Harold introducing the Business Application Modernization concept, including the 4 dynamics that all the modernized applications share: Extend, Unlock, Exploit, Leverage. He gave examples like Fiat’s dealer order management, InTicketing, bwin Games, Accuweather and Tagged to illustrate the trend.

Yesterday about 300 people showed up to attend the tutorials. Last night there were parties, dinners, and lots of good laughter and serious talk as well. We will have about 750 people at the show in total, up 50% from last year.

The room is filling up, press releases are about to hit, Twitter channel set up, the room is filling up. The first news broke already - hey getting all these things out at the same time is hard to do!

Mark

The party last night at Oscon worked out great! We expected about 75 people and got 300! The restaurant had to scramble to bring on enough food and drinks. As promised it was fun and there were tons of great people to meet. Even R0ml remarked that all expectations were exceeded.

During the day yesterday we went to Tim O’Reilly’s executive briefing. It brought mostly the expected fare from technologists in open source and SaaS companies, with one interesting exception: the ‘chat’ of Tim and Eben Moglen. Eben used this event to re-invigorate the debate about software freedom by attacking Tim O’Reilly, who he claims has wasted his time cozying up with the new powerhouse companies of the Web 2.0 generation and getting rich, while failing to use his influence for the bigger issue of software / knowledge freedom.

Eben called it an “invitation to join a conversation” but never seemed to be interested to have any conversation. Tim probed Eben about the SaaS loophole in GPL3, but Eben turned it back on Tim, who demonstrated that picking a fight with a brilliant lawyer is pointless - he threw his hands up in the air and asked the audience to step in.

Did Eben succeed in restarting the conversation? My take is that he didn’t, I never figured out what he wants. Sure his mission is important, but does that mean we should no longer meet and talk about web services, Web 2.0, business models, etc.? Is this like Al Gore coming to Oscon to berate us that we are not at work finding solutions for global warming? From blog entries by other attendees like Zack Urlocker, Chris Marino, Robert Kaye and Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, it seems he did not make many new friends for his cause.

Interestingly, Tim O’Reilly will always promote new technology directions with great passion, and always turns out to have significant commercial investments in these technologies, whether through his conferences, books or board seats. Does he invest in what he believes in, or does he believe in what he invests in? Until he clarifies that, he is quite vulnerable to attacks like Eben Moglen’s.

This morning Andi gave presentations about Rich Internet Applications and Security of Web Applications. Both were well attended and well received. Cal will post their notes and source code to DevZone as soon as he gets a chance.

Now I am attending a session by Chris DiBona about the use of open source at Google. As Harold Goldberg points out, the attendees to Oscon are all busy typing on their laptops while attending conference sessions - an interesting way of being social, similar to the kids hanging out together at the malls with their iPods blasting in their ears. I am telling him that this is the generation that is all great at multi-tasking.

P.S. (7/27/2007), more coverage about the Moglen - O’Reilly exchange in The Register,

Infoworld wonders how the response will be to the, in my view, much overdue announcement that PHP 4 will be retired. In a way open source communities are no different from commercial corporations, they need to focus on what has impact and minimize deploying resources to activities that make less of a difference. We will look back upon this decision as one that helped us maintain the health of the PHP ecosystem.

In Zend’s customer base we have seen the switch from PHP 4 to PHP 5 happen about a year ago. Commercial use of PHP is based on PHP 5 in large majority of cases we see nowadays. Now that the leading open source projects like Drupal and PHPMyAdmin are switching, there really is not much reason left to continue to support PHP 4. There are also very many hosting companies available who can provide hosted servers that run PHP 5.

Companies looking to justify the migration cost should consider the improved performance characteristics and the improved security of PHP 5 among others.

Zend has made PHP 5 (in fact PHP 5.2 or better) a requirement for its recently released Zend Framework, which I think will be seen as the killer application for PHP 5. PHP 5 plus Zend Framework is the perfect platform to base your next generation of modern web applications on.

Zend is already helping many companies that are switching from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and will continue doing so in the coming year.

(PS 7/16/2007: News.com ran a story on the announcement. It is pretty balanced, but it is clear that the debate will not go away any day soon.)

We are making good progress with the plans for the Zend Conference 2007. We have more content this year than ever before, as we have gone from to format of 33 sessions to one of 48 sessions. As the confirmations from speakers come in, the information about the program will be posted in the coming days.

In addition to that we will have an ‘Open Space’ room that can be used for sessions that are not on the main schedule. The room will have three clusters of whiteboard, monitor and chairs, that can be used by groups of 5-20 attendees and will operate during the day and evenings, except during keynotes. We still need to decide on the scheduling mechanism during the conference, but to get you started we have opened a “Birds of a Feather” page on the conference wiki.

The first idea has already been posted by Keith Casey. It is still early days for registrations, so keep an eye on the wiki to see how the number of proposals will grow when we’ll get closer to the conference.

If you plan to come to Oscon, the O’Reilly open source convention, in Portland, you should stop by at the YourPHPMySQLParty on Tuesday July 24 at 5:30pm at the Doubletree Hotel, a 5 minute walk from the convention center.

MySQL and Zend Technologies will provide drinks and snacks and we are inviting all our open source friends at the convention to come over.

At Oscon there is as much to learn from the first-rate presenters as from your fellow attendees and at the party you will meet both. So it will be educational for most, or at least for some. But it will absolutely be fun for all!

The details:
(more…)

To celebrate its 40th year, Computerworld has compiled a list of 40 innovators, younger than 40 years old, who make a big difference in the IT world. It has become a very impressive list, you should all check it out on the Computerworld website.

Zend Co-Founder and Co-CTO Andi Gutmans has been chosen as one of those 40 young innovators (see him at #16). Congratulations to Andi! It is very deserved recognition of the work Andi is doing. It is also something we at are all a bit proud of at Zend, as it reflects the success of our company as well.

We launched Zend Framework 1.0 on July 2. The feedback so far has been very positive — we had surpassed 1 million downloads before the release, and since then the download run-rate has more than doubled, so 2 million downloads should happen before 2007 is over. More importantly, Zend Framework already plays a role in production systems at surprisingly many companies. When we asked on the Framework mail list, we got over 200 samples, many of which we’ll be able to make public over time.

A nice example was Right Media, a company which runs an online advertising exchange. The story was published on the framework site and last week got a very nice write up in Informationweek with a headline stating “Right Media’s use of the latest Zend Framework may give Yahoo the means to counter Google’s dominance in online advertising.” If Yahoo succeeds, maybe they can donate a bit of their gains to the framework project.

Here are some other mentions we got in the press:

InformationWeek: “Zend To Release Rapid Development Platform For PHP. The framework will connect the application to databases and networks, leaving developers free to concentrate on user interactions and the business logic behind them.“

InfoWorld Online: “Zend PHP framework set for Web development. The 1.0 version of technology will suit mainstream developers, analyst says.“

Dr. Dobb’s Journal: “Zend Releases Open Source Framework. Zend Framework 1.0, an open source PHP development tool.“

InternetNews Online: “Zend Framework 1.0 Ready To Compete“

ZDNet Blogs: “Zend Framework hits 1.0 milestone“

Let me end with a quote from our friends at Varien:

“The Zend Framework powers our new open-source eCommerce platform, Magento. It has allowed our teams to rapidly develop using enterprise level architecture and structures that the framework suggests. The libraries available throughout the framework have proven to be highly optimized, thoroughly tested, and have streamlined our development process greatly.”

– Roy Rubin, Varien ()

When I was getting ready to go to work this morning I tuned in to CNBC World and saw George Bush deliver a speech ahead of his trip to the G8 meeting next week. In the speech he outlined the United States’ leadership role in the fight against global warming. Mine is not by any means a blog about political viewpoints, but as a marketer I am fascinated by the apparent impunity with which leaders can rewrite their own history.

Which is why I had to think about another leader, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who takes a refreshingly different approach.

In a recent blog posting he made a surprisingly frank assessment about Sun’s recent failing for a company CEO. “Sun was under pressure in the market. Although many users loved our core Solaris operating system, others thought it was built for high end computers, not grid systems. Our computer business had failed to keep pace with the rest of the industry - which meant our volume systems looked expensive. In combination, and with a poor track record of supporting Solaris off of Sun hardware, we gave customers one choice - leave Sun. Many did. Those were the dark days. Where did they go? They went to GNU/Linux, a free and open source operating system built by a growing community, running on x86 systems.”

He then goes on to say how Sun moved on from there. How they were advised to litigate Linux providers, but how instead they chose to compete by innovation and not by litigation. Jonathan is claiming good progress as a result, and at Zend we can observe the increasing strength of Solaris through our customer interactions. Even without the field validation I would tend to trust his claims - the frankness of his assessments and the tradition he has built of open communications through his blog, are tremendously valuable to Sun customers and eventually to Sun itself.

Microsoft (see: “Microsoft takes on the free world“) should also pay attention to Jonathan. “All of which is to say - no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach. That’s not a genie any litigator I know can put back in a bottle.”

Microsoft’s “Licensing, not Litigating” messaging does not add value to this debate over patents. The Novell deal shows that company only licenses because it wants to avoid litigation, so licensing can not be separated from litigation.

Microsoft is already proving it can do better. Zend has nothing but positive to report about its cooperation with Microsoft. It is not based on any explicit or implied threats and it has already produced measurable improvements for PHP - a win for the PHP community, for Zend and for Microsoft.

Zend Framework is getting real close now to its official release. Bill Karwin just announced a 0.9.2 version, and states we may have one more interim version before we get to release candidate 1. Go to framework.zend.com to see more about the project, including all the detail on the components, the documentation and more. There is also a mail list that makes interesting reading. Here is an exchange from today that shows how folks feel about the progress:

From: Maurice Fonk
Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 4:56 AM
To: fw-general AT lists.zend.com


Subject: Re: [fw-general] Zend Framework 0.9.2 release plan
I too would like to say thank you to all of you who have put in effort to make the framework into what it is today. I don't know if this is the right place for praise, but I really enjoy coding using the framework as my base. Things that used to take me hours of hacking, googleing and trial-and-error just work for me now, with zfw's consistent and easy to understand components. Thank you, all of you.

Maurice Fonk

Michael Depetrillo wrote:
> Great job on the framework! I haven't contributed yet, but have been
> using it exclusively for work projects since 0.2. It has come a long
> way and so has my knowledge of php 5, mvc and Object-oriented
> programming. I am a big fan of everyone who has contributed. Thank
> you.
>
> On 4/5/07, *Bill Karwin*
> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Friday at noon Pacific time (8:00pm GMT) I would like to call a
> code-freeze to make a Zend Framework 0.9.2 Beta Release.
>
> There have been 68 issues resolved since 0.9.1 and the project is
> gaining quality and completeness with each release. Congratulations
> and thanks to everyone who is contributing to this effort.
>
> We may do another Beta Release later in April, before we call it a
> 1.0.0 release candidate 1. It's not decided yet.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Karwin
>
> --
> Michael DePetrillo