Hire PHP developer for Open Source Customization & Custom PHP Web Development

PHP is one of the fastest growing web scripting languages on the Internet today, and for good reason.

PHP (which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor) was designed explicitly for the web. Designed in 1994 to enable the creation of dynamic web pages quickly and easily, PHP has exploded in growth and has been adopted by major vendors such as Linux that have included the language with their web servers. PHP is mostly used in conjunction with MySQL Database for web development services like Open Source Ecommerce Websites, Open Source CMS based Websites, & Custom PHP based web applications. This works on Linux Apace MySQL PHP (LAMP) Environment.

PHP Web development is becoming increasingly popular in web development industry mostly because of the fact it is open source. In easy words what Open source Means is you can install a popular ecommerce solution or cms solution and customize it as per your requirements and you have your website up and running in matter of a week.

t Profit By Outsourcing We do Open Source Customization for Popular ecommerce engines (like oscommerce Customization, zen cart Customization, x cart Customization, CS cart Customization, virtuemart customization, and magento customization), CMS engines (Mambo Customization, Joomla Customization, Drupal Customization, typo3 Customization, phpnuke Customization and expression engine customization). Apart from this we also do Custom PHP Web Development.

At Profit By Outsourcing, we provide 2 Options:

• You can hire there Own team of Dedicated PHP Programmer(s) from Profit By Outsourcing, who will work dedicatedly and exclusively on your Projects for 176hrs/mo and will provide a daily work status reports at close of play.
• You can also work with Profit By Outsourcing on a project basis, where we agree on a total project cost for your php web development requirements before project commencement, the cost is calculated on basis of project specifications provided.

Source : http://www.pr-inside.com/hire-php-developer-for-open-source-r1270520.htm

Microsoft preps for open-source cloud apps PHP gets Azure tinge

Microsoft has unveiled a toolkit for PHP developers building open-source applications that help fluff its planned Azure cloud.

PHPAzure is a software development kit (SDK) for programming to both Windows Azure and the underlying SQL-like Windows Azure Storage service's blobs, tables, and queues. PHPAzure is an open-source project developed with RealDolmen and hosted on Microsoft's CodePlex site.

The PHPAzure community technology preview (CTP) was unveiled by Microsoft India and is due for completion on August 21. Azure is itself currently in CTP and has been promised for delivery by the end of this year.

PHP is one of the web's most popular programming languages, running more than 20 million sites. It's also used in conjunction with Apache, Linux, and MySQL - a web server, operating system, and database combo that Microsoft is in competition with.

Microsoft's recognized the importance of winning over PHP developers and has worked with Zend Technologies to fine-tune PHP to Windows until now. The risk was developers would otherwise build their PHP applications on Windows and deploy on Linux instead.

With PHP being a default web-programming environment, Microsoft has accepted it must embrace the language as a way to populate Azure with applications, moving it from a standing stop.

PHPAzure sounds like a framework for PHP programmers to build to Azure and its underlying storage system rather than a new language from Microsoft. Features include PHP classes for Windows Azure blobs, tables, and queues, for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST, and error management, and there is manageability, instrumentation, and logging support. You can read more on the architecture here.

Bootnote

Sybase has announced plans for its server products to work in Amazon's cloud. The company said it'll make Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), developer guides, and developer software for its software freely available for development and testing. Sybase is also working with Amazon to devise "flexible utility computing models" of its software to enable pay-per-use billing on the Amazon cloud.

Once a database contender to Oracle, Sybase today has a diverse set of products covering mobile and business intelligence. But the announcement will likely only apply to its database and data integration and replication products. It will expand the number of database options available on Amazon and keep Sybase in the game - though it's coming a little late. Amazon's EC2 currently offers IBM's DB2 and Informix, Oracle 11g, Microsoft's SQL Server Standard Edition 2005, and MySQL Enterprise.

Sybase also said it's working with Symantec and its Veritas Storage Foundation to optimize its Virtualized Resource Management framework from the company's ASE Cluster Edition for use in cloud-based storage. ®

Source : http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/14/microsoft_php_azure/

Desktop computers dragging down Canada's PC market

MONTREAL — The Canadian market for personal computers isn't expected to reboot to positive growth until 2010 because consumers and businesses are delaying purchases and waiting for new technologies, says IDC Canada.

Desktop computers dragged down the market in the first quarter and the volume of netbooks - small mobile computers that allow users to surf the Internet and check email - has levelled off, IDC said Tuesday.

"This year, the bottom has completely fallen out of desktops," said Tim Brunt, IDC's senior analyst in personal computing and technology. "The market is demanding mobility."

The overall desktop PC market declined by 27 per cent from last year, but on average a desktop PC now sells for more than $200 more than a portable personal computer, IDC said.

Netbooks continued to garner a larger share of the overall market for portable PCs due to their lower price, but unit shipments were down by five per cent from the fourth quarter, Brunt said.

Netbooks, also called mini notebooks, usually cost between $200 and $500, but can be found at even lower prices.

"They're really taking a price leadership role," he said, adding that laptops also have compete with the price of netbooks.

"Mini notebooks came along at an opportunistic time - a down economy and a low price point," Brunt said from Toronto.

The overall PC market took a step decline in the quarter with unit volumes down 14 per cent over the same period last year to reach about 1.3 million desktops, laptops and netbooks shipped in Canada.

The most popular PC brands in Canada in first quarter were HP, Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo and Apple, Brunt said.

Canada didn't fare well globally in the quarter, Brunt said. In the United States, PC shipments were down just 3.4 per cent in the quarter with 14.9 million units shipped, he said.

"While the overall PC market continues to retreat, and the remainder of 2009 does not look optimistic, there is light at the end of the tunnel in 2010, where there are several factors that will drive the industry back to positive growth."

Brunt said consumers and businesses are waiting for faster chip sets in PCs, Microsoft's new Windows 7 operating system, and different form factors. He added that small businesses will be looking to take advantage of the federal government's stimulus package before the end of the year.

Analyst Duncan Stewart said consumers used to have to pay more for a mobile computer, such as a laptop, than for a desktop.

"In the early stages of a technology, people pay a premium for smallness and portability but then as you figure all of that out, you realized that you don't need that much power for a little, portable device," said Stewart, director of research, technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Canada.

But he said desktop prices will "hang in there" because people will buy them to do more things with them.

Despite a decline sales volumes in the first quarter, netbooks still have appeal.

Dell announced on Tuesday the launch of the Latitude 2100, a netbook specifically designed for students from kindergarten to Grade 12.

Netbooks will also be a source of revenue for wireless carriers with Verizon and AT&T in the United States offering them with multi-year contracts and some rebates.

Source : http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jD5RoOT25Tl0H5sktWHmXVA7T6Hg

Software switch advised for e-commerce success

A new report from Gartner has advised online retailers to make greater use of open source, commercial or off-the-shelf software to focus their budgets on the areas that matter.

The research company claims that too much money is spent on custom web development for functions that could be easily addressed by standard software.

It states that large e-commerce retailers could save up to 35 per cent of their ongoing maintenance and license costs by using software instead of custom development for functions such as shopping cart management.

For small retailers, this figure could be anything up to 25 per cent.

Gene Alvarez, research vice-president at Gartner, said web retailers should ask web specialists to concentrate on "developing rich internet shopping capabilities or [improving] site design for search engine optimisation so that the site can rank higher in a Google-based search".

E-commerce retailers could also save money by using Magento hosting for their websites. The software is open source, which means that it is free to use, although Magento has also recently announced the launch of a paid-for enterprise edition of its solution for those requiring more features.

NASA astronauts install new computer on Hubble telescope

During a 7-hour-and-20-minute spacewalk today, NASA astronauts gave the Hubble Space Telescope a new backup computer to replace the onboard system that had to be put into use after a technical failure last fall.

The computer, called the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit, is designed to send commands to Hubble's science instruments and also format science data so it can be transmitted to the ground.

The Hubble telescope's main unit failed late last September, leaving the orbiter unable to send data to Earth. Michael Moore, a program executive for the Hubble Space Telescope, has said that the computer problem was the worst the Hubble has suffered since it went into orbit 19 years ago. NASA engineers remotely switched the telescope over to the backup system, and today's spacewalk added another system, which will now serve as Hubble's backup unit.

The space shuttle Atlantis' 11-day mission is focused on repairing and upgrading the telescope, which has not been serviced since 2002. The repairs and additions should make Hubble far more powerful than it's ever been. And that will put Hubble in the position to make more, and more important, discoveries in the next five years than it has in the past two decades, said Ed Ruitberg, deputy program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Today, NASA Mission Specialists John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel performed the long, grueling spacewalk, which included removing the telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and replacing it with a new wide-field camera, which should enable Hubble to take large-scale, detailed photos.

The astronauts, who were aided by astronaut Megan McArthur operating the shuttle's robotic arm, also installed a soft capture mechanism, which will allow future vehicles to attach to the telescope. This is the last space shuttle mission to Hubble, but other space vehicles could someday make another maintenance trip or even go up to retrieve parts of it.

Friday's spacewalk is set up to install six new gyroscopes and three of the six new batteries that will go into the telescope during this mission.

Source : http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=43C02D11-1A64-6A71-CEC3E03F87EB7060

OOP Concepts in Drupal

Despite the lack of explicitly-declared classes in Drupal, many object-oriented paradigms are still used in its design. There are many sets of "essential features" that are said to be necessary to classify a system as object-oriented; we will look at one of the more popular definitions and examine some ways in which Drupal exhibits those characteristics.

Objects

There are many constructs in Drupal that fit the description of an "object". Some of the more prominent Drupal components that could be considered objects are modules, themes, nodes, and users.

Nodes are the basic content building blocks of a Drupal site, and bundle together the data that makes up a "page" or "story" on a typical site. The methods that operate on this object are defined in node.module, usually called by the node_invoke() function. User objects similarly package data together, bringing together information about each account on the site, profile information, and session tracking. In both cases, the data structure is defined by a database table instead of a class. Drupal exploits the relational nature of its supported databases to allow other modules to extend the objects with additional data fields.

Modules and themes are object-like as well, filling the "controller" role in many ways. Each module is a source file, but also bundles together related functions and follows a pattern of defining Drupal hooks.

Abstraction

Drupal's hook system is the basis for its interface abstraction. Hooks define the operations that can be performed on or by a module. If a module implements a hook, it enters into a contract to perform a particular task when the hook is invoked. The calling code need not know anything else about the module or the way the hook is implemented in order to get useful work done by invoking the hook.

Encapsulation

Like most other object-oriented systems, Drupal does not have a way of strictly limiting access to an object's inner workings, but rather relies on convention to accomplish this. Since Drupal code is based around functions, which share a single namespace, this namespace is subdivided by the use of prefixes. By following this simple convention, each module can declare its own functions and variables without the worry of conflict with others.

Convention also delineates the public API of a class from its internal implementation. Internal functions are prefixed by an underscore to indicate that they should not be called by outside modules. For example, _user_categories() is a private function which is subject to change without notice, while user_save() is part of the public interface to the user object and can be called with the expectation that the user object will be saved to the database (even though the method of doing this is private).

Polymorphism

Nodes are polymorphic in the classical sense. If a module needs to display a node, for example, it can call node_view() on that node to get an HTML representation. The actual rendering, though, will depend on which type of node is passed to the function; this is directly analogous to having the class of an object determine its behavior when a message is sent to it. Drupal itself handles the same introspection tasks required of an OOP language's runtime library.

Furthermore, the rendering of the node in this example can be affected by the active theme. Themes are polymorphic in the same way; the theme is passed a "render this node" message, and responds to it in a different way depending on the implementation of the active theme, though the interface is constant.

Inheritance

Modules and themes can define whatever functions they please. However, they can both be thought to inherit their behavior from an abstract base class. In the case of themes, the behavior of this class is determined by the functions in theme.inc; if a theme does not override a function defined there, the default rendering of an interface component is used, but the theme can instead provide its own rendering. Modules similarly have the selection of all Drupal hooks to override at will, and may pick and choose which ones to implement.

source:http://api.drupal.org/?q=api/file/developer/topics/oop.html/4.7

Motivations for Current Design

As of version 4.6, Drupal does not use PHP's class construct. This decision was made for several reasons.

First, PHP's support for object-oriented constructs was much less mature at the time of Drupal's design. Drupal was built on PHP 4, and most of the improvements in PHP 5 relate to its object-oriented features.

Second, Drupal code is highly compartmentalized into modules, each of which defines its own set of functions. The inclusion of files is handled inside functions as well; PHP's performance suffers if all code is included on each page call, so Drupal attempts to load as little code as possible per request. This is a critical consideration, especially in the absence of a PHP accelerator; the act of compiling the code accounts for more than half of a Drupal page request. Functions are therefore defined inside other functions in Drupal, with respect to the runtime scope. This is perfectly legal. However, PHP does not allow the same kind of nesting with class declarations. This means that the inclusion of files defining classes must be "top-level," and not inside any function, which leads either to slower code (always including the files defining classes) or a large amount of logic in the main index.php file.

Finally, using classes to implement Drupal constructs is difficult due to the use of some advanced object-oriented design patterns used by Drupal itself. While this may sound self-contradictory, it should become clear in the following discussion that the lack of certain OOP constructs such as Objective-C's "categories" in PHP would mean that implementing some Drupal mechanisms (such as the theme system) would be more complicated using classes than using functions.

source:http://api.drupal.org/?q=api/file/developer/topics/oop.html/4.7

Magento 1.1.6 Released

As each ecommerce application Magento benefits from different updates. So a recent release of Magento 1.1.6 has been warmly accepted by Magento community. No doubt all bugs noticed since the last Magento release have been taken into consideration and fixed. Having explored Magento 1.1.6 you’ll find out the next improvements:

• Google Checkout table rates work perfectly;
• While upgrading existing databases you won’t experience SQL error any more;
• Refreshing products count in categories management page won’t make you any troubles;
• From now on order status after creating an invoice will be shown in a right way;
• Translations and locale settings used in PDF print-outs have been fixed as well;
• Managing product categories has been also made more effective.

Note we’ve listed just several improvements which have been made. Of course there aren’t perfect things but there are great things and Magento belongs to the last ones. In fact Magento has launched a blank theme for building online shops. This theme has a very simple design but it can be useful for those who can’t afford custom made design or purchasing professionally designed Magento themes.

source:http://www.design4magento.com/category/magento-news/page/3/

Why Magento?

Open Source. Open Source means your store and the platform its built on are fully yours. You have the freedom to customize Magento, tailor it to your business model and expand on it for years to come. No strings attached.
Integration Friendly. Your eCommerce platform should not dictate what third-party solution you use. Magento gives you the freedom to work with the third-party solutions you want.
Feature-Rich. Magento comes out-of-the-box with features like one-page checkout, product comparisons, multi-address Shipping and many more features that will set your store apart.
Support Network. Magento is fully supported by Varien and the international Magento community ensuring that where ever you are, you’re never on your own.

source:http://www.varien.com/products/

Magento launches Enterprise Edition demos

Open source e-commerce platform Magento has released demonstrations of some of the capabilities of its new Enterprise Edition.

Magento hosting users can now access a demonstration Storefront and a demonstration Administrator Panel for the product on the company's demo site, which requires log-in details provided by Magento.

Writing on the Magento blog, designer Minu Oh said that the demonstrations display how the Enterprise Edition "provides increased return on investment for Magento installations and allows retailers and manufacturers on Magento to create multi-faceted, strategic marketing efforts and target them to different audience types".

Magento first unveiled the Enterprise Edition version of its platform in mid-April. The premium product is aimed at larger organisations requiring greater functionality than that provided by the free Magento solution.

The free product has been downloaded more than 750,000 times to date and boasts more than 85,000 community members, according to the most recent figures from Magento.

source:http://www.globalgold.co.uk/web-hosting-news/custom-web-hosting/magento-launches-enterprise-edition-demos-19150303.html