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Thursday, August 06, 2009

PAMPA-J Destiny?

One of my favorite Windows Desktop Application Project, PAMPA-J, is not dead ... it is simply "waiting events", if any.

What Is Going On With Aptana Jaxer


I have no idea! The most exciting news about PAMPA was the J at the end: Jaxer.
Apparently this project is in stand-by: while it has been always present in the Aptana Home Page, it disappeared even from Aptana Cloud Page - apparently, they are not hosting Jaxer anymore ... cool! What should I do then? I know is there a way to go in the Jaxer page, but at the same time precedent signs let me think something truly bad happened to this project. Does anybody have any idea about it?

What Is Going On To PECL For Windows


We all know the "official site" is useless since ages:

The pecl4win build box is temporarily out of service. We're preparing a new build system.

I know PHP 5.3 put in core a lot of PECL libraries such mbstring, iconv, APC, APD, etc etc ... but I wonder when we will be able to add our favorite custom libraries without compiling them for a single machine. I am particularly waiting for runkit and operator, but apparently these two extensions are not going anywhere and PHP 5.3 support is not ready yet. Does anybody have an idea about PECL?

What Is Going On With PHP 5.3


Apparently, the PHP team has to celebrate a lot for their 5.3 release. It is the first time in years they come out with a release that is not overpatched after few days.
As soon as they announced PHP 5.3 I installed it in PAMPA-J without problems (change the php.32 folder, overwrite a couple of apache dedicated files, that's it, some minor simple change in the php.ini and nothing else).
At the same time I was sure in few days they would have patched 5.3 with a 5.3.0.1 but it did not happen. After holidays, and too many days from the event, I am waiting for the 5.3.1 already available as dev distribution.

What Is Going On With MySQL


Good question! After I released PAMPA-J, MySQL has been acquired by Oracle. Right now I have no idea how is the MySQL development status, neither which version should I put in the next PAMPA-J.

What Is Going On With Apache


Nothing so far, but at least I realized for Apache 2, 2.X in PAMPA-J, the suggested PHP version is the one compiled in VS2005 and not 2008 (suggested for IIS). Next PAMPA-J will contain the right version of PHP to guarantee better stability.

What Is Going On With Me


I have to admit I am a bit bored by PHP Programming Language. The language itself is great and fun, but its intrinsic limitations plus missed PECL plus people still writing $email to retrieve a posted mail field, plus articles that are never up to date and suggest PHP4 code, plus people still complaining about short tag while PHP problems are, trust me, much more than that ... plus me working over C# and .Net since months, plus me interested in django, plus ... well, you got the point, PHP is behind as programming language, even behind JavaScript, surely behind Python, Ruby, Java, C#, and others.
I am not talking about "what you can do with PHP look there is Wikipedia and Facebook", I am talking about language malleability, features, etc etc ... just the fact somehow operator overload is not supported slashed me on the floor every time I think about the next revolutionary library able to make everything type hintable. No way ... they are pushing so much to badly clone Java language without considering missed overload, mess with public and static, slow OOP against procedural, double API for everything (OOP/procedural) ... guys, what the hell is becoming PHP language? The Emperor of hybrids languages, so hybrids that one day it will be slower than every ther due to SPL massive usage from everybody trying to surpass PHP limits. Ok, it's malleable cause SPL let us do that stuff, but how much slower is an OO application entirely based on getter and setter for a language that was truly fast when used procedurally? Make a decision, take a direction ... frameworks are castrated right now and there is something wrong we should get rid of ASAP. That's me about PHP.

Sorry for delay, hopefully next PAMPA will arrive soon!

7 comments:

J5 said...

Looked around a bit after reading your post for more information on where Jaxer is heading and this thread seems to show that while it may continue to live it is not part of Aptana's core focus:

http://forums.aptana.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=9435

I have been looking at Helma NG a little bit for use with Google App Engine but have yet to write any code with it.

Andrea Giammarchi said...

thanks a lot for that link. It is a while I am thinking about it but I've never investigated. It is a shame, for different reasons, first of all JavaScript had a great place in a server and all by itself. I hope they'll change their mind even if I know there are other projects via Helma, Rhino, etc, but Jaxer was something "too futuristic to explode instantly"! Regards

V1 said...

Jaxer moved from aptana.com to Jaxer.org

Anonymous said...

But they've still got it under GPL which
means it'll always be crippled and only Aptana will have the keys to uncripple it. Maybe we can convince them otherwise?

Gopala said...

Hi Andrea,


Thanks for your great work!

Please, see PAMPA-J + CMS Xoops 2.3.3 + Xoops Modules + portuguese translation on:

http://www.xoops.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4946


Download:

http://code.google.com/p/xoops-miniservers/downloads/detail?name=Xoops2.3.3Pampa1.0.0Blog2.6.0.zip


Many thanks


Gopala

DaN said...

Hi Andrea,
a simple curiousity...
I'd like to understand what do you mean by saying "people still writing $email to retrieve an email address"...? Maybe you recriminate about the fact they don't use the form $_POST['email']? (Or you have in mind a comparison with other methods offered by other programming languages?)
Thanks,
greetings.

Andrea Giammarchi said...

it's about people working with register global on or people completely ignoring filter functions in core since ages ... it's basically about the learning curve, people think they are PHP developers after just a successful form saved in db. This is not helping the language to grow up as it should do. We need more skilled PHP developers. Just my opinion.