Sebastian finally signed his contract with eZ systems and will move to our headquarter in Skien - Norway - next month. He will write his diploma thesis there about the new work flow engine for eZ publish 4. I'm really happy to have Sebastian with us. Another member of the open source community in our middle. For that: Welcome on board, Sebastian! Have a lot of fun with the great guys in Skien! :)

In a news release from InfoWorld today, there's information on the work that Zend and IBM are doing to bring PHP to IBM's System i computers (formerly the iSeries or AS/400s).

Development products featured as part of an agreement between IBM and Zend include Zend Core for the i5/OS; which will be Zend's PHP implementation for System i; Zend Studio for i5/OS development tools, and Zend Platform (Overview, Articles, Company) for i5/OS, which features tools for operating Web sites.

The goal of the effort is to enable development of Web applications for deployment on System i computers. PHP is a widely used scripting language for Web applications.

According to the release, the marriage of PHP and the System i machines, both popular among budget-minded individuals, will "open up a sizable market" for smaller clients.

Today I signed a contract with eZ systems as. I will start work in Skien, Norway on May, 1st.

During my first six months I will work on my diploma thesis ("Design and Implementation of an Activity-Based Workflow Management System"). The result of this work will be part of eZ publish 4.

I am looking forward to moving to Skien and to working together with people like Derick Rethans, Zak Greant, Sandro Groganz, and Tobias Schlitt, for instance. I am also glad to be able to work for a company that believes in Free Software.

Today I signed a contract with eZ systems AS. I will start work in Skien, Norway on May, 1st.

During my first six months I will work on my diploma thesis ("Design and Implementation of an Activity-Based Workflow Management System"). The result of this work will be part of eZ publish 4.

I am looking forward to moving to Skien and to working together with people like Derick Rethans, Zak Greant, Sandro Groganz, and Tobias Schlitt, for instance. I am also glad to be able to work for a company that believes in Free Software.

Today I signed a contract with eZ systems AS. I will start work in Skien, Norway on May, 1st.

During my first six months I will work on my diploma thesis ("Design and Implementation of an Activity-Based Workflow Management System"). The result of this work will be part of eZ publish 4 the eZ platform.

I am looking forward to moving to Skien and to working together with people like Derick Rethans, Zak Greant, Sandro Groganz, and Tobias Schlitt, for instance. I am also glad to be able to work for a company that believes in Free Software.

Today I signed a contract with eZ systems AS. I will start work in Skien, Norway on May, 1st.

During my first six months I will work on my diploma thesis ("Design and Implementation of an Activity-Based Workflow Management System"). The result of this work will be part of eZ publish 4 the eZ platform.

I am looking forward to moving to Skien and to working together with people like Derick Rethans, Zak Greant, Sandro Groganz, and Tobias Schlitt, for instance. I am also glad to be able to work for a company that believes in Free Software.

Since the testing of MySQL compiled with Intel ICC showed good numbers I carried on some testing with Apache, PHP and APC also compiled with the ICC compiler. The test was done with eZ publish running on a Linux server with Xeon processors.

All tests showed speed improvements. When I ran tests on template processing, which is the most PHP intensive operations in eZ publish, it showed improvements from 17.4% to 19.6% faster with the ICC compiler. Total script runtime measured with ab ranged from 6.3% to 12.7% faster. Of course these numbers are a bit lower since they include I/O like network transfer of the pages and so on. The more PHP intensive and heavy the script was the faster it ran under ICC.

Of course this compiler comes with a $399 pricetag so you have to compare that with the performance gained with it. In our case it looks like heavy operations are boosted by close to 20%.

To get your stack compiled with ICC you simply install the compiler as instructed by Intel and export the CC environment variable.

export CC=/opt/intel/cc/9.0/bin/icc 

Once this is set up you can do a make clean and rm config.cache followed by a ./configure. For APC you also need to run phpize before you configure. Then you make and make install like normal. No tweaking was done other than this so there is mabye room for further tweaking of compiler parameters.

It would be good to hear other people's experience with PHP and the ICC compiler.

eZ publish 3.8.0beta1 is released. The package contains some new features, improvements and bug-fixes. eZ publish 3.8.0rc1 is expected on the 17th of April

One of the current collaborations that Zend has added to its list is one with Oracle on the Zend Core for Oracle, a helpful tool to more closely integrate your PHP code and the Oracle database you're working with.

To help you get the most out of this optimized connection, the Oracle Technology Network has posted this new tutorial covering connecting your code to the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition.

This is a complete tutorial, starting from installation (of both Oracle XE and the Zend Core) as well as configuration notes and example code. The examples range from just a simple "connect and execute the query" out to how to handle transactions, bind variables, and stored procedures.

Lukas Smith, following up on a previous post on his perspectives on the openess of the Zend/Eclipse IDE development process. It seems that he's not the only one that's wondering - there've been other posts to the Eclipse boards that have been either ignored or treated with no respect.

After publishing my initial post where I question if the proposal process meets my definition of the open source process I had several people on IRC querying me and saying that they very much agree. However when I indicated that Zend needs to know about this too, so that they can better understand the importance to the community people did not seem to follow through. What exactly are people scared about?

While I may not agree with Zend on this, they have been receptive when people brought issues to their attention. Although it sometimes took a blog post (scroll down to "I'm Spartacus") with a number of comments to make them realize that they need to fix their priorities (scroll to "A Change in Policy").

It's a shame to see the people at Zend not taking notice of something like this until there's already a large amount of community involvement behind it. Sure, it's worked alright so far, ususally with the wanted changes being made, but if they keep that up, it's going to come back around and get them in the end.