PHP Magazine

[AJAX Magazine] CopperLicht, fast WebGL JavaScript 3D Engine

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:40:47 +0200

WebGL is getting hot after being supported by modern browsers Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Now you can even create amazing apps with CopperLicht, a fast JavaScript 3D engine for creating games and 3d applications in the webbrowser. It uses the WebGL canvas supported by modern browsers and is able to render hardware accelerated 3d graphics without any plugins.

Key features :

3D World editor: CopperLicht comes with a full 3D world editor named CopperCube.
Many supported 3D file formats: .3ds, .obj, .x, .lwo, .b3d, .csm, .dae, .dmf, .oct, .irrmesh, .ms3d, .my3D, .mesh, .lmts, .bsp, .md2, .stl. and more, see below.
Incredibly fast: CopperLicht is highly optimized and able to render and animate even huge 3d scenes.
Simple API: CopperLicht is a SceneGraph based 3D engine, and a lot of examples and tutorials are available to show you how it works.
Binary compilation: Unlike other WebGL 3D Engines, CopperLicht compiles your 3D meshes into a small, binary file which downloads quickly, reducing bandwith usage for your users. Simply import your 3D files into the CopperCube editor and publish it as CopperLicht scene.
Totally free: CopperLicht is free to use. Just download and go!

[AJAX Magazine] ItsNat Natural Ajax v0.7 Released

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:08:55 +0200

ItsNat is a server centric Java AJAX web framework with the same style of programming as the client, because ItsNat approach is "The Browser Is The Server" (TBITS). ItsNat simulates a Universal W3C Java Browser in the server, client events are sent to the server via AJAX and converted to W3C Java DOM Events, changes in DOM server are automatically sent to the client as JavaScript updating the client DOM. In ItsNat templates are defined using pure X/HTML or SVG files with no logic. View logic is coded in pure Java using Java W3C DOM APIs promoting reuse and the goodness of Object Oriented Programming.

This release, 0.7, is highly focused on SVG, these days web technologies like HTML 5 and SVG are trying to achieve the same Flash capabilities tanks to browser makers and projects like SVGWeb sponsored by Google.

ItsNat v0.7 adds first class support of SVG in native browsers and Internet Explorer using a broad range of plugins: Adobe SVG Viewer (v3 and v6), Renesis 1.1, Savarese Ssrc, SVGWeb and Batik as applet. Savarese Ssrc also provides XUL to MSIE.

[Web Accessibility Initiative] Social Accessibility Project by IBM

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:00:36 +0000

Social accessibility sounds like Accessibility 2.0, is a project where visually impaired users can connect to help making the web accessible. Using an innovative new system, it gathers information about accessibility problems directly from visually impaired users. To address these problems, the Social Accessibility Project provides a tool to members of the open community that allows them to externally modify Web pages, successfully making the pages accessible while leaving all original content untouched.

This pilot service is focused on improving accessibility for screen reader users. Users encountering Web access problems anywhere at any time will be able to immediately report the problems to the Social Accessibility server.

[Enterprise PHP] Makara Leverages Virtualization to Simplify Cloud Application Management

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:12:01 +0000

Makara's Cloud Application Platform, now available as a developer release, helps developers easily deploy, scale and monitor mission-critical applications in the cloud

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. - February 2, 2009 - After months under the radar, Makara today unveiled a brand new approach to cloud computing's most difficult problem: application deployment and management. Rather than retrofit system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara's Cloud Application Platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product is freely available today as a developer release at www.makara.com.

"The widespread adoption of cloud computing is hitting a wall in terms of ROI because companies are not able to effectively manage applications, both inside and outside the enterprise, in a cloud environment. No one's going to run mission-critical apps without management, not in the data center and definitely not in the cloud," said Tim Guleri, Managing Director of Sierra Ventures. "Makara's Cloud Application Platform provides that missing link, enabling developers to deploy their apps and make them work with full management capabilities. Makara will get the cloud past the ROI hurdle."

[PHP Magazine] PHP in MENA market

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:13:42 +0000

In a effort to help promoting PHP in the Middle-East, North Africa and Arab countries in general, I'm happy to announce the arabic edition of PHP Magazine Network phpmagazinearabic.net.

[Googling Magazine] Google Drops IE6 support from Google Apps

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:29:45 +0000

In an email sent to Google Apps Admins, Google Apps team are dropping old browsers support from Google Apps in order to improve their products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance. As a result, in 2010, support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers will be phased out.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above. If you are still using an old browser somewhere it's time to change, since it's no more supported anywhere and Google is making a good step to encourage people using new supported and more secure browsers.

If the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements in 2009, I think this number will be beated in 2010 to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

[CMS Magazine] XOOPS CMS Gains Popularity

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:11:36 +0000

World's leading Open Source CMS speeds up development

Feb. 1, 2010 - XOOPS Projects is enjoying a strong increase in popularity, measured by number of new users, as well as new developers joining the XOOPS Team. According to Alexa.com, the XOOPS' reach increased by 57% over the last three months.

Thanks to this influx of new developers, XOOPS Project has been able to release updates to its CMS on a monthly basis since August 2008, and to start parallel development of new versions. While one team focuses on the maintenance of 2.4.x series, a new team from France and Switzerland is working on 2.5.x series, with main focus on redesigning the Admin with jQuery. At the same time, the work continues on on revising architecture for the new XOOPS 3.0 version, led by Dr. Taiwen Jiang, the Project Leader.

The XOOPS 2.5 Alpha has been released on February 1, 2010, only one week after the 2.4.4 Final release.

[Enterprise PHP] Zend Framework Adds Support for Microsoft Windows Azure

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:01:42 +0000

Zend Technologies have just announced version 1.1 of Zend Framework including support for Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services and the Deutsche Telekom Developer Garden platform. The new release also provides documentation and tutorial enhancements.

Microsoft Interoperability team noted on their blog :

With the new Zend Framework 1.10, by simply using the new Zend_Service_WindowsAzure component, developers can easily call Windows Azure APIs from their PHP applications and leverage the storage services, including Blob Storage, Table Storage and Queue Service, offering them a way to accelerate web application development and scale up on demand.
....

Jean Paoli, General Manager Interoperability at Microsoft offered a comment about this announcement: "PHP developers find the Windows Azure platform compelling, Microsoft's decision to contribute PHP-based Windows Azure components to Zend Framework helps demonstrate Microsoft's commitment to openness and interoperability by providing greater choice and opportunity for Microsoft customers and partners."

[AJAX Magazine] Websync, .NET and IIS Comet Server

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 10:06:23 +0200

If you are looking to turn your IIS, ASP.NET server into a highly scalable HTTP Comet/Reverse Ajax server, your solution could be called Websync, by Frozen Mountain Software. Websync is cool, because unlike every other comet server currently available, it doesn't require a separate server, instead it runs directly with IIS. It takes about 2 lines in your web.config to get it going, and we've tested 30,000 users simultaneously on a single $400 Acer desktop with 3gig of RAM.

More features include :
- an embedded JavaScript client (only 9 KB!) and .NET client.
- server-side publishers for .NET and PHP
- uses open protocols and proven technology (HTML5, Ajax, JSONP, Bayeux).
- allows secure, controlled access and virtually unlimited scalability.
- offers complete end-to-end application integration.

Websync is a commercial product, pricing start from $749. More information and download at http://frozenmountain.com.

[AJAX Magazine] Visual WebGui platform further enhances its SDK with the integration of jQuery in its new 6.4 version

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:26:05 +0200

The new version offers upgraded performance, scalability and complete developer and designer freedom to design and customize Web 2.0 like user interfaces

Gizmox, the developer of Visual WebGui web/cloud applications platform announced today the release of its Visual WebGui 6.4 beta 1 version. The new version offers enhanced performance as well as enhanced customization, extension and user interface designing capabilities. The expanded capabilities include the integration of the jQuery library for faster behavior customization and user interface extension. This enables developers to create Web 2.0 user interfaces (UI) in a more expedited and easier manner. In addition, the integration allows jQuery developers to offer a path empowering the jQuery based UI, while maintaining the Visual WebGui server power and security which are vital for data secured - sensitive applications.

With the original VB6 like drag and drop development practices that earned Visual WebGui its popularity as an open source enterprise .Net Ajax platform, the new version lends its simple VB6 like web development empowerment to jQuery developers. In addition, Visual WebGui developers will be able to develop applications using full object oriented environment by utilizing the power of the server and at the same time to write extensions using one of the most popular client side frameworks.

[e-Commerce Magazine] Avactis 1.9.0 eCommerce PHP Shopping Cart Solution Released

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:38:26 +0000

Pentasoft Corp. have just released version 1.9.0 of Avactis PHP Shopping Cart e-Commerce software. A lot of improvements to the new version of Avactis were added.

The key improvements include:

Built-in Content Management System

Now Avactis is not only a shopping cart system, but also an eCommerce Content Management System (CMS). You can change the logo of your store, the text of your main page or create new pages using the built-in Content Management System and a WYSIWYG editor. The pages you create will be SEO-friendly - you can add META descriptions, META keywords and SEO titles to them.

New CSS based "Avactis Blue" design theme

The new Avactis design theme is cleaner and more professional-looking. The "Avactis Blue" theme is XHTML 1.0 compatible.

Customer Reviews module

We've added the Reviews module to Avactis so your customers can rate and review your products. Customer Reviews are very customizable: you can enable them for any visitor or for registered customers only; approve ratings and reviews from the administration zone; and much more.

QuickBooks export

Now you can export your orders to QuickBooks' .iff format. Also you can configure the QuickBooks export options directly from the Avactis administration zone.

[AJAX Magazine] dhtmlxScheduler 2.1 Released

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:10:55 +0200

DHTMLX team has announced the availability of version 2.1 of dhtmlxScheduler, a lightweight and highly customizable Ajax calendar component for creating rich scheduling UI. The update includes numerous enhancements and bug fixes, and introduces the following new features:

- Agenda View, which allows users to see the list of oncoming events starting from the current date (if needed, this starting date may be easily changed).

- In addition to Day/Week/Month Views, version 2.1 provides the ability to display events in the Year View.

- The update includes multiple extensions for the most common use-cases such as: read-only form, loading from multiple sources, key navigation, html templates, etc.

- Online Skin Builder for dhtmlxScheduler now provides developers with the ability to choose the coloring scheme for the calendar, or change the colors of each part of the skin.

- Localization capabilities of dhtmlxScheduler have been extended. The list of supported languages includes Chinese, Japanese, French, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and more.

Version 2.1 also provides much more samples, which demonstrate the capabilities of the calendar and simplify the use of the component. For more info and download please visit this page.

[AJAX Magazine] AMPLE SDK, Open Source JavaScript GUI Framework

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 07:28:03 +0200

Ample SDK is a standard-based cross-browser JavaScript GUI Framework for building Rich Internet Applications. It employs XML technologies (such as XUL, SVG or HTML5) for UI layout, CSS for UI style and JavaScript for application logic. It equalizes browsers and brings technologies support to those missing any.

Today's web browsers are playing a role more and more crucial in web application development since they're becoming the web platforms that we build on, but for web application developers problems to solve remain the same : use of open technologies and standards while assuring compatibility between different browsers and devices. AMPLE SDK provides a client-side application layer to build standards-based GUI using open technologies and guarantee a compatibility with most web browsers. No need to learn anything new !

The SDK simplifies coding client-side applications by providing common playground across all web-browsers. It doesn't modify/enforce any new programming practices or API - only standard technologies used. It enables XUL (Mozilla-based GUI technology) cross-browser, as well as it adds SVG 1.1 to the Internet Explorer. And many more.

The project is available under MIT and GPL license, more information and download available at http://www.amplesdk.com/

[e-Commerce Magazine] Open Source Magento and vBulletin integration released

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:52:03 +0000

Forum functionality is now available for Open Source eCommerce platform Magento through integration with vBulletin - the major Open Source forum publishing software. The extension that provides close integration between the two platforms was developed and released by AITOC, Inc. this November.

Forums benefit eCommerce business owners:

� by generating free content that helps to drive sales and contributes to SEO;
� by increasing traffic to the web store;
� by adding interactive social element to the web store.

The vBulletin Integration extension has rich functionality and is 100% Open Source. It enables shoppers to discuss products right from the Magento store front-end. The extension makes the registration, navigation and account management easy both for shoppers and admins. Lite version of the extension is available for free download.

[Open source Magazine] MXsense Announces Email Archiving Support for Linux and Unix Email Servers

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:24:22 +0000

Marlboro, NJ (November 23, 2009) - MXsense Solutions, Inc. today announced a new version of its MXsense Web-based email archiving solution which now supports Linux and Unix operating systems. Organizations running Sendmail and compliant email servers on Linux, Unix, Sun Solaris, HP-UX and IBM AIX can now take full advantage of MXsense. This new version is available now and expands on the company's widely deployed email archiving platform for Microsoft Exchange environments.

MXsense is designed to help organisations manage the ever-growing volume of information and intelligence stored in email communications and attachments. As a cloud-based email archiving solution, MXsense provides a powerful search engine with built-in indexing and retrieval features, giving users full access to their personal and corporate "extended inbox." A fully-managed solution, MXsense does not require the installation and management of client software or on-premise equipment. All archived email is securely stored and managed in our data center.