PHP may be the most popular Web scripting language in the world. But despite a large collection of nails, not every tool is a hammer. So when should it be used, and when would another dynamic programming language be a better choice? We identify its strengths and weaknesses.

For the ones, who doesn’t know about CIO, their target audience is managerial. not developers.
So potentially reader will be your manager and they’ll get this info as a reference.
I’m copy/pasting some parts of it for your convenience. Let’s assume your manager does not know about PHP (I hope not) and you’re about to convince him/her to use PHP on a project. What whould he/she think after reading this?

When should you use PHP?

• Creating an intranet site.
• Prototyping an application that will be converted to Java or some other language.
• Creating a Web database application.
• Deploying an inexpensive or quick solution.
• Using ready-made apps from Sourceforge.net or other sites.

In general you should not use PHP:

• Where data security is of high importance.
• In Shell or automated scripted applications.
• In enterprise applications where scalability takes higher precedence than economy.

What a short sight!?!? Kenneth Hess the author of the article, is also the new “On The Desktop” columnist for Linux Magazine. Honestly, I would not really expect these claims from Ken Hess.

Please share your comment.

Link: You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!

This is what I think:

• Community:
  • Trust the members’ input.
  • Allow the members to be known and get credit by measuring their contributions.
  • Allow other members in the community to measure and respond to contributions.
  • Enable members’ knowledge base to evolve as processes and concepts change.
  • Enables user to embrace the content ownership
• Content
  • Make it easy to contribute to your knowledge base and make it accessible to others.
  • Reviews, Ratings, Comments, Focus: Freedom of expression
  • Free content
  • Using the power of the crowd
  • Originality
  • Community decides what they want to see on the site
• Context
  • Displaying the information based on reality of the user or page
  • Giving the value to people near you (in taste or physical location)
  • Provides personalization of the content
• - Commerce
  • Adapting non-revenue-generating website into that generates revenue
  • Via affiliates programs
  • Without disturbing the community
  • Should be well hidden between the lines
  • $$$
• Personalization
  • Allowing the user to tailor the site in accordance with their tastes and preferences.
  • Caters the sense of ownership / ease of use
• Vertical Search
  • Introducing the context into search (showing results that are more relevant to user)
  • Introducing other sites (possibly affiliate sites/competitors) into search.

Some of Google’s non-search projects are really extensions of its search monetization, and are likely to succeed. But others projects mean entering areas where Google doesn’t have much experience, and is taking a risk. With regard to those riskier areas, the key question for Google’s future is whether it can realize that losing is really one of the best assets the company has.

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mediapost

User Information; Other Information. Your messages may be the subject of unauthorized third party interception and review. An individual with Internet access can cause, among other things, damage, incur expenses and enter into contractual obligations while on the Internet. All such matters are your sole responsibility. Your Service Provider has no obligation to monitor the Service, any content or your use of Your Service Provider’s networks. However, you agree that Your Service Provider reserves the right from time to time to monitor the Service electronically, monitor or investigate content or your use of Your Service Provider’s networks, including without limitation bandwidth consumption, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy any laws, regulations or other governmental request from any applicable jurisdiction, or as necessary to operate the Service or to protect itself or others.

That means they’ll tell you to the big brother if you download mp3s from your favorite bittorrent site.
Also by talking to friends I learned that all the ISPs in Canada doing the same thing already but Bell is the first ISP to announce it on their ToS.

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.

nicely pointed out by Joshua Porter

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
Following up on my Del.icio.us Lesson post, this is a critical reason why web apps fail. Many apps focus on being the new social killer-app when, in general, people don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing, and will only use software that benefits them personally at every step. You could call this selfishness or laziness, but I would call it optimization. For example, we simply don’t have time to tag things for tagging sake. Instead, we might tag things if we think that it will help us in the future, but adding tags to an app does not a solution make.

2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…

3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
So much focus is on aggregation right now that it is easy to overlook the happiness of users. Many services, such as Technorati Tags or Google Sitemaps, exist solely to make the aggregators happy, and not the user themselves. They sell themselves on incentives that sound like what a movie agent might say to an aspiring actor: – We’ll make you famous, kid. You’ll get found!”. First of all, this is all talk directed at the developer, who is not the user. That’s a huge tip-off right there. Second of all, if the aggregators had their way everyone would be using these formats, which simply dilutes the value for everyone else and only serves to lock the site into some weird relationship with the aggregator. This is not how it should be. That’s why I stopped using those two services ages ago. Instead, focus on adding features that make the user happy, and when that happens everyone else can be happy, too.

4. They sell it the wrong way.
Web apps are not about Ajax, tags, Web 2.0, SOA, REST, or any other technology. Why do so many startups and web pundits focus on these terms when talking about a product? To get a better frame of reference, talk about how your app empowers users to improve their life. Think about how the long-term successful companies sell their stuff. They relate it to some bigger idea. So, for example, Nike has always embraced the hero archetype. They might talk about how great their foam arch is, but that’s always secondary to how buying their shoes makes you a hero. Their commercials are often amateur runners out running in the rain. How cool is that? Way cooler than double-density shock foam. A good example of this in web apps is the messaging from 37signals. They’re not selling software, they’re selling rebellion.

5. Not in it for the long haul.
If you build it, they will not come. There is too much competition right now, so another wiki-type application isn’t going to set the world on fire. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about web apps that became successful only after they adapted to their user base over time (short periods of time, but over time nonetheless). Their initial effort didn’t work, or was too similar to another one, but they were in it for the long haul and they adapted to what their users wanted. Flickr is a great example of this. Flickr started out as a game called Game Neverending. That didn’t work, but their second attempt did. Many web app makers would never make it to the point of seeing the light (or admitting the failure).

6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
One of the big promises of aggregating the wisdom of crowds is building systems that use the input from huge user populations to come up with value. However, as people get used to how the wisdom is aggregated, they figure out how it all works, and the more public the mechanism for aggregation, the easier it is to figure out. That’s why gaming is such an issue with Digg. The voting on Digg is public, so you can see which items have the most votes before you submit your vote yourself. This goes against one of the principles of the Wisdom of Crowds, which states that in order to successfully harness it, each member of the crowd needs to be making an independent vote.

7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.
Most business strategy is about making money. However, this is a short term goal. If you focus only on ways to make money, then you’ll make decisions that in the short term seem good for the balance sheet but in the long term actually work against it. Take the case of LLBean. Where everyone else is trying to get away from call centers and move all of their customer interaction to a web site, LLBean actually allows you to talk to a human being almost instantaneously. Their phone number is easily found on their web site/app. This probably does cost them a lot more than if they had some contact forms or an instant chat room, but it sure does make it quick and easy to give them money. My sister worked at LLBean for a time, and I was always impressed by the way that they empowered her to handle customers. It probably cost them money in the short term, but people remember when you make their lives easier, not harder. Many companies, unfortunately, see the Web as a way to reduce direct communication with customers, when in reality it should cause an increase in communication if you’re successful.

Thoughts Aside:
With the advancement in the internet and wireless technology most of the companies are now moving their whole setup over the internet. They are introducing wireless network at their work place to ensure fast and reliable services. By installing wireless camera they can take the review of the whole work place as well. Another technology which is readily becoming popular is the internet phone system which is cheap and reliable at the same time. The installation of internet voip protocol is required to properly run this system.

A Texas jury has awarded $133 million in damages to David Colvin, after finding Microsoft and Autodesk guilty of infringing upon Colvin’s two software patents for software antipiracy protection. Colvin’s company, z4 Technologies Inc., filed patents for ‘passwords and codes assigned to individual software copies to prevent unauthorized copies.’ Microsoft was ordered to pay $115 million, and Autodesk $18 million for infringement of the product-activation schemes. A spokesman from Microsoft contends that ‘Microsoft developed its own product-activation technologies well before z4 Technologies filed for its patent.’ Appeals are expected.

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ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has once again scrapped the plan for a new internet “domain” .xxx for pornography. Supporters of the .xxx address suffix argued that it would have helped to protect children and others from accidental exposure to internet pornography, particularly if stronger filters were used to screen out explicit material from other internet domains. Pressure from conservative Christian groups in the US, which has a veto over the internet addressing system, led the organisation last year to put off introducing a new “.xxx” domain for pornography on the internet. That drew international complaints that the US exercised too much power over the internet and added to a European-backed movement to shift control of the online medium to an international group

Well, I agree.

The Ability to Hyperfocus
Rapid Fire Mind
Multitasking at Will
High Energy Level
Highly Creative
Quick Learner
Stimulus Seeking Brain
Constantly Scanning your Environment
Great in a Crisis
Risk Taker

Here is the full article.
also 151 positive characteristics of people with Attention Deficit Disorder

These are the things to look out for when building a large application on web. Most of them I agree, some of them I don’t. This list also should keep in mind that, real world problems are not that perfect. I marked the ones that I strongly agree with an asterix (*).
I also filtered out the things are specific to del.icio.us from the original text.

• Browser quirks. CSS/JavaScript/rendering. IE caching.
• Scaling: avoid early optimization. SQL doesn’t map well to these problems – think about how to split up data over multiple machines. Understand indexing strategies, profile every SQL statement. Nagios or similar for monitoring.
• Tags don’t map well to SQL. Sometimes you can prune based on usage – only index the first few pages for example. This keeps indexes small and fast.
• *Some latency in the system is OK – work out where you have leeway, e.g. RSS feeds can fall a few minutes behind without anyone minding.
• *People are always going to abuse your system (scraping, greasemonkey, etc.)
• *“Idiots are a lot smarter than you” – wait to see what breaks before you fix it.
• *Learn Apache – tuning can make things a lot faster. Understand headers, mod_rewrite (a dark art). Put a proxy in front of Apache e.g. Perlbal from LiveJournal – one guy on a modem can suck up lots of resources otherwise.
• Images off a different server, RSS from a different server.
• “Save site for offline use” feature in IE is particularly nasty.
• *The easier the API to get in and out of, the more people will use it. There’s a long tail of smart developers. Stuff like SOAP discourages adoption. No API key = people can play with it faster; drives attention.
• Dont expose your unique id’s to the outside world (php?id=1 etc.) people can scrape through everything very easily. This is why del.icio.us uses MD5 hashes of links instead.
• Giving everything a unique ID in the database is a scaling problem in its own right.
• *Features: the features you put in are as important as the ones you leave out. There’s no “send a note” in del.icio.us feature because e-mail already exists.
• I don’t add featues that are available elsewhere e.g. messaging
• *When people ask for features, get to the bottom of why they are asking for that exact thing. Solve the problem, rather than doing exactly what your asked for.
• With tags, people ask for “A and B and NOT C or D” – but less than 1% of queries even use more than a single tag.
• *RSS important in del.icio.us, because it’s a native way for people to access lists (of links). Put RSS everywhere you can. del.icio.us does way more RSS traffic than HTML or API stuff – partly because of poorly written readers. Understand the headers – especially if-not-modified.
• *Make sure the URLs follow the path of the site. DONT include session data, drop ugly details that are to do with the system, not the user (.php, .aspx, ?, &, etc.)
• URLs are prime real estate – respect them (Good URL structure writeup from another carson speaker – http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2003/06/on_permalinks_and_paradigms.shtml )
• *When you chose what to build, solve a problem you have yourself so you can be sure to understand it. Passion counts. It’s cheap and easy to build stuff, so other people will be building it too.
• *A niche product with a limited audience is still good business (with how advertising and paypal work)
• *Every day that you don’t have something properly out in the world (not on an invite only beta) you’re losing a chance to gain users. Get it out there ASAP.
• Aggregation is often a focus of attention (latest, most active, etc.)
• *As the population gets larger, the bias drifts; del.icio.us/popular becomes less interesting to the original community members. Work out ways to let the system fragment in to different areas of attention.
• “Spam is attention theft” – that’s one of the reasons del.icio.us doesn’t have a top 10 links of all time – it’s an attractive nuisance.
• *When you’ve figured out someone is spamming, don’t let them know – let them keep posting and just silently junk their stuff.
• *Make users do the minimum amount of work. But make them do something.
• Understand the user’s motivation: “You have to understand the selfish user” – user #1 has to find the system useful or you won’t get user #2. Systems that only become useful when lots of people are using them usually fail, because there’s no incentive for people to contribute themselves. The real trick is to make the user base you have want to invite more people in to the system.
• *Manage your effort – be careful where you spend your efforts.
• *Don’t waste time building features nobody uses.
• *Measurement: watch your system intensely: “Intuition is ideas backed by numbers”
• *Measure behavior rather than claims. del.icio.us doesn’t have stars because why would you bookmark something that was no good? This way people bookmark things that they really care about rather than trying to tell the system things.
• *User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is important. Make the system suitable for the people actually using the system. Everybody on the team should see this in action. Labs are great but expensive. If you don’t have a lab do ghetto testing in Starbucks. We did one day then two days user testing in a user testing lab.
• *Goals skew the results. People don’t read, they cram crap in to boxes. Let people wander don’t give them tasks.
• *You have to speak the user’s language. “Bookmarks” are what you call them if you use Netscape of Firefox – most users these days know the term “favourite” instead. Half of his population (? users) didn’t know what a bookmark was.
• *Don’t make users register before they can get in to your site. Maybe even give them an anonymous account to play with. A lot of users want to know what they’ll get if they register – especially from fear of giving out email address, spyware etc. You can’t tell them; they’re not going to read it. You have to show them.
• *Use Verbs – doing words – to prompt actions.
• *If users do have to register, send them straight back to where they were when they’re done. Don’t dump them on the homepage.
• *“Design Grammar” – if you’re presenting a system that’s different from how other things work (del.icio.us had novel tags, save your bookmarks to the web) you should still try to reflect the design patterns of the web.
• *Morals: You have to develop a sense of morals when you build your system. It’s the user’s data; it’s not yours. Make sure they can remove themselves and their account if they want to.
• *Infection: Understand infection vectors for promoting your system. “Enable evangelism”. RSS lets you get at users who don’t use your system directly. Also think about iCal, M3U – anything that a desktop app can consume over HTTP. Do an inventory to get into every desktop app. possible.

Here is a nice screen cap of the game: