Update: PHP 5.3 on Windows

hanrahat — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Congratulations to the PHP community on its PHP 5.3 alpha 2 release in December. In roughly one month, there have been over 80,000 downloads of the alpha 2 release from unique IP addresses.

You can see that interest in PHP on Windows is growing significantly when you compare this to the 40,000 or so Windows downloads of PHP 5.2 alpha and beta combined over nearly five months.

One of the critical accomplishments in 5.3 has been updating the code base so that the core engine can be built under the latest version of Visual C (VC9). This update has enabled members of the community to focus on optimizing the PHP core to run on Windows. Already, with alpha 2, the release is proving itself to be a stable, robust implementation.

The community anticipates hitting general availability for 5.3 in the spring. Interest in that release is already running high and should continue to grow in the coming weeks.

New Document Format Interop Solutions

Peter Galli — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:05:00 GMT

The work to promote interoperability between different document format implementations is yielding some concrete results.

A number of new technology solutions were announced in Brussels on December 3 by the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII), which was launched in March of this year, and where industry leaders and representatives from vendors around the world gather for technical discussions and labs to identify, test and develop solutions to overcome document interoperability barriers.

The solutions - which will improve the installation, performance and stability of translated documents - include the Open XML Document Viewer, which translates Open XML documents to an HTML Web page and allows readability on Web friendly browsers like Firefox. You can watch this video demonstration of the Open XML Document Viewer, while the CTP is available here.

Other new solutions include the Open XML/ODF Translators Version 2.5, a document translator that improves translations between different formats through optimized templates, and which will be made available as an add-in for Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and XP. You can watch the video demonstration here.

The Apache POI Java SDK for Open XML gives customers and independent software developers greater choice as they create and use business applications that manipulate business documents and which are built on Java.

As transparency and co-operation are vital for initiatives like this to succeed, it's important to note that the DII's goals are to increase interoperability between document format implementations across a range of formats, applications, platforms and devices, and that the initiative is open to any vendor who wants to collaborate with the community to identify and address interoperability issues between different implementations of document formats.

We believe that the industry has a responsibility to come together to address the interoperability interests of users as well as effective data exchange between widely-deployed document format implementations, and so the development of these technical tools, which is due to the open and constructive industry dialogue at DII, is gratifying. This work also underscores the progress being made as the global IT community continues to work together on developing real-world interoperability solutions.

Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Interop, App

Update: PHP 5.3 on Windows

New Document Format Interop Solutions