| Wednesday, July 25 |
In a highly competitive market, with a lot at stake, developing consensus as well as running code can be difficult. Industry consortia and business models may determine how the future of the Internet gets decided - and who makes those decisions. Cisco Fellow Fred Baker will talk about the challenges that will shape the Internet, and whether Open Source will play as big a role as it has in the past.
How important is open source to the future of the Internet? The Internet evolved as it did because of open source software and open standards. The spirit of open source is best expressed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, which operates on the basis of "rough consensus and running code." However, today's Internet is not the playground it was a decade ago. While some applications, like Napster and AIM, use the open Internet effectively, the sacrifice of the end-to-end model makes deployment of innovative applications challenging. The introduction of so-called "middle boxes" - firewalls, translators, caches, and application layer gateways - means that the new applications must actively circumvent these, or must gain their cooperation.
Sponsored by
This infrastructure was architected with a combination of Open Source and proprietary software. This presentation will discuss the challenges faced, both technical and political, when deploying OSS on such a large scale and the problems managed as the environment changes and grows.
The discussion covers the contrast between the OSS experience with that of proprietary closed source products in the same environment, the lessons learned from this experience, and how the OSS community can help make OSS a continued success.
Morgan Stanley has what is widely recognized as one of the best IT departments in the financial industry, and has built one of the worlds largest integrated and truly "Enterprise-wide" technology platforms for application deployment.
Sponsored by
| Thursday, July 26 |
Mundie set off a far-reaching discussion recently when he introduced Microsoft's Shared Source program, which blends access to source code with the preservation of strong intellectual property rights by software developers, and contrasted Shared Source to Open Source and the GNU General Public License.
There's been a strong response from the open source and free software communities, accusing Microsoft of trying to co-opt the momentum of open source with a program that offers superficial similarities, but few of the real benefits. Microsoft counters that they are trying to find a balance between the needs of commercial developers and the lessons learned from the open source movement.
Mundie will discuss ways in which Shared Source differs from Open Source, and why Microsoft believes that the Shared Source Philosophy supports a strong software business case for commercial software developers and their customers.
Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann will then discuss the industry's experience with open source vs. pseudo-open licensing, and why he believes that the future will favor stronger (rather than weaker) licenses to protect choice for users and freedom for developers.
His speech will be followed by a panel discussion with Tiemann, Mundie, and other experts on intellectual property and the software industry including,
Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie and Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann set the stage for a wide-open panel discussion about Microsoft's Shared Source program and the response from the open source community, when they square off in this shared source vs. open source debate.
Tim O'Reilly will moderate the panel.
This presentation covers the technical history of PHP, from PHP/FI 2.0 to
PHP 4.0, and explores PHP 4.0's design. Gutman and Saraski analyze how the Zend Engine works, targeting points of interest to extension developers. The session explores how to add functionality to PHP, ranging from simple new functions to new extensions. It covers advanced PHP 4.0 features such as resource management and object-oriented syntax overloading.
One of the most important factors of PHP's widespread success is its strong extensibility features. The abstracted module interface introduced in PHP 3.0, succeeded by the even more mature extension API of PHP 4.0's Zend Engine, gives developers a strong and easy to use infrastructure for building new PHP extensions.
This session presents the PEAR project, an update on the project's status, plans for the future, demonstrations on the most popular PEAR components, and an introduction on how to write PEAR components. PEAR is an infrastructure for sharing PHP code and extensions.
This session discusses the challenges, advantages and disadvantages of using PHP as a teaching language. Topics include the challenge of using a weakly typed language, the (now solved!) problem of using a language without an IDE, comparisions to other commonly used teaching languages, and the ease with which students can create user interfaces to their applications with HTML.
This session discusses the Contec Innovations Application Server for current and next generation wireless networks (HA-Linux, Apache, PHP, Oracle), and addresses the technical challenges of PHP and Wireless, possible solutions for overcoming them, and the creation of a "PHP Sandbox", where applications cannot harm other applications running on the system or the system itself. In addition to Internet connectivity, the system supports a wide variety of wireless services such as WAP, i-Mode and SMS. The base functionality also provides a Messaging and Billing Engine, and a plug-in concept that allows easy integration of a wide variety of third party applications.
| Friday, July 27 |
If you talk to CTOs, their biggest concerns aren’t whether to use commercial software or open source software but a set of large-scale problems that don’t yet have obvious solutions. Oracle may not have solutions for them, but neither does Open Source. Our panel of top CTOs will tell us about enterprise-class problems that they are worried about solving into the future.
We constructed the Metalloprotein-site Database and Browser (MDB) to be a scientific resource for metalloprotein design and analysis, one that should be available to all the research community, as well as being central to our research.
Since its inception (in January, 1998), the MDB has used Open Source technologies in its core: Apache, PHP and MySQL, and for the interactive visualization and structure processing needs, Python and Java (latter not strictly OSS).
It started as a repository of geometrical information to be used interactively via a web browser, but with time the need arose to allow other people, sites and even programs (we and others are developing), to access this resource non-interactively, usually to include/embed seamlessly data or analysis information from the MDB.
This talk presents the design and evolution of implementing an API for this scientific web application. From using simple, mostly ad-hoc, scripts for information embedding or remote viewing, to a more formalized library of URLs that could output embeddable (HTML tables) or machine processable data (CSV, WDDX), to an XML-RPC based interface allowing for more flexible access, be it from a script in another web server, a local Python application or a remote Java program.
Some examples will be shown, in particular, the implementation of a general SQL query server, and scripts and methods that make it simple to embed complex data and analysis results (e.g. a histogram of distance distributions for the Zn-N bond for all tetracoordinate Zinc sites).
This talk uses the real-life experience of the Horde project to explore: how a project can grow software iteratively; when to reject features; how to throw out only what you have to; the dangers of both under- and over-design; and other software engineering topics in the context of web applications.
The Horde project started when a small student organization needed a webmail application, and a quick PHP IMAP interface was created to fill the need. Through accumulation, evolution, and revolution, this initial hack grew into the
Horde Project, a collection of applications and documented libraries that
follows recognized software engineering principles.
Presenters include the Horde project core system architect and project leader, and system administrator.
This talk is aimed at people wanting to know how to speed up serving PHP pages by using a simple code caching mechanism and willing to have a very light explanation of some of the PHP internals.
Starting from a simple case study of the application that leads us to write bwcache, some of the solutions we tried at first are be explained by going through a very simple analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of PHP from the performance point of view.
Then we look at the way PHP stores compiled code and the way PHP can be extended using dynamically loadable modules. The structure, implementation details and the problems encountered while writing bwcache are explained.
Some benchmarks comparing no cache at all, bwcache, apc-cache, zend-cache is shown and some considerations are taken regarding the final result. Then, some of the possible future development are analyzed and discussed with the public.
This presentation is an overview of Intacct's original concept and design, and demonstrates Intacct's core component architecture. The components are reusable and extensible classes designed to facilitate rapid development by driving the presentation and database access layers. In addition to showing how these components are used in Intacct's application, we'll also build a small sample application so that audience members gain a clear understanding of why and how to use these components. We'll detail our own experiences building these components, look at what challenges PHP's design poses in an application framework, touch on some of the steps a developer can take to work around them, and close with some ideas about what direction we, as hosted application developers, would most like to see PHP development take.
PHP-GTK is a new extension to PHP. PHP-GTK utilizes the power of PHP as a scripting language to create cross platform GUI applications.
In a little over six years, PHP has gone from a collection of random tools that helped Rasmus Lerdorf find out who was viewing his resumé on the Web, to being the foundation of some of the Internet's leading e-commerce and content sites. This panel session features some of the core developers of PHP and other luminaries from the PHP community, discussing where they think PHP will go in the next six years. Don't forget to bring your own ideas to share with the panel!