I thought I'd throw in a question for a change! As I'm quite sure at least some of my readers are skilled PHP developers, some of them might be able to throw in some insightful remarks when it comes to the future of PHP5 and frameworks.

I guess most developers will agree on this one: We're all getting sick and tired of writing so-called 'plumbing code'. It's a boring, tedious and flat out annoying job to write CRUD classes (Create, Read, Update, Delete) over and over again when developing web applications. Other boring things are form validation, input filtering, database abstraction layers and complex presentation layers. Then there's AJAX. Most of us like it, most of us want to do it but very few of us like to write hundreds of lines of javascript code.

The folks who came up with Ruby On Rails were right on the money when they came up with their framework. This thing eliminates most of those shitty tasks no one likes to perform.

lees dit artikel in het Nederlands

After a period of secrecy it's time to get it out in the open: I'm building a new weblog network. Not just on my own, I must add. The network will be called Dutch Directions. You've seen the snazzy logo in my footer. Now you'll learn what it's all about. At this moment we're still working very hard on finishing the main website on time but the community has already taken off. We've sent out over 40 invites for the first acceptance round of which 18 weblogs have already accepted. The lineup is very diverse in terms of content and I'm extremely proud to be able to let the world know we have some serious quality on board. If you've received an invite but you didn't decide whether you should join us or not, maybe this article and the current list of members will encourage you to do so. If you haven't been invited yet, keep watching us. We'll be accepting new member sites very soon after we've launched! The network will launch officially on March 11 at the award ceremony for the Dutch Bloggies. On this day our splash page will be replaced by a full blown platform for the network.

For now, read on to learn more about Dutch Directions!

I placed this entry under 'programming' but it might as well have been placed under 'rants' really. I've been programming PHP for over six years now. It's still definitely my language of choice because of it's speed, ease of use, ease of deployment and last but not least: because of the huge community with all of it's advantages. However there's one thing that's really bugging me lately: PHP is seriously suffering from what a friend of mine called 'the Apache syndrome'. Apache 2.x has been released a long, long time ago. Yet, tons of servers are still running 1.3.x and they probably will continue to do so for years to come.

While this isn't all that serious for a webserver (as long as it serves it's stuff and the server doesn't break it's fine) I believe the case is different with PHP.

Let’s have this out in the open: Mint is being pirated. Which puts myself—and all of Mint’s paying customers—in a difficult position.Shaun Inman

This entry on Shaun Inman's website has got to be the most remarkable blog entry I've read in a long, long time. In the rest of the posting Shaun is discussing possible ways to discover who is pirating Mint. I've been gazing at my screen in awe for quite a while after reading the rest of the entry.

Note: Even though the title might suggest so, I don't think Shaun was so naive that he didn't see this coming. I wrote this article because I seriously question the merits of creating protection schemes for software.

The past few weeks have been weird and filled with uncertainty. I've lost quite a lot of sleep while trying to decide whether I would take the plunge or not but I finally managed to come to a decision. Freelancer is what I'll be! Starting this monday I'll be an independent developer and designer, ready to (hopefully) rock the internet with interesting projects in the field of PHP programming, XHTML/CSS, AJAX techniques and design.

The decision has definitely not been easy. Pareto, the company for which I've been working in the past year has been great to me and I've had a lot of fun with all the nice collegues there. Yet I felt the need to move on and take the next 'milestone size step' in my professional life. A step with an importance of the same magnitude as the one I took back in 1999 when I decided I should quit my university study to become an internet specialist. A step I didn't ever regret! I hope I'll be looking back at this next step in the same way a couple of years from now.