PHPMeetup Boston, June 2006

June 1st was once again PHP Meetup Boston night. Mark Withington, the organizer had invited Mike Potter from Adobe's Developer Relations team to present about the upcoming Flex 2.0 web-application framework and how to use it with PHP back-end applications. Mike gave an impressive overview of Flex 2.0 and how easy it is to create impressive user interfaces with a few lines of xml and ActionScript.

Here is what I took away from this meeting:

1. Flex 2.0 is a really impressive development and expected to be out within the next 60 days. See for yourself, what Mike did with Flex2.0 and Drupal. He also demonstrated an open source PHP-Flex bridge, called AMFPHP. Flex 2.0 competes with open source projects such as OpenLaszlo and ZK1. However, Mike thinks it is the stronger platform. He said that a basic command line SDK will be free and the Flex 2.0 developer IDE based on Eclipse will be less than $1000 per developer license.
2. Mike described another project that
piqued my interest. The project is called Adobe Apollo and is expected to come out by the end of the year. He described it as a stand alone flash application engine, that can be used to package Flash (and Flex) based applications to be installed on a user's desktop. The really cool statement to me was that it also should run AJAX based applications.

3. Mike also did a cool demo of 3D objects embedded in PDF documents and animated through JavaScript. He showed off an impressive 3D rendering of a turbine which he was able to pan and rotate as well as to have the turbine wheel spinning, while doing so. And all this in a 300K document you can e-mail and print (w/o the animation off course).
4. Triggered by a question from the audience, Mike briefly introduced Adobe's AJAX framework, called Spry. This also looks very powerful and I have to revisit this topic, once I learned a bit more about it.

This was an evening really well spent. I learned a lot and met a bunch of great people. If you are a PHP developer or a software developer in Boston, I highly recommend to go to the PHP Meetup.

Banco do Brasil has now 35,000 OpenOffice.org users

In an article of today, TMCNet reports, that "Banco do Brasil has completed the migration of all its Windows XP computers to the OpenOffice.org open source suite"

They report that 35,000 PC have been converted from Windows XP to Linux with OpenOffice.org. This is a lot of PC's that now run the open source office suite. Banco do Brazil is federally owned and the Brazilian government has supported open source for quite a while. They are not only using it but actively making sure that translations are available in Portuguese as well as supporting open source development.

BarCamp Boston 2006

On June 3 - 4 the Boston geek community will gather for the BarCamp Boston 2006. Thanks to Shimon Rura for driving the organizing effort. It promises to be an interesting event with presentations, lightning talks and demos. BarCamps are supposed to bring together geeks as well as entrepreneurs to talk ideas, trends and how to make them happen for the benefit of the greater public. In addition we'll have a hacking competition I look forward to. If you live in Greater Boston, you don't want to miss it. If only to tour the offices of Monster.com who sponsors the facilities.

Best Open Source Software for the Macintosh

Apple Matters has selected OpenOffice.org as best open source software for the Macintosh in its category. Devanshu Mehta from Apple Matters sees it as an obvious choice, writing "This one is a no-brainer. Compared with the expensive office software from other companies, OpenOffice.org has a quite well-rounded feature set."

However, Devanshu thinks that the reliance on X11 for OpenOffice.org for OS X is a serious drawback and recommends NeoOffice, the port created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin using Cocoa for a native look and better integration.

New visual books

InPictures has published four new books covering OpenOffice.org

• Base 2.0,
  
• Writer 2.0,
  
• Calc 2.0,
  
• Impress 2.0.
  

InPictures follows an unusual concept: [Its] computer how-to books are based on pictures, not text. The company states Most computer books contain over 50,000 words. In Pictures books contain one-tenth as many.

Best of all, the books are cheap, dirt cheap For a limited time, In Pictures books can be downloaded for free.

Open Document format 1.0 becomes ISO approved

In a joint press release, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved the international Standard ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.

The Open Document Format (ODF) has been developed as an application-independent format by a vendor-neutral OASIS Technical Committee. ODF has been at the heart of the controversy around the State of Massachusetts adopting open standards to ensure long-term readability of electronic documents.

FSF may take OpenOffice.org off its high priority list

According to an article at NewsForge, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers removing OpenOffice.org from its high priority list of open source projects.

The FSF does maintain this list to draw attention to various projects it considers critical to achieve parity with proprietary platforms. FSF put OpenOffice.org on the list, despite that it is open source itself. However, it is based on Java and depends on features that are not available in the free Gnu implementation of Java.

With the recent release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 the goal has apparently been achieved to eliminate all the quirks, that prevented OpenOffice.org to compile on GCJ. One caveat, this build is not the fasted in the world and rather not usable. But the FSF claims the principle goal to be achieved and hopes that future GCJ implementations will take care of reasonable performance.