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..

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

A group of developers all over the world are into something big that will soon be in your next phone. OpenMoko is an attempt to create an open/free software stack for mobile phones.

At the moment, there is an actual live phone (Neo1973) being used by developers to further the development of the OpenMoko Framework. Most of the user interface specifications supports stylus and finger based input. The phone functions just like the Apple iPhone but I would think that OpenMoko based phones will be very customizable as it is most likely to run on embedded Linux and QT.  Some more links for your reading pleasure..

•  iPhone and Neo1973 Comparison
• Some photos
• Look and Feel Specs
• Planet OpenMoko - where developers’ blog are aggregated

All in all, their wiki page is very impormative and worth checking out.

1. MooTools /MooFx can easily take-over Scriptaculous as a Javascript framework/Animation. The documentation is rich in content but it’s too technical that I can’t even find where the “getting started for dummies is”. I got to get my hands dirty on this one! It’s an improved Prototype.js!

2. Cisco has agreed to acquire Webex for $3.2 billion as published over at techcrunch.com. That’s a huge price tag that Cisco is willing to spend their money into considering the fact that web conferencing market is crowded these days! Add to the fact that there are a number of web 2.0 conferencing startup sprouting all over Silicon Valley scene to compete and bring innovation backed by big time venture capitalist. ( I will list them here when I find my super-secret-list! ). This is just a wow deal because as far as I can remember, the only deal that made me say “wow” was when Google bought Youtube for $1.6 Billion in stock (also here and here)

3. It’s weekend tomorrow! Okay, I know it’s non-sense but hey, I will finally have a time to blog more! Hopefully…

Shoot!