New IM Handles
Posted by Bobby Easland, Jan 18 2009, 05:57 AMEveryone please take note that I have changed my instant messenger handles.
Is osCommerce alive again?
Posted by Bobby Easland, Dec 22 2008, 10:03 PM
I happened to notice that HPDL is once again committing code to the repository. Good play Harald...you only had a week left before the project was considered abandoned. Now you only have to commit code every year or so to meet the end of decade release path for MS2.
Bobby
Contributions or best fit for the author?
Posted by Bobby Easland, Nov 26 2008, 03:36 AM
There are so many instances that an osC contribution is developed by the developer to meet a requirement that, although it may be {barely} functional it is implemented. Over my years I've implemented osC based stores that took 40+ dedicated servers to keep up with the load...but there's not too many of us with that kind of concurrency experience.
My question to you...whoever you are reading this blog...is do you want the code to support MySQL replication, NDB Cluster, or other HA solution? In a nutshell, are you a mom and pop shop or are you expecting 2.6M requests per second?
Let me know...how many questions per second does your store digest?
Bobby
Where have all the good coders gone?
Posted by Bobby Easland, Nov 25 2008, 02:07 PM
I am very active in the PHP IRC channel on Freenode (##php) helping to answer questions that are asked and have noticed a disturbing trend. PHP is a wonderful interpreted scripting language that is easily learned by the laymen however that is also it's downfall since that produced a large percentage of wannabe experts. Ahhh...the salvation versions are here (5.2x and 5.3x) that puts PHP on par with Python and other OOP languages at least in a web realm. Now the problem is that all those expert PHP4 coders are floundering when it comes to design patterns, visibility, scopes, class abstraction/interfaces, overloading, etc.
In version 5.3x the PHP development team introduces namespaces (although the implementation has already changed twice), late static binding, lambda functions, and of course the new MySQLnd driver.
We are at a cross roads with PHP and web engineering. There will be the PHP4 coders that never get the core concepts of OOP and the powerful features we are going to (especially in v6.x) and they will have to find another day job. Then there will be the few that grasp the concepts well enough to put something sloppy together that works but the engine is scrap. That will only leave the few that have at least a basic formal education in computer science and can apply the new features and create responsive, enterprise, and graceful code.
Who knows...I can be and am frequently wrong 
on Is osCommerce alive again?