!!! IBM backs PHP !!!

[Vin DSL]

Slow 'news day' here at JagPC...

This is 'old news' - about a month old - but I wanted to make sure it didn't 'slip us by'; especially the PHP detractors and naysayers amongst us...

IBM backs open-source Web software

IBM is putting its corporate heft behind a popular open-source Web development technology called PHP, in a move meant to reach out to a broader set of developers.

On Friday, the tech giant announced a partnership with Zend Technologies to create a bundle called Zend Core, which includes IBM's Cloudscape-embedded database and Zend's PHP development tools. Zend sells tools built on the open-source edition of PHP and offers related services.

The two companies intend to devote programmers to make PHP work better with corporate databases and Web services protocols. IBM also plans to establish an area dedicated to PHP on its developer Web site, which will include technical resources such as white papers. Zend Core will be available as a free download in the second half of the year.

PHP, originally known as Personal Home Page, is a widely used scripting language for generating Web pages. Unlike compiled languages such as Java or C, scripting languages like PHP are easier to learn. They are generally used for simpler tasks, rather than for complex number-crunching jobs.

Big Blue's public commitment to PHP is significant because the company has the technical and marketing resources to accelerate usage of the open-source product. IBM's investments in Linux and Java, for example, were crucial to mainstream corporation adoption of those technologies.

"We've got ideas for improving things," said Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging technology. "We worked on specifications in the Java community that weren't language-specific and are applicable to the PHP world."

One industry executive who requested not to be named said that IBM's push into PHP and scripting reflects IBM's disillusionment with the Java standardization process and the industry's inability to make Java very easy to use.

"IBM's been so fed up with Java that they've been looking for alternatives for years," the executive said. "They want people to build applications quickly that tap into IBM back-ends...and with Java, it just isn't happening."

For his part, Smith said that Java and PHP can be used for different tasks and said that IBM remains committed to Java.

SOURCE: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5589559.html

[Vin DSL]

Addendum: http://www.php.net/usage.php

[mattsiegman]

they should back perl...

[Rye Seronie Oh]

That's awesome. I love PHP. It's almost the greatest thing since sliced bread. =)

[JonathanB]

I've been meaning to learn PHP. In my job however, my employer has a Micro$oft web server. I'm responsible for my department's website and am currently going through an ASP book. I haven't done much programming at all in the past (just a little javascript).

I'd like to get into PHP on my Jaguar sites. Is learning ASP going to hurt my learning of PHP?

[mattsiegman]

learning one language only helps in learning the others.

[Vin DSL]

learning one language only helps in learning the others.

Can't really argue with that, however, I had a hell of a time going from Perl/CGI to PHP. Maybe it was just me. I couldn't seem to get the concept of 'globals' (global variables) to sink in...

It was kinda like trying to shave the hair on the back of your neck, looking into a mirror behind you, using a hand-held mirror in front. Everything looked topsy-turvy for a LONG time (probably the better part of a year).

Sometimes old habits are hard to break, you know?

Having said that, once it starting sinking in, I knew PHP was the one!

[Ron]

Try C sometime....That is a steep learning curve.

I have programmed in many languages over the years. Started with BASIC and x86 assembler and MASM, graduated to COBOL and FORTRAN (FORTRAN IV, Y, 66 and then 77) Then to C. In between there's been DEC VAX's DCL, Various shells; bash, korn and C, And plenty of utility languages like TEX, TECO, JCLs, perl awk nawk gawk sed (SED is great....) now php, a bunch of SQL flavors TRANSACT-SQL, PL*SQL, stored procedure, report writers, and I'm certain I've left out a bunch.... oh yeah, lex, yacc, various makefile languages, lotus 1-2-3 macros lol

Never did Visual BAsic, thoguh I was tempted once.
They are all pretty much the same, each has its own quirks. Once you're proficient in one, the others come very quickly- though I'm not too sure if you try to learn several at once before mastering any.

C though, that was a toughie. It was the pointers to pointers and references and dereferencers and the such. Making that leap from straight pass by value was a transition. Took a good couple fo weeks to get a grasp on it, back in the mid 80's.

Good luck!

When I learned programming, we had punch cards, but my school couldn't afford a keypunch machine, so we marked the cards with a pencil, and sent them off to WANG for batch processing.

[Vin DSL]

Try C sometime....That is a steep learning curve...

Heh! I used to write viruses in C, for educational purposes only, of course. I never turned one loose in the wild - really! I just liked to write them and test them on an old doorstop computer I had...

Anyway, funny you should mention that. I'm getting interested in 'C Sharp'.

Ever try it? Um... 'C Sharp', not writing viruses...

[gerilya]

Started with BASIC and x86 assembler and MASM

Nice to see a fellow assembler user , though, it hurts that you didn't mention Pascal in your impressive resume

[Oldfrog]

Nice to see a fellow assembler user

Does it count if it was 360/370 assembler? I think the one that I enjoyed the most was APL. Talk about a steep learning curve.

[gerilya]

Does it count if it was 360/370 assembler? I think the one that I enjoyed the most was APL. Talk about a steep learning curve.

As far as I am concerned, 360/370 assembler counts

[Ron]

I did briefly use a little pascal... it always felt a little geeky or clubbish or something for me to adopt it. Turbo pascal from Borland, if I recall. They also did a nice speedy little Turbo C package. I did forget to mention a brief stint into PL/1. I also forgot to mention RT-11 and TSX-11 running on the PDP-8e's. lex and yacc and gnu (gnu not unix) I'm sure I've still missed a few.

I once recoded a communications package... I'm trying to remember the original product's name,,, it was an old DOS comm... DCOMM perhaps... anyway, I recoded it sorta in straight hex -- debug actually! and made it a dual window, dual modem comm package. Allowed you to have two modems going independently, so you could be dialed into two different BBSs at the same time.... or as two different people in the same BBS. It was quite fun on the bleeding edge. Nobody EVER caught on that I was logged in twice.. who could imagine someone with two computers(so they thought would be required), two phone lines, two monitors.... lol I did have 2 phone lines.

Nice to see some old IBMers... JCL anyone? I did work in 390 (ROSCOE) hell, but that was with a nearly proprietary 3GL called TRIAX, but that was after a few years in limbo on Honeywell GCOS-8 machines. They were odd ducks.... 36 bit words, but they were comprised of 6, 6 bit bytes. So we had a really large integer, but no lower case. lol

I remember trying to explain to people that my financial company's programs were written in FORTRAN-Y, and I could easily express billions of dollars, but I couldn't store exactly $1 even. who were using FORTRAN. You see, we needed precision to 6 decimal places and magnitude to billions, so even with a 36 bit word, INTs weren't enough, so our math was done in floats.

I wrote some really nice funtionality into some really cool libraries back then.... sigh.... Oh to be a programmer again, with not a care in the world other than the technical challenges of memory limitations and speed of execution.

[jason]

I got my programming start on the Intelivison II's add-on computer. The computer, when you started it up, gave you three options: play game (from the cartridge that you had installed), play music (which gave you some horrible pre-midi synthesised sound when you preseed keys on the keyboard), or BASIC programming. If you wanted to save a program you wrote you had to store it on an audio cassette tape.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...sPageName=WDVW
Looks like a dinosaur now...I just downloaded Burger Time to my cell phone, though...

I started my web programming experiences in Perl. Prior to that I had experience with C/C++, BASIC, Visual Basic, some Logo (pendown...forward 100...right 90...), and a language that no one has ever heard of called Eiffel. I was in college and got a job writing CGI scripts for an instructional developer. He then learned about this new technology called Active Server Pages, so we set up an IIS server and started having some fun. A few months later he read an article on PHP, so we threw that on the box too. The weirdest thing about PHP and ASP for me was that I wrote the code around the HTML instead of trying to squeeze HTML output into the stream of a program. Once I got the hang of that I found it much easier to work with ASP or PHP than Perl for web stuff.

I think the first step in learing any language is to pick one and learn it the best you can. In your case it should probably be ASP (which is actually a good starting point because VBScript is easy to learn). Then, once you are comfortable with it, you can move on to another--a lot of the conceptual stuff you learn will cary over, even if the syntax and the "words" change. If you try to learn two languages at teh same time, you'll only confuse yourself.

--Jason

[Vin DSL]

...If you try to learn two languages at teh same time, you'll only confuse yourself...

LoL! I know it sounds like I'm contradicting myself, but the fact of the matter is - PHP is pretty useless without HTML and JAVA. At least that's been my experience...

If you want to be 'World-Class 2005', you need to know all three of these languages...

Secondly. you're 'talking to' a guy that ran a IIS web site for several years. Basically, I mixed raw HTML with Perl/CGI and made it all work. One of my fondest memories of that whole experience was when ppl would find out I didn't know jack-sh!t about ASP. Hahahaha! They all wrongly assumed I was using ASP/FrontPage.

Anyway, here's MY twist on the situation. After running a WiNNT IIS server with ODB (belch) for my sql db, beating my head against the wall, and longing for a return to BSDland - I finally figured out the obvious - that MS is skewed in favor of using MS products exclusively - duh!

I would suggest to you that running ASP on Linux is the same situation in reverse. To my way of thinking, unless you're running on a Win server, forget ASP.

Please don't think poorly of me for saying this. After all, how long did it take IBM to see the light?