The good news is that all is good on Afrigator now. All blogs that are using some form of Pubsubhubbub service will be realtime in no time.

If you’re running on WordPress (not WordPress.com) and you have not yet installed PuSHPress, please do so soon!

I find this very hard to believe, but it seems that Red Hat Europe‘s site is still powered by PHP 4. PHP 4.3.2 to top it all off. This after PHP 4 reached it’s end of life more than a year ago. I guess the old saying applies:

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it!

Right…? It is just a little bizarre, I guess. Here is a screenshot of the headers.

I think I can give you an executive summary of this blog post: if the documentation for an open source project sucks, nobody but the most hardcore developers will use it.

That couldn’t be more true! The documentation is just about as important as the application. The problem is that it takes time to maintain. Often we as developers are simply too lazy and “will update the documentation later”. I know I am like that, sadly… Will make it next years new years resolution to change that!

I do think that there could possibly be better ways to do documentation. Look at PHP

‘s documentation. It is fairly simple and concise, but I have often found great value in the user comments and examples which you would find underneath every page. I don’t think it is perfect, but it sure helps.

User contributions play a big role in Open Source documentation and developers with blogs often write their examples on their blogs. I end up finding them by searching Google for it, but it would sure help much more if those posts were linked to the documentation. Something to consider, I think.

First of all, let me say that the organization of Tech Ed was simply astounding. Very well organized and very professionally executed. Besides the demo gods playing havoc and SA bandwidth not helping at all, it was brilliantly executed and I want to commend the organizers.

I’m not going to repeat what has been said already about the demos gone wrong, etc, but here is a couple of things of interest:

I think a big part of Microsoft’s success can be contributed to their treasuring of developers. They go absolutely out of their way to make life as easy and comfortable as possible for developers. They also treat developers with the utmost respect(?) and try and make a big deal of them. This, I think, creates loyal devs and with loyal devs, they can roll out great software. Visual Studio looks fantastic and the features are amazing. If you look at their language support on the .NET platform it is evident they try and cater for developers to enable them to develop in the language they feel comfortable with.

I used to develop Windows software back in the days on .NET version 1.1. I know first hand that the Visual Studio IDE is great. It does make you lazy and with their excellent IntelliSense, you almost never type full statements or lines of code. This made it quite a mission to get used to a normal text editor going back to Linux.

I can see how they successfully make it quick and easy for developers and in effect keep them loyal to the Windows platform. You have to respect that, if anything.

The other interesting thing was while everyone was struggling to demo smoothly, the one presentation on PHP with FastCGI and IIS7 by Tim Keller did not get a lot of interest, but it was the only presentation which was flawless. Microsoft people don’t seem too interested in Open Source technologies, which is sad really. I’m not sure that I’d ditch my trusty Linux box with Apache for Windows with IIS7 anytime soon, but I’ll say this: Rewrite rules in IIS7 is fall out a tree easy! You simply copy and paste your URL you’d like to rewrite into a dialog and it returns a selection of rewrite options for you. You select the one most suitable and hit save. Done.

Silverlight, the so called flash killer looks very interesting. In flash, you need a pre-compiled flash movie embedded in your page to get to use flash in your pages. Silverlight is different. You need a javascript library and a XAML file (which is a plain XML file) and you can do Silverlight! That does change things as you no longer need a special software application to make RIA apps. XML and Javascript does the trick! Nifty. It was all a bit over my head to be honest, since I’ve never really made the effort to look into it, but I’m sure I will look into it much more now.

From languages like PHP, Ruby, Groovy and Java all the way through to Apache and High Scalability explained. All that is required is that you must be a registered DZone member and you can download the documents for free. There is over 50 reference documents, so it is well worth the effort.

Now you have to put it to work. This is where the API comes into play! All the API does is it lets you communicate with the indexes you’ve created. Various programming languages are supported like: JAVA, Python, PHP and Ruby. (NOTE: The Ruby on Rails community wrote some plugins for Rails for the Ruby API.)

Lets look at the PHP version. The API is basically a PHP class you can create an instance of and then use the various methods to interact with the search daemon.

First you need to add the file called sphinxapi.php to your include path. In your application, require the sphinxapi.php file:

require_once "/path/to/sphinxapi.php";

Next, create a new instance:

$sphinx = new SphinxClient();

Specify your server and port settings where your search daemon is running on:

$sphinx->SetServer( "localhost", 3312 );

Now, you’re all good to go and ready to start query the indexes. More on that in the next Sphinx Search API post.