It's Thursday - what a day to visit jfoobar!

Joomla! extension soap or marketing miscalculation

Written by Arno Zijlstra Thursday, 20 August 2009 16:00

What if there are two companies or in this case a company and a community which are both building a product that does a lot of what the other does? (bridging between Joomla! and Magento)

In this case the company thought it would be a good idea to blog about the other and the community project responded. Here's the storyline, judge for your self or don't judge at all of course. Maybe there's something to learn here.

The company blogs:
So is JFusion secure?
"Magento implements security, JFusion deletes it again...."

The community responds:
Yireo scare campaign against JFusion
"But this does not mean there is a difference in security between JFusion and Magebridge, as Yireo tries to fool people to believe...."

The company responds again:
About the attack on JFusion
"We have to admit, we did not look through the code very thoroughly - but we only got a very strong impression...."

And the community responds again:
Yireo Shock Admission
"Yireo does not seem to feel bad about spreading false information and indicates that it will continue these hardline attacks...."

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Community involvement, communication and some fun

Written by Arno Zijlstra Wednesday, 19 August 2009 20:14

Brian had an interesting post about communities and especially the Joomla! community, actually what he says is "There is no Joomla community". I think he is right and knowing Brian he really put's some thought in things like this. He says the "Joomla! community" is actually many communities like, a community of users, a community of consumers, a community of friends but there's also many language based communities.

One thing that has been floating around for years is the difference in community between Drupal and Joomla!. The common thought has always been that Drupal has a developer community and Joomla! has an end-user community and up to a certain point I see this case.

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Open Source software growing faster than expected

Written by Arno Zijlstra Tuesday, 18 August 2009 09:39

We knew it already of course but a new report from IDC tells the same same story, Open Source is the way to go.

The IDC forecast concluded that, from 2009 to 2013, worldwide revenue from open source software will grow at a 22 percent compound annual growth rate to reach $8.1 billion by 2013. That growth figure is "considerably higher" than previous growth estimates from 2008, IDC says.

IDC says there are three main reasons for the big uptick in predicted revenue for open source software, or OSS, as the analyst group likes to call it. First, the level of acceptance of OSS among enterprises over the last 12 months is "much higher" than what IDC previously expected. Second, the poor economy is driving enterprises to seek alternatives in OSS (which is not to be confused with "free software," but which is often sold at a steep discount to proprietary alternatives). Lastly, IDC recently completed an "exhaustive" search for revenue-producing OSS projects, so apparently it has a better gauge on the breadth and depth of the overall OSS landscape.

IDC sees OSS as one of the disrupting factors in enterprise IT, along with software as a service (SaaS). So-called "hybrid" business models will become the norm.

Source: ITJungle

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Goto PHP 5.3

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 07 August 2009 13:39

When I started programming I had to manually encode the processor instructions on my Zilog Z80 microprocessor. In the years to follow new procedural languages came available and I have coded a lot using those languages. Early 90's I learned about object orientation and and design patterns during the various courses I followed. From the start I was educated that using a goto statement was bad practice. One of the first writings about how bad goto statements are was done by Edsger W. Dijkstra in the Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148. A goto statement easily creates dead code, and most of all it is very difficult to follow the program flow when goto statements are used, I agree fully with the statement that goto statements are bad practise.

Almost 30 years later we use modern programming languages like C, Java, Ruby and PHP. I never have had the need to use a goto statement in any of my programs, and the lack of the availability of this statement in PHP was even never noticed by me, until I was notified that the goto statement has been added to PHP 5.3...how bizar?

A hilarious bug report can be found in the PHP tracker, an even subtile and funny reply can be found in the PHP documentation page where the goto statement is explained, the image below taken from xkcd says it all ;-)

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Using Virtualbox for web development and testing purposes

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 29 June 2009 10:50

As web developer you face the challenge to support a wide variety of platforms and browsers. There are some generic tools that help you testing, but sometimes you need those platforms to be available.One way to manage that is to make a multi-boot installation or use several different systems. That is one way to solve this "problem", another way is to use virtualisation. This technique is used to implement a certain kind of virtual machine environment: one that provides a complete simulation of the underlying hardware. The result is a system in which all software capable of execution on the raw hardware can be run in the virtual machine. In particular, this includes all operating systems.

I recently installed the open source edition of VirtualBox and it does exactly this; enabling me to run any operating system as a virtual instance on my desktop system. Installing is pretty straight forward, there is a windows installer for those who want Windows to be their host system, under Ubuntu (or similar Linux distributions) you can use the package manager to install it, or if you want you can compile it.

Virtualbox also provides a full screen option for the host systems. As I have a dual screen, this allows me to seaming-less run two operating systems on each screen. It is even possible to copy/paste information between the two operating systems...how cool is that? I found out that installing the guest additions, which enables the virtual operating system to run in full screen, install very easy under windows. Installing it under Ubuntu 9.04 is a bit more work since there seems to be a small error in the installation script. I found an article that solves that problem pretty quickly, check out the blog on nIxternal site for a brief explanation on how to make it work.

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New labs items for prototyping with Joomla!

Written by Arno Zijlstra Friday, 19 June 2009 09:53

Last week I've done a little presentation at the Joomla! Days NL 2009 about quickly setting up prototype sites with Joomla! and I promised the audience some tools to make life easy.

It took some time because a few guys of the JFoobar team are working on a great new venture at abillo.com but here we go.
There are three new labs additions:

• Prototyper Component
• Prototyper Template
• Template layout switching code

You can also read this post here on jfoobar that gives more information about the template. Joomla!, quick, rapid, fast, speedy and custom

Have fun playing around and thanks everyone for listening and giving feed-back.

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