Jeremy Allison of the Samba fame wrote an interesting blog post about Sun’s approach to open source participatory development, followed by Bradley Kuhn’s bad opinion of Oracle’s attitude towards open source.

PHP 5.2.13 has been released. The announcement is href="http://www.php.net/releases/5_2_13.php">here

At the same time, PHP 5.3.2 RC3 is available for testing, see href="http://news.php.net/php.qa/65489">http://news.php.net/php.qa/65489

The PHP UK Conference
2010 starts tomorrow. Special shout out to Johannes Schlüter
whose talk is href="http://www.phpconference.co.uk/talks#Hidden_features_-_from_core_to_PECL"
>Hidden features - from core to PECL

 PHP and Oracle: Christopher Jones

I attended href="http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Jacobs_Ken/102658330.05.01.acc.pdf">Ken
Jacobs's

More good work under the auspices of John Scoles from Pythian: he has just released DBD::Oracle 1.24 for Perl. His annoucement post has all the details.

Facebook have announced a significant project around PHP that I
saw previewed at a small tech summit last month. No, Facebook did not
announce href="http://twitter.com/PhilipOlson/statuses/8549466708">PHPVille

Facebook announced href="http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=358"
>HPHP

It's no secret that some North America-based PHP folk met at
Facebook's Menlo Park HQ last week at the invitiation of David
Recordon and new-hire href="http://www.macvicar.net/blog/2009/12/funemployment-part-3-back-to-work.html">Scott
MacVicar

Francis Begin reminded me that Québec's premiere (can I say that?)
open source conference is coming sooner than you think: ConFoo.ca is styled as a "Web Techno" conference "with over 130
presentations in 8 rooms". It takes place in March, which means you need to get your travel plans organized ASAP.

This conference is an evolution of previous PHP successful
conferences. This year it has grown to include a number of web related
themes and other languages.

(This was an article I wrote for a newsletter).

In December 2009, PHP reached the number three position in the href="http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html">TIOBE
language index

If you don't follow the PHP press this will be news: PHP Advent is back for 2009!

Given the high quality of the previous two years of Advent posts, you'd be crazy not to follow along this year: http://shiflett.org/blog/2009/dec/php-advent-2009

The Lift web framework includes basic support for OpenId using the the openid4java library. I wanted to learn a little more about Scala, Lift and OpenId – so what follows are my notes on how to get this running, along with some minor improvements that I have made.

We have just released version 1.1.4 of Jersey, the open source, production quality, reference implementation of JAX-RS. The JAX-RS 1.0 specification and the 1.1 change log is available at the JCP web site and also available in non-normative HTML here.

Zend Technology, Microsoft’s little open source PHP friend, says it’s making its Zend application server, designed for running and managing business-critical PHP applications in production, available to Oracle’s enterprise customers through Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Network.

On Wim Coekaerts Blog I read that Zend and Oracle are working closer together. This makes PHP/Zend Server more integrated with Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL).

You can now use Oracle's free or paid Linux package channels to install Zend Server.

In three links:

The technical details

Wim Coekaerts's blog gives the background

The press release

Blackboard has not been having a good time in the state of North Carolina. As I noted recently, the University of North Carolina (a Blackboard customer) reported highly favorable results of their pilot study of Sakai, with an outcome of further investigation into Sakai as a full replacement of Blackboard as their primary LMS.

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

With Red Hat making a $19 million investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week, competition in the open source database market figures to get a little more interesting.

Yesterday we realeased the press release titled "Italy's CASPUR Relies on MySQL Enterprise to Support its Scientific Research" and I want to spend a few lines in commenting it.

First of all it was a pleasant surprise for me how extensively MySQL in particular and Open Source Software in general is pervasive into scientific research. I particularly appreciated a quote from Caspur:

The complaints and concerns over Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems and open source MySQL database grew this week to calls for the acquisition, or at least the relatively small MySQL part of it, to be blocked.

Phew! The Oracle OpenWorld conference is: href="http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=974003">wrapped
up

Now onto ZendCon down at the
other end of Silicon Valley.

Check out the Oracle Magazine Editors' Choice Awards 2009.

Raimonds was at the Oracle OpenWorld Conference last week. He seemed to be everywhere: I bumped into him numerous times and got to see one of his talks. He was always thinking of an interesting problem or great technical challenge to solve.

Congratulations Raimonds!

With IntelliJ now being available under an Open Source license, developers have another option to choose from when it comes to Java-based IDEs/Frameworks (Eclipse and NetBeans being the other two prominent ones). Choice is always good, and being an Open Source enthusiast, I of course welcome JetBrain's move!

If you have an interest in dynamic language programming here are the Oracle sessions to attend. There are also unconference sessions happening - check out the OTN area for details on each day.

Conference Sessions

S311373 Agile Web Development: Ruby/Rails and Python/Django with Oracle Database 11g, Sun 10:30-11:30 Hilton Hotel Golden Gate 1
S311371 Best Practices for High-Performance Applications with Oracle Database 11g, Mon 17:30-18:30 Hilton Hotel Golden Gate 1

I just released an Alpha version of PECL OCI8 1.4 on http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8
The code is also merged to what will eventually be the PHP 5.3.2 and PHP 6.0 releases.

Documentation will appear on http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.oci8.php
in the next few days, if all goes according to plan.

From the Changelog:

1. Introduce connection attribute functions:

oci_set_module_name
oci_set_action
oci_set_client_info
oci_set_client_identifier

So that's not the one that makes the customers happy,

Analysts looked at Oracle’s stack of chips for the last quarter and called it a bit light. (Thus this picture of Oracle’s headquarters.)

Should followers of open source care?

To read the entire article at its source, please refer to Does Oracle matter to open source