Zend Framework Introduction

See Zend Framework Introduction at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Slides from last night's Zend Framework Introduction at the Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group are now available online:

Zend Framework Introduction

View more presentations from Bradley Holt.

The presentation is available under a Creative Commons license.

As I mentioned earlier, there's also a demo blogging application called Postr available on GitHub. The application is available under a free/open source New BSD License so feel free to use, redistribute, and/or modify it however you'd like.

Learn Zend Framework

See Learn Zend Framework at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

At tonight's (Thursday, January 28, 2010) Burlington, Vermont PHP Users Group meeting I'll be giving a Zend Framework Introduction presentation. I'll be covering how to use several features of Zend Framework and common patterns including:

• Zend_Tool
• Zend_Application
• Model-View-Controller (MVC)
• Zend_Layout
• Action Controllers
• View Scripts
• Zend_Test
• Modeling domain objects
  
• Zend_Form
• Zend_Db_Table
• Data Mapper
• Zend_Paginator
• Zend_Date
• Zend_Markup
• Zend_Navigation
• Controller Plugins

I've created a demo blogging application called Postr that I'll be using as an example throughout the presentation. Thanks to Jason there is some CSS that makes the application much more usable. I will post the presentation to my SlideShare account after tonight's meeting.

The meeting is from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM at Office Squared in Burlington, Vermont. If you're in the area and interested in attending then you can register for free on Eventbrite.

Open Source and Open Standards Bill

See Open Source and Open Standards Bill at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The other day there was a discussion on the VAGUE mailing list about an open source and open standards bill (H.516) [PDF] recently introduced in the Vermont General Assembly (a.k.a. legislature). It's technically an amendment to an existing act and has the following stated purpose:

This bill proposes to require the department of information and innovation to advise against the acquisition by a state agency of proprietary software or software that operates by means of proprietary protocols when acceptable functionality can be achieved with open source software and open standard protocols and to ensure that the expected total life-cycle costs of software are fully evaluated prior to acquisition.

Overall I see this as a positive move for the State of Vermont. It does not seem to put the requirement for open source and open standards ahead of the particular business needs at hand since it only "advise[s] against the acquisition by a state agency of proprietary software or software that operates by means of proprietary protocols when acceptable functionality can be achieved with open source software and open standard protocols." However, Mitch Lieberman points out:

@BradleyHolt functionality does not directly = biz value IMHO, biz value needs to include ROI of functions, thus includes TCO

I agree with Mitch that the bill could do a better job of addressing not just functionality, but also return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO). These should be the primary considerations of any responsible organization in deciding what software to use. However, since it is the public's money being used to purchase this software it is worth considering whether our resources are being used to further entrench proprietary software and standards, or whether we are instead enriching the public commons by supporting open source software and open standards.

In addition to the above, there are some details of the bill that demonstrate some possible misunderstandings of how open source software works. While it's not anywhere in its text, the bill is described as being "An act relating to comparing the costs and benefits of downloading free open source software with purchasing proprietary computer software." There are a couple of misconceptions in this one statement. First, cost should not always be the primary motivation behind using open source software: the freedoms it gives you are just as important. In fact, not all proprietary software costs money and not all open source software is available free of charge. Second, "downloading" is simply a means of distributing software. Proprietary software can often be downloaded. Open source software is sometimes distributed on a physical medium.

It's not stated explicitly in the bill, but people sometimes think that if they release their own software under an open source license they are somehow giving up control of the licensed software project. While there are many benefits of giving up control (which are outside the scope of this blog post), it's worth noting that you don't have to. When you license your software you still own the copyright on that software. You can still do whatever you want with that software, including release it under a different license later. Once you accept outside contributions then you need to honor whatever license has been given to you be your contributors (unless they agree to transfer copyright to you, but this can be tricky). It's your choice whether or not to accept those contributions in the first place. You are still completely in control (as long as you want to be) and have simply given others the possibility of benefiting from your work.

Year In Review

See Year In Review at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Being the first day of 2010, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at 2009…

Burlington, VT PHP Users Group

2009 was the second full year of the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. We had some fun meetings and presentations including:

January

Jason Pelletier gave a presentation on CSS for Developers.

CSS for Developers

View more documents from jason.pelletier.

February

Aaron Carlino demonstrated SilverStripe, an open source CMS/framework built in PHP.

March

Special guest Paul Reinheimer gave a presentation called "Easy Problems are the Hard Problems" taking an in-depth look at the easy/hard parts of building web applications.

April

Rob Riggen gave a talk on website performance optimization.

May

Rene Churchill gave a presentation on MySQL database optimization.

July

Matthew Weier O'Phinney gave his Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects presentation.

Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects

View more presentations from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.

August

Matthew Weier O'Phinney presented again in August, this time giving a hands-on unit testing crash course [ODP].

September

September's meeting was a casual get-together instead of a formal meeting and presentation—a change of pace from the typical meeting format.

October

I gave a talk geared towards PHP beginners.

November

November's meeting fell on one of Zend Framework's Bug Hunt Days. Held monthly, Bug Hunt Days are designed to encourage the community to help triage and resolve issues in the framework. Matthew Weier O'Phinney guided us through effective bug reporting and taught us how to contribute patches. As part of Bug Hunt Days, my first Zend Framework patch was accepted, a small addition to the documentation.

December

December marked the second birthday of our local PHP Users Group and that month's meeting turned out to be a fun social event.

Our users group also won a free pass to ZendCon '09, and Jase Roberts was the lucky recipient. He joined fellow Vermonters Matthew Weier O'Phinney, John Valance, and me at the annual PHP conference.

The Browser

Jonathan Butler started a program on our local community radio station called The Browser. It's "a show about the people who bring the world wide web to [Burlington, VT]." Jason and I were on the show twice—once in February and again in August.

Town Meeting Day Vermont, ACM-NE, and Tagnabit

The first Tuesday of March was Town Meeting Day here in Vermont. Citizens throughout Vermont gathered together to elect local officers and vote on budgets. As an experiment we put together a website, tmdvt.net/09, to aggregate content from social media sites around Town Meeting Day Vermont '09. If you used the appropriate tags in your tweets, Flickr uploads, blog posts (if indexed by Technorati), YouTube uploads, and bookmarks on Delicious, then your content showed up on the website. I wrote a post recapping some things we learned from the experiment.

As a result of that project, Bill Simmon and Seth Mobley from Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM) approached us about doing something similar for the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region (ACM-NE) conference they were organizing here in Burlington, VT. We built acmne.net/09 for the conference and it was a big hit. I spoke on a social media panel (which Liz Schlegel moderated) and helped with a social media workshop at the conference. Colin Rhinesmith, who was on the panel with me and also helped with the workshop, posted a good summary of the conference on his blog.

We then took the idea from Town Meeting Day Vermont and ACM-NE a step further, creating Tagnabit—aggregating tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks for any arbitrary tag. Bill Simmon wrote a good blog post on how Tagnabit could be used.

Jelly/Coworking

I was excited to see Jen Mincar open up a coworking space, Office Squared (o²), here in Burlington, VT in 2009. I think it will help bring more cohesiveness to the local technology community since many of her customers work in technology-related industries. As a precursor to its opening, we hosted a Jelly at Found Line in July, inviting entrepreneurs and freelancers to work in our studio for an afternoon. Here are some photos from the Jelly and another one at the Burlington Free Press.

Vermont Code Camp

September saw the first ever Vermont Code Camp, bringing together people from local technology communities around .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Python. The event was a huge success with 85 attendees and 19 sessions. I had a small part in organizing the event but the real credit goes to Rob Hale, Julie Lerman, and everyone else who organized, volunteered, and presented. I also gave a presentation on Resource-Oriented Web Services as part of the code camp.

Resource-Oriented Web Services

View more documents from Bradley Holt.

ZendCon

ZendCon is the biggest conference of the PHP community, and this year's event was my second ZendCon. What can I say? The talks were excellent. The people were even better. I ended up co-presenting at the UnCon with Michelangelo van Dam and Anna Filina on the role of a PHP user group.

Moving On

2009 seemed to be the year for people in the PHP community to change jobs. Following that trend, I made the move to Found Line full time last month, leaving Vermont Oxford Network. As I said before I'm very happy to have more time to focus on our clients' projects and to work with free/open source software and open standards full time.

Work

2009 was a busy year. Some of the work included:

• helping ThinkFlood launch their RedEye product by building their website and eCommerce application (see the Rackspace Cloud blog post on the launch);
• building a news article management tool for NEHP's website;
• creating Vermont Public Radio's Artist Mug Gallery, Champlain 400, School Closings, Search, and States of Marriage pages;
• launching Common Good Vermont; and
  
• developing and maintaining a line of business web application for the University of Vermont.

Phew—a lot to say! I hope you had a good 2009, and have an even better 2010.

Common Good Vermont

See Common Good Vermont at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The other day we launched the first iteration of the Common Good Vermont website. From the about page:

Vermont (pop. 621,000) is a small, tightly knit rural state proud of its independent spirit and high levels of civic engagement. Vermont's independent sector (3000+ organizations, $4 billion annual revenue) plays a primary role in the delivery of human and cultural services and in the preservation of the state's cherished natural resources. Most social services—food, shelter, healthcare and education—are delivered within local and regional community settings.

Often separated by geography (mountains, rivers, lakes), Vermont's 251 towns and 14 counties are increasingly knit together by broadband "build-out". Common Good Vermont leverages these electronic networks to bridge the barriers of Vermont's geography and the "beaten paths" of its hyper-local networks. New human and electronic networking activities will support the delivery of information and innovation to the state's community builders: project volunteers and professionals who, by virtue of their civic and nonprofit roles and responsibilities, are the lifeblood of the "green mountain state". Common Good's place-based and community virtual events are designed to improve the capacity of so many "small networks" that, improve Vermont's unique "quality of life".

Common Good Vermont aggregates content for (and from) Vermont independents and nonprofits by pulling in RSS and Atom feeds including blogs, news sources, social bookmarks, and event calendars. The goal is to serve as an information hub encouraging knowledge sharing and increasing cross-organization communication. Content is currently organized by a combination of taxonomy (categories defined by Common Good Vermont staff) and folksonomy (tags from the feeds themselves). Our goal is to eventually remove the taxonomy layer and have all content organized completely by broad and, to a lesser extent, narrow folksonomy. However, the taxonomy layer is there for now to allow a certain amount of curation while we seek out, connect, and aggregate additional sources of information.

Common Good Vermont is built using Zend Framework and hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Components from Zend Framework used include its MVC system, Zend_Application, Zend_Feed_Reader, Zend_Tag_Cloud, Zend_Search_Lucene, Zend_Paginator, Zend_Db, Zend_Date, Zend_Auth, Zend_Acl, and Zend_Form. Stay tuned for future iterations to the website!

Bug Hunting

See Bug Hunting at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

If you are a PHP developer in the Burlington, Vermont area then you should come to tomorrow (11/19) evening's PHP Users Group meeting at the newly opened Office Squared coworking space in downtown Burlington. This month we will be learning how to find and fix bugs in free and open source projects. From the meeting description:

Each third Thursday and Friday of the month, Zend Framework has Bug Hunt Days in which the community helps triage issues and resolve them. These efforts include everything from fixing typos in documentation to creating reproduce cases and capturing them in unit tests to actual creation of patches resolving reported bugs.

Since this month's meeting falls on the third Thursday, Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Project Lead for Zend Framework, thought we could join in on this effort or help contribute to other projects. He will be providing a short presentation on effective bug reporting and triage, after which we will jump into some actual bug hunting on projects you, the attendees, are interested in.

So come with your laptops ready, and let's fix some bugs!

PHP developers of all skill levels are welcome. There are many types of contributions needed to keep free and open source projects moving forward. You will likely have something you can contribute — and you'll learn a lot doing it!

Beginner PHP

See Beginner PHP at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The Burlington, VT PHP Users group has been going strong for almost two years now. We've had lots of great presentations and some really experienced PHP developers at the meetings. However, I've been concerned that we might scare away PHP beginners with many of the meetings being on advanced topics. So, our next meeting topic will be Beginner PHP:

Have you recently started using PHP? Don't use PHP but want to learn more about it? The topic of this month's Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting will be, "Beginner PHP." Learn the basics and some tips and tricks from experienced PHP developers. Are you an experienced PHP developer? Then come to the meeting and help out some beginners! We were all beginners at some point.

Refreshments will be provided, and you'll have the chance to network and connect with fellow PHP developers. Meetings are open to the public via RSVP.

Vermont Technology User Groups

See Vermont Technology User Groups at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

One of the great things to come out of this past Saturday's Vermont Code Camp was the opportunity for people from various local technology user groups to connect with one another. People from the Vermont.NET User Group were there (the .NET group spearheaded organizing the event) and I also saw some friends from the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. Based on turnout at the Ruby on Rails session, it looks like the Vermont Ruby On Rails User Group may be restarting soon. The Vermont Area Group of Unix Enthusiasts (VAGUE) was represented as well as the Green Mountain Oracle Users Group, the New England Adobe User Group, the VT SQL Server Users Group and the Vermont Software Developers' Alliance (vtSDA).

User groups are a great way to meet new people, learn new skills and keep up with the latest trends in your field. Sometimes you'll even be treated to pizza and swag. Whatever technology you work with, I hope you'll find a local user group that you can attend — or start one yourself!

On a related note, the upcoming (10/26) Vermont 3.0 Innovation Jam looks like it will be a lot of fun:

[Showcasing] the coolest companies in the Green Mountains[, this is] not just a job expo. The event will examine the uniqueness of the state’s entrepreneur-founded creative technology companies while acknowledging the start-up drive that lives within each and every one of us.

Update (9/15): To clarify, the Vermont Software Developers' Alliance (vtSDA) is not a user group but instead, "create[s] collaborative and knowledge sharing opportunities that promote and grow Vermont software businesses." They are also a primary sponsor of the aforementioned Vermont 3.0 Innovation Jam.

Vermont Code Camp Heroes

See Vermont Code Camp Heroes at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

By all accounts, the first ever Vermont Code Camp was a big success! There were 85 attendees, 19 sessions, and a whole track of non-.NET topics (not that there's anything wrong with .NET!). A HUGE thank you to Rob Hale, Julie Lerman and everyone else who organized, volunteered and presented. Also, a big thank you to the sponsors and donors: MyWebGrocer, Green Mountain Coffee, Telerik, O'Reilly Media, TechSmith, Microsoft and, of course, the University of Vermont School of Business Administration for hosting the event.

Plans are afoot for the next iteration of Vermont Code Camp so stay tuned!

Vermont Code Camp

See Vermont Code Camp at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

This Saturday (Sept 12) from 9am-6pm will be the first ever Vermont Code Camp and it will be here in Burlington, Vermont at Kalkin Hall on the University of Vermont campus. While code camps are typically .NET focused, this one will cover a broad range of topics including .NET, PHP, Ruby and Python (full list of sessions). Some of the sessions include:

• Alison Gianotto: Facebook Application Development with PHP
• Bryan Tuttle: Introduction to Joomla!
• Bradley Holt (me): Resource-Oriented Web Services
• Sergei Serdyuk: Why Ruby On Rails?
• Josh Sled: The Django web-application framework
• Dave Burke: Building Online Communities with .NET Open Source

Hope to see you there!

Free ZendCon Pass

See Free ZendCon Pass at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The Burlington, VT PHP Users Group has won a free pass to ZendCon '09 along with Austin PHP Meetup, the Chicago PHP User Group, PHPBenelux, and PHPWomen. Congratulations to my fellow PHP users group members! Now we need to pick a lucky member to get the free ZendCon pass. Are you a local PHP developer that meets the criteria? If so then send in your application by 8/1/2009.

New Media Office Hours (East)

See New Media Office Hours (East) at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

If you're a "new media" (social media, digital video/photography/editing, podcasting, etc.) enthusiast (or just curious) in Burlington, Vermont then you should check out the New Media Office Hours this evening. From the VCAM blog:

So we’d like to officially announce that the first New Media Office Hours (east-coast) gathering will be this coming Monday evening at The Sapa coffeehouse in downtown Burlington at 5:00 P.M. A small group of new-media pros and arm-chair enthusiasts will be on hand to chat with anyone who stops by about whatever is on their mind (related to new-media, that is).

I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to make but it sounds like a fun event!

Jelly!

See Jelly! at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Are you an entrepreneur, freelancer, or just someone looking to work out of the office for an afternoon? Then sign up for the upcoming Jelly that we'll be hosting at our Burlington, Vermont studio! The date is Friday, July 31^st from 1pm to 5pm. A Jelly is a casual coworking event. For more info on local coworking plans check out the BHive LinkedIn group.

We'll provide the Wi-Fi and coffee (please bring a travel mug so we don't run out of mugs), you bring your laptop (or whatever you need to work). Our studio is small so space is limited. Depending on the number of attendees it could get crowded, so please bring a friendly disposition. Be sure to sign up (it's free!) early to reserve your spot. If there's no remaining space by the time you read this, please contact me (you can simply leave a comment here if you prefer) or Jen Mincar and let us know that you're interested so that we can let you know if space opens up.

PHP Users Group Meeting Tonight

See PHP Users Group Meeting Tonight at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The presenter at tonight's (3/26/2009) Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting will be Paul Reinheimer of php|architect. His presentation, "Easy Problems are the Hard Problems," will take an in-depth look at the easy/hard parts of web applications. There will be pizza for your consumption (provided by Found Line). If you're a web developer in the area then I hope to see you there! If you know any web developers who may be interested, please let them know about tonight's meeting.

TMD VT Social Media Recap

See TMD VT Social Media Recap at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Wow, thank you to everyone who participated and helped make Town Meeting Day Vermont '09 a social media success! In the spirit of openness, I wanted to share some things that Jason and I learned from the tmdvt.net/09 experiment. First of all, some disclaimers. It's important to note that we were just one small part of something that was bigger than us. Our goal was to encourage people to use tagging on Twitter, Flickr, blog posts indexed by Technorati, YouTube, and Delicious so that others could easily find Town Meeting Day related content. It didn't matter to us if people used tmdvt.net/09 directly, what mattered was that people used the relevant tags when publishing or when searching. In fact, I doubt that tmdvt.net/09 had much of an effect on adoption of the #tmdvt hashtag on Twitter, which was the site that, by far, had the most tagging activity.

Before you continue reading the rest of this blog post, you should read my first post on Town Meeting Day Vermont, Bill Simmon's Town Meeting Day & social media, Cathy Resmer's Town Meeting Day 2009, and Ryan Freebern's Townsourcing; or, the promise of localized community media for some background and other perspectives… OK, back? Great!

A big thing we noticed was that since most users found out about tmdvt.net/09 through Twitter, they expected the same level of immediacy as Twitter from the other websites we aggregated. Flickr, Technorati, and YouTube all had delays that were longer than what users expected. Delicious bookmarks didn't show up immediately but were still relatively quick. We couldn't quite figure out why some of the content from Flickr was delayed. It seemed to be based on a variety of factors, such as the account's submission frequency (possibly as an anti-spam measure).

As I mentioned earlier, the heaviest tag usage was on Twitter with over 360 tweets from countless people using the #tmdvt hashtag. Next up was Flickr with over 150 uploads tagged with tmdvt09 from a handful of users. Only 6 blog posts used the tmdvt09 tag and were picked up by Technorati: 1 was my original post about the tag, 1 was from Vermont Public Radio's blog, and 4 were from The Seven Days Staff Blog. I think there were more blog posts that used the tmdvt09 tag, but for whatever reason these didn't get indexed. Only 2 YouTube videos were uploaded and tagged with tmdvt09. There were 21 bookmarks tagged with tmdvt09 on Delicious; however, none were tagged enough to be considered "popular" by Delicious.

CCTV Channel 17 pointed out that they were posting exit interviews to blip.tv and that there was no option for that on tmdvt.net/09. It appears that blip.tv doesn't support tagging or categorized feeds so we had no way of syndicating content specific to Town Meeting Day from blip.tv or CCTV's channel. However, a representative from blip.tv was paying attention and was quick to respond to my tweets, which I was very impressed by.

I was also impressed with local news outlets bridging the gap between traditional and social media during Town Meeting Day. Seven Days, Burlington Free Press, Vermont Public Radio, Vermont Community Access Media, and CCTV Channel 17 all had a presence on Twitter, and some had a presence in other social media as well. I had conversations with representatives from several of these news outlets and there was a general interest in further engagement in tmdvt.net/10.

The original sketch for tmdvt.net/09 included tabs for traditional media outlets in addition to the tabs for various social media websites. I don't think social media will replace traditional media. Traditional media provides the resources (i.e. time and money) to do real reporting and the authority that comes with that legwork. I do, however, believe that traditional media and social media can learn a lot from each other, which is part of why we wanted to put them at the same level on tmdvt.net/09.

In order to include traditional media, we needed Atom or RSS feeds specific to Town Meeting Day content. In my research, and in talking with several people from the media, I couldn't find anyone who was currently doing this. The Seven Days Staff Blog was the closest with their Town Meeting Day 2009 category. However, they didn't have an Atom or RSS feed set up for this category, so it would have been very difficult for me to try to aggregate that content. My challenge to the news media is to provide more fine grained feeds so that your readers can decide exactly what type of stories they're interested in reading. It will likely increase the number of people who subscribe to your Atom or RSS feeds and allow people like me to make mashups using your content.

I think there is a lot to be learned from this experiment and I'd love to hear what insight others may have about this. Let's continue the discussion online. Also, it might be interesting to have an offline discussion sharing perspectives from this year's Town Meeting Day and ideas for similar events in the future. If you're interested, let me know!

Town Meeting Day Vermont

See Town Meeting Day Vermont at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

The first Tuesday of March is Town Meeting Day here in Vermont. Citizens throughout Vermont get together and elect local officers and vote on budgets. While it doesn't get as much attention as some of the bigger elections, it's still an important day in local politics. This year's Town Meeting Day will be on March 3rd, 2009.

We've put together a simple website, tmdvt.net/09, to aggregate content from social media sites (along with traditional media, where available) around Town Meeting Day Vermont '09. If you use the appropriate tags in your tweets, Flickr uploads, blog (if indexed by Technorati), YouTube uploads, and bookmarks on Delicious, then your content will show up on the website. We're also looking for Atom or RSS feeds specific to Town Meeting Day Vermont '09 from traditional media outlets. If you know of any, or have other suggestions, please email participate@tmdvt.net. Please be gentle, we put this together in one day's time!

SilverStripe CMS Overview

See SilverStripe CMS Overview at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Aaron Carlino will giving an overview of the SilverStripe CMS / framework at this week's Burlington, VT PHP Users Group meeting (details). The meeting will be held Thursday February 26th, 2009 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm at Bluehouse Group in Richmond. As always, the meeting is open to the public (but be sure to RSVP so we can get a headcount).

For those new to the group, the local PHP users group has been around for a bit over a year now (our first meeting was in December of 2007). A typical meeting has between 10 and 15 people in attendance and there's usually a main presentation along with some general discussion. The mailing list has about 100 subscribers with moderate traffic (several posts a month) and some of us hang out in the #btvphpug channel on freenode in case you're interested in conversation with local PHP developers between meetings.

Browser Correction

See Browser Correction at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

On last week's The Browser interview (audio) with Jason Pelletier (jason_pelletier) and me, Jonathan Butler (jonathanpb) asked me for an example of a proprietary framework and I used Adobe Flex as an example. It turns out that the Flex SDK is actually not a proprietary framework and is, in fact, open source. I should have known this since Adobe Flex was the topic of a whole PHP users group meeting awhile back. John Boone (jbgoode12) pointed this out to me in an interesting conversation he and I (BradleyHolt) had on Twitter:

jbgoode12: @jonathanpb @BradleyHolt @jason_pelletier listening to ep 2 of The Browser - also very interesting! One correction: the Flex SDK is open src (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @jason_pelletier @BradleyHolt @jonathanpb It's true that the Flex IDE costs $$$ but you can create Flash w/open src: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 Good point! I guess I was thinking about Adobe Flex Builder. Didn't meant to pick on Adobe, just one example of proprietary SW. (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 Oh, and thanks for listening to the show, glad you're finding it interesting! (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @BradleyHolt @jason_pelletier It's like how Micro$oft does it : they have open SDKs but the IDEs are $. FB is based on Eclipse, tho (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 Yeah - technically open source but to do anything practical takes lots of work or spending money to make it easier. (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 But you're right, the framework itself (Flex SDK) certainly appears to be open source. I stand corrected :-) (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @BradleyHolt It'll be interesting to see if an ecosystem grows around the Flex SDK, like maybe the relationship between .NET and Mono... (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 That will be interesting to watch. The Flash Player is still proprietary (although there are some alts) which could be a problem. (view tweet)

jbgoode12: @BradleyHolt right. and the flash player being proprietary kinda makes the rest moot... plus you can do a lot with frameworks like jquery. (view tweet)

BradleyHolt: @jbgoode12 I love jQuery! Would be cool (but unlikely) if Adobe truly opened up everything Flash related as open source and open standards. (view tweet)

I appreciate John's correction and love having conversations like the one above. I hope The Browser inspires many more conversations!

David Gibson on The Browser

See David Gibson on The Browser at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Don't forget to tune into Jonathan Butler's new radio show, The Browser, tonight (Wed Feb 18th) at 6:00pm on Burlington, Vermont's WOMM-LP 105.9 FM The Radiator. He'll be talking with David Gibson of Propeller Media Works. If you're not in Burlington you can always listen online or catch the podcast after the show. The podcast of last week's show that Jason and I were on is available as well as the first episode with Edward Shepard from Small Dog Electronics.

Found Line on The Browser

See Found Line on The Browser at its new home on bradley-holt.com.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday February 11th, 2009) Jason and I will be on Jonathan Butler's new radio show, The Browser. We'll be talking about Found Line, our work, free/open source software, and open standards. We'll also talk a little bit about the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. You can listen to the show at 6:00pm on Burlington, Vermont's local noncommercial low power FM radio station, WOMM-LP 105.9 FM The Radiator. If you're not in listening range you can catch the show online or get the podcast later.