From the well huh… department…

It’s official… I read it on the internet… it must be so. Either way, PHP is the *greatest language on the planet and a presonal friend of mine…

PHP is my personal favorite language for web development and I’m not alone. And even though I almost always have to explain to people (even other web developers!) what it is, more and more, I’m finding myself surfing on it. Then yesterday, during my daily Slashdot run, I came across this story that talks about how Yahoo is switching from their proprietary backend to PHP.

This is big news for PHP developers. Love or hate Yahoo if you like but the fact is, they are huge and will likely pave the way for other companies to take a long look into PHP.

Read the notes from Yahoo’s presentation here.

My Woman sent me a link to this page that answers the question: “If programming languages could speak; what would they say?”. Geek humor at it’s finest.

PHP is installed on Jaguar as it was in previous OS X builds and only needs to be activated in order to work. Here’s how…

Launch Terminal.app and enter each of the following steps in order:

1. sudo apxs -e -a -n php4 /usr/libexec/httpd/libphp4.so

2. echo 'echo "AddType application/x-httpd-php .php" >> /etc/httpd/httpd.conf' | sudo sh -s

3. sudo apachectl restart

That should do it. To test if it’s running, create a files called info.php (or whatever) that consists of the text:
<?php phpinfo() ?>, drop it in your web site documents folder and open it in a browser. It should look something like this. If all is well, you now have an active PHP module with support for MySQL.

For a more detailed instructions and a PHP lib file with more features configured take a peek here.

One of the biggest improvement of this release is to code readability and logic. I separated all of the HTML from the PHP code and added a basic template system to help configure output. I removed or rewrote many of the functions and added comments and documentation to help myself (and others) making sense of the code.

This release was important because many changes needed to be made before adding some of the missing features (custom playlists and such). This release addressed most, if not all of the changes needed, while adding increased performance and reliability. Take a look at the demo or download it and try it out for yourself.
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It’s always nice to come back to a project after some time off and go “yeesh… this code is terrible!”. On one hand, you have your work cut out for you and will likely spend most of your time fixing rather than adding but on the other hand, your code knowledge has grown.

This is my current state with JookBox. I worked my butt off getting the code to work and out the door but the majority of it was a big hack. Since then I’ve been working on smaller stuff and other people’s code, hell-bent on improving my knowledge and skills. So, after about six months of stockpiling new ideas and building some enthusiasm, I came back to the code only to find it… well… sucks. Oddly, this made me feel pretty good.

Moral: The true gift of knowledge is the discovery of our own ignorance.

While rummaging through some code today, I took a look at an app named Nucleus written by Wouter Demuynck. This guy is a monster! His code is beautiful and so well commented and concise that it makes me feel like a bumbling idiot. And of course, he’s German.

Nucleus is a a weblog written in PHP/MySQL much like the one I’m using here. It’s really polished app with great features and is meticulously documented. I set it up with the intention of using it on my site but after a lot of tweaking, I found that Weblog suits my needs better. Now if only Weblog’s code was as pretty as Nucleus’ (sorry Mark!).