Ok, maybe I watch too much reality TV, but I'd like to see a show called "The Coding Apprentice."

Starting with 18 candidates, each week, they are randomly divided into teams of 2, 3, or 4 (perhaps solo on odd weeks). Then a charity is selected with a need for an application. Each team is given a week to create a solution. The charity reviews the solutions and picks the application they like best. Then, the teams that weren't picked go back to "the conference room" and make a presentation to Steve Jobs about the merits of their solution and the problems with the other teams solutions. Then Steve fires one candidate. At the end, the winner is given funding to start a software company and can hire some of the candidates that weren't chosen.

What reality TV show would you like to see "Geekified?"

Gridlogix, a creator of XML Web Services-based integration solutions, announced the completion of the enterprise-wide integrated network for the eBay Denver data center, one of several regional mission-critical operations.

Stylus Studio announced the immediate availability of Stylus Studio 2006 Release 2 XML Enterprise Edition, the latest version of its award-winning XML IDE. The new release provides powerful new XML tools and utilities to simplify XML data integration tasks faced by developers. Software professionals can download a free trial of Stylus Studio 2006 Release 2 XML Enterprise Edition today.

Magic Software Enterprises, provider of business integration and development technology, announced that it would start shipping eDeveloper V10, its Composite Application development and deployment Framework on March 30.

The March issue of php|architect came out yesterday. I'm excited to see this issue finally out. I've taken over writing the monthly Test Pattern column from Marcus Baker and this issue contains my first column.

Writing doesn't come easy to me. Writing this blog for the past two years has helped me improve. However, I have to admit that I was quite worried just before the column was due. I just re-read it for the first time since turning it in and I am happy with the result. This is due in no small part to some great advise and encouragement from Marcus.

This month's column takes on the topic of organizing code. I wanted to convey some of the fundamental principles underlying the object oriented paradigm, but in a way that goes beyond objects. In the mid 90's, I had what I consider a major professional epiphany when I finally understood object oriented programming. This month's column is my best attempt to concisely explain the heart of that epiphany.

I'm proud of this month's column. I hope you'll check it out.

Chris Shiflett has some thoughts about the security corner column in the same issue.

Reactivity, independent XML Gateway company and Systemation, provider of SOA and Web services enabling technology and services in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg (Benelux), announced that its entire suite of Reactivity XML Gateways are now available in Benelux through a new distributor partnership.

Altova announced the latest version of its Unified Modeling Language development tool, Altova UModel 2006. The release features support for the UML 2.1 and XML 2.1 specifications, sequence diagrams, C# code generation and advanced messaging.

19 leading Internet companies have joined to ask the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to reconsider a decision that they say would deprive the .com domain registry of future competition, to the harm of all Internet users.

Stylus Studio, which bills itself as the industry-leading provider of XML development tools and data integration components for XML and legacy data integration, has announced the availability of a new groundbreaking video tutorial entitled: An Introduction to XML Schema Development with Stylus Studio.

UModel 2006 presents a rich visual interface and trouble-free, advanced capabilities that help level the UML learning curve and enhance developer productivity by making software modeling easy and fun, the company says.

James Gosling, the "father of Java," recently commented on PHP:

"PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems," he continued, "but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems."
...
PHP (for example) is able to make things simpler because it's 100% aimed at web pages, Gosling explained. Whereas with Java, he said, "We have a balancing act: we need the simplicity but we also need power."

The headline here should be "Father of Java says writing web applications in PHP is simpler." This is pretty much what I said in my Comparing PHP with other languages post:

Why is Java considered so complicated? One reason is that it is designed to run on everything from servers to cell phones, from desktops to dishwashers. It's scope is impossibly general. Of course, specialized tools such as Rails and PHP are more productive for their sweet spot applications.

Both .NET and Java have this be all things to everyone mentality. If you need that generalization, fine, but generalization is not without cost as Gosling points out.

He called Simplicity and Power "evil twin brothers" - "Building systems that have a lot of power just attract complexity. Because of the way that the world has become so interconnected it helps to have systems where it carries over from one domain to another. You can do web presnentation stuff really well in PHP but you couldn't write a library that does, say, interplanetary navigation.

So, if you are writing software for interplanetary navigations, by all means, choose Java. If you just want to write really good web applications quickly, choose PHP.

Regarding the scalability and performance characterization. I'm so tired of that. PHP performs and scales just fine for many people. Flickr makes an interesting case study of PHP scaling:

• Scaling fast and cheap - how we built flickr
• Hardware Layouts for LAMP Installations
• Open source helps Flickr share photos
• flickr and PHP

With Squizz, designers create easily an infinite range of samples, then apply new fabric instantly to existing models. This HandsOn demonstrates how you apply any kind of fabric to a model, so you can display new designs with your existing model.

TAGS: photoshop 3d | textile design | 3d | industrial design

HostBridge Technology, the provider of HostBridge software for XML-enabling CICS,announced that CA has certified the HostBridge integration software as interoperable with Advantage CA-Ideal for CA-Datacom (Advantage CA-Ideal), enabling organizations to integrate Advantage CA-Ideal applications with Web services platforms, application servers, or other host applications.

When we need to store XML in a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) we have to think of nonnative ways to store it, since the structure of XML does not fit the flat relations of the RDBMSs. Although some RDBMS vendors support XML storage and XQuery such as Oracle 10g (release 2), this support is not yet common. Some of the well-known RDBMSs are Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase IQ, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. If you have one of these products, or a similar product, you should be interested in reading this article.

The Codehaus XFire team has announced their 1.0 release. XFire is an open source Java SOAP framework built on a high performance, streaming XML model. XFire includes support for web service standards, an easy to use API, Spring integration, JBI support, and plugable bindings for POJOs, JAXB, and XMLBeans.

Altova announced that Software Development magazine has selected Altova UModel 2005 as a finalist for the 16th Annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards in the Design Tools and Modeling category. UModel was commended for features like powerful diagramming capabilities, advanced Java code generation, reverse engineering, and round-tripping functionality.