After many days of speculations all around the web about Facebook’s rewrite of PHP, today Haiping Zhao from the Facebook team has announced “HipHop for PHP”. The basic idea of HipHop for PHP is that it turns the code you write in PHP into C++ which then can be turned into machine code.

Even though there are others idea that have tried accomplishing the same goal as HipHop for PHP, I believe it is quite safe to assume that Facebook has a large enough user-base to produce code that is solid enough to run and can run well.

The announcement has been made on the Facebook blog earlier today, and tonight there is going to be the video tech talk that everybody can watch:

This evening we’re hosting a small group of developers to dive deeper into HipHop for PHP and will be streaming this tech talk live. Check back here around 7:30pm Pacific time if you’d like to watch.

A few questions come to mind even though we haven’t seen the code just yet. My main concern though is the one of buffer overflows and the security implications of turning PHP code into C++. As they say on the blog, it took nearly 18 months before having a relatively stable version and 3 developers. This is a very short lapse of time to develop a solution used by so many.

Another interest of mine related to this release is how does it compete with the likes of phc or roadsend php. If it does at all.

However I have noticed on their blog that Facebook has also developed HPHPi which seems to let you use HipHop but without having to actually compile your code before running it (The concept seems a bit like APC’s stat on and off switch from the few lines of description), which seems like a quite interesting idea for the development stages.

If you have ever used Python and Memcached, you probably have been looking for a library to connect to your Memcached server. And I’m sure you stumbled on the Tummy.com library which has basically no official online documentation.

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The last couple of months have been extremely busy for me, to a point where I have not been blogging or participating in open source project nor the local user group to the level I’d like, but it has been the good kind of busy, where you feel exhausted but very satisfied with one self.

What has been keeping me busy? I have presented at 3 conferences (PHP Tek, DPC and OSCON), took a week vacation in Iceland with Chris Shiflett and Andrei Z, moved to a new house, work on a very fun but stressful project among other interesting things that have happened.
A rough calculation told me that since mid May, around the time of PHP Tek, I have been away from my home a total of 38 days, almost 50%, not bad at all!

To touch base quickly on each of the conferences I spoke at: (more…)

According to wikipedia, the Dragon’s Den is:

a venture-capitalist television programme that originated in Japan where the format is owned by Sony. The format, which now airs internationally, consists of entrepreneurs pitching their ideas in order to secure investment finance from business experts — the “Dragons”.

As some may already know, in 2009 the television show began in Ireland on RTÉ ONE. This post covers the technical considerations encountered when a web site / application appears on national television. (more…)

Watch out! The semantic web is on the way, a thought that many (and not just the marketeers) may find daunting . Why? Because system and web app developers that want to take advantage of the semantic web will need to learn a lot of new standards and change the way they work.

I have been studying and working with web standards (XHTML, RDF, ATOM, RSS) for well over 4 years now, something I am glad of,  because recently something struck me. Conventions are arising, for example DOAP, SKOS and others, that are built on top of the Resource Description Framework otherwise known as RDF, if they aren’t, they are usually built on something very similar or related. (more…)

This past weekend we went along to Dublin’s OSS BarCamp. There were some really great talks, Stuart Langridge’s Javascript presentation was a highlight. Jaime Hemmett’s talk on using Git for version control was useful and informative. Paul Biggar’s talk on PHC, the Open Source PHP Compiler, was thought provoking and certainly caused a few grumbles from PHP guys like myself in the audience ;). JD and myself managed to catch up with him after and talk through some of his ideas over a drink. (more…)