Archive: July 22, 2002
Hey, cool. PHP Everywhere links to, the article which uses my XML-RPC library for its tutorial on web services in PHP.  Oops, just noticed his link is wrong. I'll have to e-mail him...
There we go, that was fast. I e-mailed him and he fixed it.
Via PHP Everywhere (and from PHP Everywhere), Enterprise PHP.
... because PHP so popular in shared hosting environments, many people have an impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites. This is patently untrue, and PHP is in use in many large scale web sites such as Yahoo Finance and for the creation of large web applications... This article is an attempt to readdress the balance and show how PHP is used in the enterprise.
Via Mike's XLog, The Illinois Leader: U. S. History Made: Congress Moves to Protect Certain Aborted Babies.
That this is even an issue sickens me. Oh, it's a human life if it's out of the womb, but not one if its in the womb. If you snap a poor baby's neck through a "partial birth abortion" while it's still half in his mother it's ok, but once it hits fresh air it's wrong to kill it.
That anyone could kill their own baby angers me as much as any terrorist act. Even more so, in fact. Whereas terrorist acts are typically based on an (albeit sick and perverted) ideology, abortions are carried out because of laziness and total lack of respect for human life - even one's own child. In a way, you can almost respect terrorists, while abortion is just sick.
Via LWN, an introduction to Quixote at Linux Journal.
Quixote was written by and for Python programmers who need to develop dynamic web sites while using as much of their existing Python knowledge as possible. In particular, Quixote is not very accommodating of the commonly made distinction between "web designers" and "web developers". If the web designers at your organization are keen to try out a real programming language, then Quixote might provide them with a good introduction to Python; but anyone who doesn't understand what "import a module" or "call a function" means isn't going to get very far with Quixote. Similarly, anyone who expects to use a dedicated, WYSIWYG HTML editor for creating web pages will be left out.
This, incidentally, is completely opposite to the stance taken by most other web application frameworks, which is precisely why we don't like most other web application frameworks. In our limited experience, they all invent an HTML templating language that embeds some sort of programming language in HTML, often with deliberate limitations to prevent naive users from shooting themselves in the feet. This usually ends up being painful and frustrating for programmers who want power and flexibility and are perfectly capable of aiming the gun away from their own feet.
Quixote originally was written because we were dissatisfied with the available options for writing web applications in Python. The only tool that came close to what we wanted was Zope, which turned out to be much bigger and more complex than we needed. Zope has the "web designer" vs. "web developer" distinction built in from the start, and works very hard to make a web site mostly editable through the web itself. This is an interesting idea, but it adds tremendous complexity to Zope. As programmers who are quite happy using text editors and the filesystem, we felt left out in the cold. Thus, in creating Quixote, we shamelessly stole Zope's best idea (mapping URLs to Python objects) and geared the whole thing towards Python programmers. The most obvious example of this is that where Zope maps URLs to arbitrary objects in an object database, Quixote maps them to Python packages, modules and functions--objects that are easily created and manipulated by Python programmers using nothing more than a text editor. The result is a web application framework that makes the creation of dynamic web pages so easy it almost feels like cheating.
I wonder if I'll like Whedon's new show, Firefly (via WHEDONesque)? It sounds lame, but it's Joss, so it may be cool. And can I handle two space shows (Enterprise) at the same time? Hmmmm...
Via WHEDONesque, one of the co-creators of Angel is leaving the show. Hopefully Angel won't start to suck now too.
This is the first I'm hearing of the Helix project from Real Networks. I don't get it though... is this going to replace Real Player and become the basis for it in the future, like Mozilla is the basis for Netscape? Hmm... check this out:
The Helix DNA platform is composed of the software engines that have powered RealNetworks' popular and proven server and player products for several years, as well as a set of more than 1,000 application programming interfaces for building media applications.
I still don't quite get it though... how does Real Networks make money if all the tools are open source now? Must find out more...
Here's a post on Slashdot from Bruce Perens going into some more detail. Also, an article from The Register (via this Slashdot post):
From The Register's article:
Real Networks is announcing plans to release some, but not all of its technology under an Open Source-friendly license within 90 days. Under pressure from Microsoft, and completely open formats, it's decided to meet the open source community halfway.
Anyway, lots of interesting stuff from the main Slashdot article.
More from Hack the Planet:
RealNetworks announced their Helix streaming platform, which will be partly open source, partly community source, and partly proprietary. They've also reverse-engineered Microsoft's ASF file format and MMS protocol so that Helix Server can serve Real, QuickTime, MPEG, and ASF content. Squeezed between MS's desktop monopoly and Apple's alliance with open source and open standards, this looks like a last gasp to escape irrelevancy.
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Monday, July 22, 2002
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