This fall is quite a busy time, conference wise. This weekend I returned from Microsoft's PDC2008 conference (small report on the PHP related things on the company blog). This week I'll be at the office to catch up with people and to start our PHP Center of Expertise with Cal Evans who had his first official work day at Ibuildings today.

Next week, I'm off to Atlanta for php|works. I will do my 'Enterprise PHP' talk there. It'll be the last time I'm doing that talk. It started as a 25 minute introduction at a Zend business seminar 1.5 years ago, and has since evolved into a book, a series of conference talks and into an upcoming column in php|architect magazine. That stretches the lifetime of the talk, and I'll start working on a whole new topic for next year.

Directly after php|works I'm off to Redmond, where Microsoft has invited a group of people from the PHP community to their 'Web Summit' to talk about things like PHP on Windows, and then from there I'll be flying to Manchester, for the phpNW conference in Manchester. I will take part in a panel discussion, the topic is 'State of the Community'.

phpNW is the first of its kind in the North of the UK, and there are only a few days left to get tickets at the special early bird price of 50 GBP. 50 Pounds is very cheap for a conference of this size. You'll learn as much as in a training course, yet you pay only a fraction. It should be very easy to convince your boss that you should go there, if you are in the UK.

And then I hope for a quiet December month, which gives me some time to reflect on 2008, and to start working on plans for 2009 (exciting things are ahead).

Back in the late nineties, when many websites still looked like this, the people at Sun had a vision that the web could be so much more than static HTML. They created the concept of Java Applets that could be placed on webpages to make them richer and do stuff that HTML just couldn't. Like adding animated menus and hideous buttons.

This was quite the cool thing to have at the time, but there were a few fundamental problems. One: it was horribly slow. Nobody really cared because at 28K8 modem speed on a 486, anything was slow, so the few extra seconds it took to load the Java stuff was accepted, at least for a while. But the second problem was that it was quite unstable. More often than not, it would crash your browser. (There's actually about a 1 in 4 chance that the above link still crashed your browser today, 10 years later; the significant improvement is that Firefox will have remembered what page it crashed on and will let you re-experience the crash upon restart. Twice the fun.)

So with most Java developers not getting beyond the 'L33T, I HAZ CREATED A BUTTON!!' stage and HTML, CSS and JavaScript gradually becoming rich enough to create hideous buttons without Java Applets, the technique more or less died. (Well, Java itself didn't; it firmly grasped on to the enterprise software market because the former button developers had kids to feed.)

We then had a few years of plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript happiness with the occasional Flash animation, when suddenly the big guys thought it was time to enrich the web again. Not with Java of course, which people still associated with fancy buttons and crashing browsers, but with new shiny technologies like Silverlight and Flex. (Sure, both Microsoft and Adobe are in favor of open standards as long as they can each have their own standard).

The concept is very much the same, both Flex and Silverlight allow you to create buttons! But this time, we use a Three Letter Acronym, because *THAT* was what Java failed, the lack of a proper Three Letter Acronym!

We call this modern variant of user interface richness: RIA, for Rich Internet Application (maybe it was supposed to stand for 'Rather Implemented an Applet' though). Like in the past, the idea is to do stuff in the browser that HTML won't let you.

Sun, who years ago created the RIA avant la lettre with their Java applets, must have watched this trend in amazement. And now that RIA's are in the early adopter stage and have enough momentum to become mainstream, it's time for them to give it another try. They are relaunching the applet idea with what they call 'JavaFX' (come on, that name just sounds like 'fancy button' all over again). Details on this can be read in this article on TechCrunch.

Interesting times are ahead. With Google Chrome possibly igniting the Third Browser War, we'll also see the RIA wars, where JavaFX, Silverlight and Flex will battle to become the dominant technology to create rich internet applications. One potential outcome: they all fail and the outcome is an improved, richer version of HTML and plain old JavaScript. Another potential outcome: they will all find their niche and we'll get incredibly cool apps. Back in the days of the Applet, the web was relatively immature. We weren't ready for real web applications. Maybe that is why Java Applets didn't survive the Button stage.

This time around however, more and more applications are webbased, so there's quite a big chance that this time, RIA technologies will catch on and outgrow their Button stages and give us some really compelling browser experience.

Time will tell. Let's look back at this in another 10 years or so.

I recently came across this article:

"Apple, Microsoft, PHP headline IBM's list of most vulnerable software"

This article once again demonstrates the cluelessness that some people have regarding what PHP is. First of all, PHP is not a vendor, so "Apple, Microsoft & PHP" does not make much sense. Furthermore, the only reason PHP even is mentioned in this context is that Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress appear in the list. So PHP, a programming language, gets blamed for the security flaws that are in these packages.

With the same data, I might conclude that C is more insecure than PHP, after all there are more C-based vendors/product in the list than PHP products.

But they're not just clueless about PHP, they also list Linux as a Vendor in their top 10 list. Linux is an operating system, not a vendor.

Sometimes I wish these reporters would talk to people that know what their talking about before they write such an article.

I was just at a very interesting keynote by Microsoft's Joe Stagner. He had some interesting news, so I didn't want to wait until my next php|tek daily report to blog about this.

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

The most important tidbits from this sessions were:

• According to Joe, Microsoft is not done talking to Yahoo. They'll need a way to align their cultural differences, but talks aren't over.

• Microsoft has no plans to buy Zend.

The second point was confirmed in Andi's keynote yesterday, so that's probably the truth. The first part however was new to me. Joe calls himself 'Microsoft's Opinionated Misfit Geek', which probably means that microsoft is able to deny anything that Joe states. But on twitter someone pointed me to this article which confirms this story.

There were also some discussions regarding how Microsoft and Zend are working together to improve PHP on windows, which lead to some comments from Derick Rethans and others that these improvements were closed source parts of Zend Core, but Stas from Zend argued against that and stated that all Zend's fixes to PHP are contributed back.

In any case, Joe's talk was a very interesting keynote that raised some controversy among the audience.