Only a hermit would not have noticed the massive, and I emphasize massive, developments in the Software development world in the first half of 2005. To get a handle on the most recent developments, I consult back to my original prediction as a frame for the picture...

http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/207

Anti-Spam Techniques in PHP

Blocking spam on a site (weblog or otherwise) has proved to be one of the more difficult things about the whole weblog movement. It's gotten to the point where anyone can plop a chunk of code onto their web host and be up and running in anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. The real problems come, however, when a spammer decides to take advantage of the site...

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/3545

Optimizing Oracle and PHP

The open-source language PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) powers some of the most popular Web sites in the world, such as Yahoo!, Lufthansa, and Disney Online. This fact is even more remarkable when you consider that PHP does so much with so little. Imagine that your Web server is a gigantic virtual factory processing HTTP requests. Now imagine your PHP interpreters as factory workers in hard hats handling the requests. Each worker is enclosed in his/her own cell, unable to talk or coordinate with the others...

http://oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/deployphp/lim_deployphp.html

Is Open Source Commercially Viable? [updated]

Even proponents like Fleury admit the open source business model is not intended to produce powerful, wealthy, massively profitable software companies. Yet people are racing into this business, and venture capitalists keep funding them, pumping $150 million into open source startups in 2004, triple the amount for 2003, according to VentureOne. Sounds like the dot-com bubble, except that this time it's not just investors who will get burned. Customers are taking a risk too...

http://phplens.com/phpeverywhere/?q=node/view/206

Open Source Javascript Archive Network (JAN)

I just saw an announcement on ProNet about a new open source JavaScript Archive Network that is supposed to be JavaScript's answer to CPAN. I think it is a great idea. There isn't much content yet (i.e. there is only one package available on the site). I hope other JavaScript resources will merge their packages in. I think if they are going to be successful there will need to be something similar to the CPAN installer...

http://www.jaxn.org/blog/archives/1004-Open-Source-JavaScript-Archive-Network.html

Andi Gutmans: Open source is inevitable

Not sure how many have seen the following Redhat video. Personally, I'm not a big fan of this kind of FUD, especially if Redhat wants to paint a picture of being the honest alternative to the likes of Microsoft. I think the open-source world should win on its own merits and not by spreading FUD. That's very much been my philosophy with pitching PHP. If I bash Java here and there, I try and keep it real and give real examples :-) ...

http://andigutmans.blogspot.com/2005/06/open-source-is-inevitable.html

Blog Worms

The incredible popularity of the PHP web application language has an obvious downside: if a significant vulnerability is discovered, it will take a while to patch all of the relevant systems. Netcraft reported today that just such a weakness has been discovered: the XML-RPC libraries (conventional and PEAR) allow remote execution of PHP code via a failed escapement of quotes...

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2005/07/blog-worms-picture-credit.html

Path Disclosure and PHP

In the past few days I've been testing a number of my own applications and scripts as well as various bits and pieces of applications written by others that I use, using an automated scanning tool I have written. One particular issue I came across, common to all applications is the inevitable "path disclosure vulnerability". The premise behind this so called vulnerability is that remote attackers by specifying certain value can make the script report it's own location on disk...

http://ilia.ws/archives/58-Path-Disclosure-and-PHP.html

cURL and parse_url Tweaks

With the release of PHP 5.1.0b3 the dev tree has been closed for new features, allowing only bug fixes to facilitate the stabilization of the code for the upcoming (don't ask me when) 5.1.0 stable. This however created a unfortunate situation where PHP does not have a development tree for feature enchantments, so any improvements remain lingering on developer's boxes until development tree is once again available...

http://ilia.ws/archives/61-cURL-and-parse_url-tweaks.html

PHP

Popularity Scoreboard *

Jun. 2005 count of domains running PHP: 20,478,778 domains
Jun. 2005 count of IP addresses running PHP: 1,299,068 IP addresses

* Fresh data! :-)

Organizations using PHP

As usual, we'll wrap up with our traditional list of significant organizations using PHP.

CapitalOne, NASA, the W3C, HP, Google, Deutsche Bank, Redhat, Lycos, Cisco, Ericsson, Volvo, Motorola, SourceForge, Honda, Xoom, WinAmp, Sony Music, Vodafone, CBS, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, the US Army, UPI, the New York Yankees, Southwestern Bell, the San Diego Zoo, the Oakland Raiders, Audi, Subaru, VA Linux, Winamp, Duke University, Quicken, The Village Voice, Undernet, Access Micro, Columbus Dispatch, Indianapolis Star, Yahoo, Indiana University, Deutsche Telecomm, Bang & Olufsen, Siemens, Unilever, Philips, BMC, NTT, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Dialpad, BMC, Mitsubishi, MP3.com, the Arizona Republic, Deloitte Consulting, the US Navy, Nokia, Valero, Electronic Arts

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