 5 especially among web hosting companies and developers, a number of open source projects and teams have put up an initiative called GoPHP5 to finally mark a due date to stop support PHP4 effective February 5th 2008. After the said date, any new releases of well known open source software will require at least PHP 5.2.0. Major web hosting companies have also agreed to include PHP 5.2.0 as part of their service offering. This is really a bold move and certainly will benefit developers and end-users. PHP4 has done a great job for quite a long time already. It is time to exploit the advanced capability of PHP5, besides PHP6 is just around the corner..

Here’s something for web developers/developers. Something to laugh about. Something to reflect on.. (really!) Enjoy!

Following emerging development in online/offline computing like Adobe’s Apollo platform or Microsoft’s Silverlight platform, Google releases Gears which will allow developers to create applications using JavaScript that will run in offline mode and could synchronize to a remote application (e.g. server application) when available.

Google Gears group writes:

Google Gears allows developers to enhance their AJAX applications to be able to run even when their users are offline. This is the official discussion group for web developers interested in using Google Gears in their applications.

Google Gears provides application programming interface (APIs) for offline application access and data storage (using SQLlite). Licensed: BSD

More on Google Gears

• Google Gears Lets Developers Take Apps Offline
• Official Google Gears Site, groups and API documentation

Authors@Google Present: Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak talks about his career at Apple as well as his life and new book “iWoz” at Google.

Stephan Gary “Woz” Wozniak (born August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California) is an American computer engineer and the co-founder of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), with Steve Jobs. His inventions and machines are credited with contributing greatly to the personal computer revolution of the 1970s. Wozniak created the Apple I and Apple II computers in the mid-1970s. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, eventually becoming one of the best selling personal computers of the 1970s and early 1980s. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak]

We all know that developers/codes and QA don’t really blend well. Here’s a great tip I got from Steve’s blog.

Go to Google.com Image Search and type “QA” as the search keyword and hit Enter (or click here). Take a note on the first image in the the result set.

Manuel Lemos of PHPClasses.org writes about his eight defensive programming best practices focusing on the context of PHP/web newsletter delivery system.

This is definitely worth everyone’s time. I highly recommend this for budding PHP developers as well as those with higher-level experience. By the way, you can vote for his post on digg.