Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

PHP UK Conference 2009

I recently attended the UK’s largest PHP developer conference in Olympia, hoping to pick up some new ideas and tech to apply to Claromentis‘ software suite.

I was really looking forward to two specific sessions at the conference, one on Adobe Flex/AIR, and one concerning a new type of database from the MySQL team, based on high-scalability.

Flex and AIR for PHP Programmers

Presented by Mihai Corlan, we got into this pretty quickly and were given some very quick and easy looking demonstrations on how to use Flex & AIR to prettify our PHP server-side apps with elegant and fast desktop clients. This was of interest in terms of Claromentis as a multi-platform, web-technology based desktop client would certainly appeal to customers who are unhappily bounded by their web-browser. It also gives a level cross-platform playing field for development, and punts quite a lot of the browser-compatibility concerns so common for web developers into the grass.

As a company based on Open Source technology, perhaps my only fear for a Claromentis suite using Flex & AIR extensively is being tied into a proprietary solution over which the users have no real control. A choice which most software companies have no doubt had to make.

Clouds on the horizon? Get ready for Drizzle

Unfortunately named “Drizzle”, which hardly suggests stellar performance, the website (and not a small amount of the presentation) suggests:

“A database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture.”

Just what’s required if you’ve ever watched the single-process MySQLD struggling with a large query, with your other 7 cores sitting mostly idle.
There wasn’t a massive amount of mature technology to see here, but the ideas for making everybody’s lives easier, from deployment to administration, as well as harnessing all of the dormant CPU power in MySQL servers the world over make this an irresistable concept. I hope to see much more solid tech to play with in the future.

Claromentis currently supports any of Oracle, MS SQL Server or MySQL, and Drizzle really would be another feather in the cap for database support when it’s in a mature state.

General Intranet Posts Adobe, conference, databases, development, php

For those of you that don’t already know, LAMP is an acronym for Linux - Apache – MySQL - PHP. It’s a collection of software that can be used to run servers and dynamic websites. It’s one of the most popular alternatives to Microsoft, and according to statistics provided by netcraft.com not only is Apache holding around 60% market share in the delivery/presentation of websites, but it’s thriving on the open source platforms and continuing to grow and compete (successfully) against Microsoft. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that any piece of software that can even compete (let alone lead) in its market against a super company like Microsoft has to have something special about it. Well, it’s no secret why the LAMP solution is so popular, it just works, it works well, it’s reliable, it’s robust, it’s resilient, and it’s free.

Without going into all of the nitty-gritty debates about why you should and shouldn’t base a corporate solution on an open source platform (there are enough of these debates on the Internet already), it’s not hard to realize why Claromentis run all of their development on the LAMP platform. The LAMP platform allows the development team to manage all aspects of their programming environment without relying on Microsoft to ensure the stability of that environment. Depending on who you talk to, avoiding Microsoft can be complete suicide, or a dream come true. Personally, I’m a believer in the statistics, and if 60% of the websites are running on Apache, my money is on that platform to deliver the best of everything. And I’ve never met a PHP developer who programs on anything else.

However, Claromentis doesn’t believe in limitations, so we let you decide which platform you wish to run the applications on. The Claromentis framework is compatible with LAMP, Windows, and ORACLE, so it works the way you do, integrating easily with your existing IT infrastructure.

For more information about Claromentis and the platforms it can run on, please contact sales@claromentis.com or call us on 01273 666 355

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