Also see the list of articles, none to be taken seriously.
PHP Everywhere: The Ultimate PHP for Windows with Turck MMCache (and FastCGI)
The old problem with running PHP on Windows is that many extensions are not thread safe and can only run safely in CGI mode. Unfortunately CGI is dead slow because the web server creates a new CGI process for each page request.
FastCGI is the solution to this. Instead of creating a new CGI process for each page view, it reuses existing CGI processes. This also improves database scalability because persistent db connections work properly.
...Well there is a lesser known GPL'ed accelerator, Turck MMCache that supports both Windows, Unix and Linux, written by Dmitry Stogov. I tested MMCache and FastCGI against several PHP scripts accessing MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. I gave the web-server a good pounding with a 60 minute stress test using fiendish scripts that cause PHP in ISAPI mode to crash. MMCache appears to be made of sterner stuff and passed with flying colours. While the test was running, I modified the source code of the test scripts; MMCache auto-detected the changes and recompiled.
[via PHP Everywhere]
CNET: Microsoft's browser play. The removal of IE as a free, downloadable software application could have a profound effect on the Web and the development of Web standards.
Zeldman: IE/AOL; the flip side. Why proposed negative (anti-IE) and positive (pro-luxury-browser) grassroots campaigns cannot change consumer behavior or alter Microsoft and AOL's business decisions. What is likely to happen to design and development methods over the next few years. Some of this is actually good news, really.
CNN: Microsoft to pay AOL $750M. Tech titans settle Netscape lawsuit, set seven-year licensing pact for AOL to use Internet Explorer.
CNET: Microsoft to abandon standalone IE.
So, AOL can now install IE with their product for no charge, just as MS terminates development of the installable IE. Great deal.
Jeffrey Zeldman has some great analysis.
Aside: does this mean AOL must use IE? From initial reports, the answer appears to be no. The alternative browser would just have to be free to AOL (or strategically valuable enough to justify its cost). However, AOL’s track record has it bundling IE for Windows even without a special agreement, even as it owned Netscape.
Presumably the termination of IE development means that users can only receive major browser updates by buying new versions of Windows. For the majority of users, who are likely to stick with their current OS version for a while, IE 6 SP1 is the end of the road. Its slow march toward compliance with CSS and other standards can go no further, no new web technologies will be added, and no more bugs will be fixed.
This is a huge problem for web programmers and designers. A large majority of web surfers—those using IE on probably all versions of Windows before Longhorn (scheduled for 2005)—have just had their browser orphaned, with no simple upgrade path. With all its warts, it’s going to stick around for a long time.
In other words, Internet Explorer 6 has been Netscape 4-ed.
Whopper of the day (from the CNET article): "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," [IE program manager] Countryman said. “Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.” Is he trying make us believe that bug fixes, CSS3, XForms, etc., are impossible without a new operating system, due to some technical limitation? Maybe the quote was meant to look like a statement of technical possibility, while it was really a marketing dictum. As in: for the users to get further improvements in IE, they must first buy and install an updated OS. (Because we want it that way.)
Tim Bray, wresting with page layout in IE, puts it more strongly:
The problem isn’t that CSS is too hard. The problem isn’t browser incompatibilities in general. The problem is specifically that Microsoft Internet Explorer is a mouldering, out-of-date, amateurish, out-of-date pile of dung. Did I say it’s out-of-date? As in past its sell-by, seen better days, mutton dressed as lamb, superannuated, time-worn. It’s so, like, you know, so twentieth-century.
Ron Green raised the alarm, which echoed through Scripting News and then around the usual hallways: “All this has lead me to ask if IE is dead.”
Firebird [mozilla.org] and Safari [apple.com] are looking really good right now.
Excellent keynote. He started with a simple, obvious thing which we tend to get wrong because we’re blind to it: weblog item doctitles that show up properly in search engines. Then a bunch of specific things we can implement, and a look toward the future. Good, practical stuff.
Talked about the content side of content management. Importance of titles and topic sentences. Communication skills. Don’t hit.
Content is the expression of ideas, request for attention, or attempt to influence. Technologists don’t think hard enough about the effort & the reward of making content.
Showed an entry on Don Box's site that displayed its title perfectly in his aggregator NetNewsWire, but Google didn't see it, because it wasn't in the doctitle. Easy to make this mistake. (Reiterated point: Publishing is essentially engineering. We forget these issues because engineers think from the inside out.) What is the right unit of content? Radio Userland has the day’s posts on one page, with the date as doctitle; Moveable Type one per page, so it can use the item's RSS title. Dave Winer's weblog comes in like an IV drip all day, but the audience for most weblogs isn't like that, and they need titles.
This affects how John Udell uses Radio Userland. Dave Winer interjected to ask if it would help to have a field to choose the day's title.
Brent’s Law of URLs: the more expensive the CMS, the crappier the URL. Showed a bunch of typical CMS & welogging system URLs. Tim Bray’s homegrown site was best: example ended with 2002/02/13/NamingFinishing. Vignette’s > $200K product was worst with an awful, long numeric URL.
Structure in doctitles. Search results pages can parse & group the titles. Example: with doctitle like Magazine Name | Date | Dept | title, group search results by magazine issue. Showed good example of this on O'Reilly's site.
Great example of broken titles in just about every mailing list archive. All the titles are wrong—they are the same as the last message in the thread. Not scannable. Showed a mockup with meaningful titles.
A few of the examples had the common thread of repetition of data in the user interface. Search results kept repeating the site name in document titles. Discussion board forums kept repeating the same subject lines. The mailing list example he showed was pretty much wall-to-wall repetition of the same thing. Only difference between successive lines was indentation and author name. A better interface would strip it all out, summarize, whatever. I've run into all the things he mentioned and just gotten used to them. I have to look at them with new eyes.
Call to implement ThreadsML.
Discussion of SlideML. Showed his method of generating it, but it isn't usable by “civilians”. No help in writing the actual content apart from typing raw XHTML in Emacs.
CMS systems came from publishing & were ported to web. Weblogs are web-first.
Hypertextual writing is still stuck in 1995. Netscape did as much or more than wer're doing today in 1996. We need lightweight web-aware writing tool. Need to advance beyond emacs, TEXTAREAs or the shoddy Windows DHTML edit control. InfoPath still relies on crummy XHTML editor.
Compound documents: tend to explode to meaningless names because the system has to add them (e.g. slide027.html). Discussion of old Netscape cid: protocol.
CMSs solve refactoring problems “in the large”: making consistent changes to many files, access, etc. Refactoring “in the small” suck up a huge amount of time: reformatting email messages, etc.
Categorization is a heavyweight operation; there should be other lightweight ad-hoc ways. Example: All Consuming book aggregator finds book references in blogs.
Showed example of searching his SlideML markup with XPath for code examples.
Update: Here are the slides and notes from Bitflux: part one, part two.
10 Best Features from Commercial CMS
Browser-based image editing, pre-localized interfaces
Extra credit: In-context editing (Edit This Page), dependency reporting, semblance of autoclassification, relational viewing tools
Reporting: such as Never Logged In
Configurable, forms-based workflow (ingest Visio WFML?)
508/WA compliant output — accessibility. Table headings + row headings, alts, etc.
Browser-based content object development (schema, essentially)
OpenCourse educational site. opencourse.org. “It rhymes with open source!” (The presenter avoided saying this, but I'm sure he wanted to.) Slow-moving.
Dublin Core Metadata in CMS
On oscom.org presentation slide show, different DC formats for XHTML, HTML, RDF XML are linked.
Good reference impl.: DC-dot. Another: Reggie
Elements (such as DC.Subject.Keyword) appearing multiple times, yes. Comma-separated value lists, no.
Discussion on thesauri, search engines, etc. Overall, I didn't get a huge amount out of this session, at least not directly. I'll have to find the references impls online.
Provides a standard way to place content on a web server, with metadata, file locking, versioning. Also can decouple filesystem layout from author's view. Uses HTTP for all logins, so no need to create full user accounts.
Very few clients support metadata so far. Cadaver does, but cmd-line based. Kcera? KExplorer? support properties.
To check out: Joe Orton's sitecopy. Twingle.
WebDAV for filesharing tested lighter than SMB on network traffic.
Question on ranged PUTs. WebDAV and mod_dav support it, but some servers don't. The Mac OS X WebDAV client can't use ranged PUTs for this reason, or it would risk replacing the entire file with the tiny part that was changed. They're working toward some kind of solution.
Servers include Apache mod_dav (which the speaker wrote) and Zope, Tomcat. Jakarta Slide requires a lot of work to connect its memory-based store to something. Can even handle WebDAV with CGI except for OPTIONS method.
Subversion supports DeltaV WebDAV. You can mount & copy files from vanilla Windows & Mac OS X. But you can't modify them, because the client don't support DeltaV. (There is an experimental "autoversion" plugin to server to allow this.)
Extensions: ACL. Remote management of ACLs; close to RFC status. DASL (DAV Searching & Locating). Yet another query language. Further off.
MS WebDAV does a little check for FrontPage first, but is pretty much straight WebDAV otherwise.
My question: best/simplest route to implement a change trigger for a WebDAV server, so I could run a script? Can I plug in easily to any of the existing servers?
A. Zope supports WebDAV and is programmable. It uses its own data store, though, not the filesystem. So the whole system would have to use Zope.
Best answer. Could look at logs / an Apache filter to implement change response. Great idea.
Alternative: Author of FS watch & notify utils suggested those. They only run on Unixes, though. (I need Windows support, so I could look into NT's APIs for filesystem notification too.)
Dave Winer (introduced as "King of the Blogging World") said that was a great introduction, and he didn't agree with anything in it. Call to open source & commercial software worlds to work with each other. Speaking as a commercial developers who has also released open source.
Q: "Proprietary" label used to be sold as a good word. Open source just used it to differentiate themselves.
"40-person company" is what he recommends would be best for customers. 2-3 people doesn't cut it. But those 40-person companies don't exist anymore. Users look at Unix-style OS and think it must be very difficult to write. But it's actually much harder to write software that's easy to use, while users won't recognize its complexity.
Halley Suitt: Is she missing the marketing for open source? What does Linux look like? There's something with a penguin. Someone helpfully brought up his laptop and opened it for her. "My Linux virginity is gone," she announced.
Internet Explorer: users are stranded. Has a development team, but they don't fix the bugs.
XML-RPC: Dave did design in 2 weeks, met with Don Box et al once. Secret of success: not overloaded with complexity. Extra features were aggressively not included. Has not changed since 1999.
Audience member disputed the assertion that there were no 40-person software firms. Many CMS packages (shrinkwrapped) come from such companies.
What audience member wants: to be able to fix software. Even if developer goes bankrupt. Dave: What you want is not to be locked in. You want open file formats. Another audience member: retraining is high part of switching cost, not data conversion. Q: Source code escrow?
Q: With IE, doesn't want to be stranded. His weblog won't display properly in IE, and he can't fix it. Dave: Source code for IE should have been put in escrow and released already, because they're not working on it. He had strongly suggested that as a remedy in the MS antitrust trial.
Movivations for Open-Source Developers essay. To do: find link; it scrolled off my NetNewsWire aggregator before I read it.
Q: Audience member complained that Radio Userland has support issues, documentation issues.
Dave: They all do! There's no money in software! It's $39.95; that doesn't pay for a lot of support.
Sound bite about personally not liking Bill Gates or Richard Stallman. Neither of them take baths. This is quoted more accurately elsewhere.
Discussion of unifying variants of RSS.
And here we come to the climactic faceoff of the keynote. Apparently Dave Winer & Bill Kearney have never met in person before. I'll let the record speak for itself (search the web for both their names), but if you've ever seen their online mailing list discussions, you'd expect a matter vs. antimatter reaction if ever they were to meet.
Bill Kearney: I'm Bill Kearney, from Syndic8.
Dave: (no particular reaction) What's Syndic8?
Bill: (explains, happening to mention again that he's Bill Kearney)
Dave: Oh, you're Bill Kearney. My God.
[Bill starts talking about "democracy, rather than benevolent dictatorship"; discussion degenerates into shouting & swearing. Elapsed time: about 15 seconds. The play-by-play doesn't really matter, but if you want one, see Aaron's weblog. After the OSCOM organizer Charlie steps in after a few minutes, Dave is too rattled to move on and ends the session.]
I didn't get to ask my question.
Steven Frank starts a user-interface discussion: .dmg Files Considered Harmful (via Daring Fireball).
I had some of the same misgivings about .dmg files, but there are also drawbacks to .sit and .tgz archives in that it's still not obvious to the untrained user how to install the programs after download. At least you can more reliably put instructions into a disk image window.
It's possible to make disk images user-friendly provided they satify three requirements:
It would be interesting to see a new user try out a disk image. Without that, all I can do is speculate.
I posted my notes from day 1. There's no WiFi in the conference building, but I walked a few blocks down Newbury St., with free wireless access, and I'm posting this from a street corner.
I?m at the the SD East conference in Boston every day this week.