Minn Myat Soe :: His Notes

Here comes Valentine’s Gift from Yahoo! For our everyday’s HTML and AJAX needs, Yahoo! has just given us Yahoo! User Interface Library, and all the components are released under Open Source License (BSD License). Better than flowers, huh?

Yeah, we’ve got libraries and that pushes us further into endless possibilities of creating useful applications. To make best use of those tools to create applications, there’s got to be some guidelines and documentations. Again, Yahoo! provides us Design Pattern Libarary. To go further, there’s a blog for everything we need to know about those libraries and design patterns.

RSS is just an XML file that follows XML 1.0 specification. RSS simply allows us to syndicate a website contents into another website. If you want to add RSS feeds into your website, I guess we will need the read the followings:

• The RSS 1.0 specification.
• The RSS 2.0 specification.
• RSS File Format and history.
• RSS Advisory Board.
• PHP SAX Functions.
• PHP XSLT Functions.

Feed Parsers parse the feeding XML into distinctive parts without sweat. Cool, isn’t it? Currently I’m into the following parsers.

• Rome (Java)
• Jakarta Commons FeedParser (Java)
• MagpieRSS (PHP)

Someday, I’ll post some tutorials about those API’s and Libraries.

Mambo OpenSource is a good CMS software with which I have implemented half a dozen websites. It has already won “Best Open Source Solution” awards by LinuxWorld 2005. Mambo was born when an Australian company, Miro, put their codes on SourceForge and get it licensed under GPL. The Open Source community welcomed the project and continued developing the CMS.

The progress went well until Miro decided to establish a non-profit organization for Mambo, Mambo Foundation. This is the letter from Peter Lamont:

As you know, there have been several important and exciting changes in the Mambo community lately. The formation of the Mambo Foundation, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to manage the Mambo project, will ensure the security, longevity and success of Mambo and its community of users. Our next goal is to put together a strong organizational structure and encourage coordination between teams including core development, maintenance, documentation, translation, third-party development, membership, finance, administration and advocacy who will work under the Foundation umbrella.

The Mambo project has been extremely fortunate in having such a vital community that has advocated Mambo in many ways and helped it grow into the award-winning product it is today. We want to thank you for your continued support, which will continue to be critical moving forward.

We will be launching the Mambo Foundation website soon, where you will find general information about the Foundation, how to join as a member, FAQ’s, and much more.

But the core development team members didn’t like the idea and started to form OpenSourceMatters. The reason why they quit is described in their website:

The Mambo Foundation was formed without regard to the concerns of the core development teams. We, the community, have no voice in its government or the future direction of Mambo. The Mambo Steering Committee made up of development team and Miro representatives authorized incorporation of the Foundation and should form the first Board. Miro CEO Peter Lamont has taken it upon himself to incorporate the Foundation and appoint the Board without consulting the two development team representatives, Andrew Eddie and Brian Teeman.

Although Mr. Lamont through the MSC promised to transfer the Mambo copyright to the Foundation, Miro now refuses to do so.

Finally, the developers who coded Mambo will continue developing Mambo as Joomla , as the name Mambo is trademarked by Miro. It is also worth noting that all major Mambo sites like Mamboserver.com, Mamboforge.net, and Mambo-foundation.org are all owned by Miro and are no longer under the control of the recently departed Mambo developers.

Now, which side are you on?

TechForge.com aims multiple channels for specific technologies, and now it’s starting with Eclipse, which is my favourite Java IDE. Now I have a chance to learn more about that technology at one place.

It is pretty easy to install and configure Apache on both Windows and Linux. And so is MySQL, and so is PHP support. Still configuring those things to work perfectly needs certain effort, especially when it comes to installing Tomcat, Perl, mail servers or ftp servers etc. For those who don’t want to mess up with opening and saving several configuration files, I would recommend using packaged distributions for Apache, MySQL and PHP. These kind of distribution packages exist for both Windows and Linux platform and they perform right just out of the box. To name a few:

• apache2triad: Server bundle of : Apache2 , MySQL , PostgreSQL , OpenSSL , Xmail , SlimFTPd Software developing triad of : PHP , Perl and Python + Apache2TriadCP , PHPmyadmin , PHPPgAdmin , AWStats , UebiMiau , PHPXMail , PHPSFTPd. All latest stables , all manuals.
• AppServ: is an merging open source software installer package for Windows and Linux.
• FoxServ: is an Apache / mySQL / PHP installer package for Windows and Linux. Unlike NuShpere or PHPTriad, FoxServ features the latest version of all included pacakges, user defined configuration during installation, PHP as a module, PEAR, and the Zend Opt.
• XAMPP: is a very easy to install Apache Distribution for Linux, Solaris, Windows and MacOS X. The package includes the Apache web server, MySQL, PHP, Perl, a FTP server and phpMyAdmin.

I’m still not sure about which package performs best. Each has its own strengths as well as weaknesses. But I’m currently using XAMPP on my Windows box.