specializing in digital media technologies

Many, many moons ago I wrote a post introducing the Yii framework. It’s a framework for creating Web applications using PHP 5 (or greater) that I’ve really liked since I originally started with it. Ruby on Rails was the first Web development framework I personally used (back in 2005) and Zend was the first PHP framework. I love the former, and Yii is quite like it in many ways, but I never really took to Zend. In that first post, I discussed just downloading and testing Yii; here I’ll walk through creating the beginnings of a Web application. (continue reading…)

Rather big news has just been announced by Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers: Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). Currently, all domain names must be written using the Latin alphabet, meaning that most of the world is entering URLs in their non-native language. Presumably, if you’re reading this, you’re comfortable with English; Now just imagine if every time you went online you had to type URLs in Chinese, Arabic, or Russian! Well, that’s going to change over the next year, as support for domain names in those three languages (to start) will be added to DNS (Domain Name System). This is a significant and welcome change. For more information, see the Icann site or this article at the BBC.

ZendCon, a Zend/PHP Conference happened last week in San Jose, California. Although I didn’t attend, I’ve been reading about the conference, including this brief article informally comparing the different frameworks. One point I thought particularly interesting is that the Zend person suggested the people using other frameworks were also likely to be using Zend. As for myself, I’m pretty happy with Yii these days, but still use Zend’s Lucene search module on sites, incorporating it into Yii. So in my experience, I’d rather not use Zend for a whole project, but happily take on those pieces that I do need. I’m not sure what that says about a framework…

Another article on InfoWorld talked about PHP 6 developments. This is of particular interest to me, as I wrote a book using PHP 6 two years ago and have been waiting for it to be officially released ever since! Anyway, the article talks about how PHP 6 stresses Unicode support, which is what I focus on in the PHP 6 sections of my book. It’s a big, radical change, that takes a lot of work to get right. A couple of other expected features in PHP 6 are mentioned as well.