Dynamic languages have changed the landscape and their only downfall is speed compared to native languages like C and C++.  C/C++ have had a bit of a resurgence with embedded devices and such sucesses as the iphone and ipod touch.  To get the most out of these devices native is the way to go.  Both iPhone SDK and Android NDK are native based.  The best games and graphically intensive applications need hardware rendering and the fastest way to get there is native. Larger companies like Google need to take advantage of speed to market and fast execution.  The outcome of that appears to be the Go language.

Native applications are more complex to manage, so lots of work like Unladen Swallow getting Python running with LLVM, PyPy and others to make CPython faster.  Google has supported Unladen Swallow.  But a company the size of Google has massive scalability problems to solve, and maybe they are looking to go more native?  The go language is now available from Google and it is deemed “Python meets C++”.  Where Apple has Objective-C (which is actually as old as C++) which is a bit more message and event driven, Google has Go which is much like Python and other dynamic languages but much closer to C++ speeds.

We will learn more about Go over time but it looks like it is taking the best of both the dynamic and native/static worlds in programming languages which is a great evolution in technology.

This update brings in some great stuff like routing controllers to use the ASP.NET MVC architecture, csharp inteactive shell and other great performance enhancements to an already speedy C#.

Python 3000

Python 2.6 was released not too long ago as an update adding great stuff like simplejson within python.  But Python 3000 might be the release that draws lots of usage and programmers new and veteran.

Having 2.0 solid and complete is a great step to making production apps run off of it.

Microsoft Compatible APIs

• ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases.

• ASP.NET 2.0 API for developing Web-based applications.

• Windows.Forms 2.0 API to create desktop applications.

• System.XML 2.0: An API to manipulate XML documents.

• System.Core: Provides support for the Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

• System.Xml.Linq: Provides a LINQ provider for XML.

• System.Drawing 2.0 API: A portable graphics rendering API.

Mono APIs

• Gtk# 2.12: A binding to the Gtk+ 2.12 and GNOME libraries for creating desktop applications on Linux, Windows and MacOS X.
• Mono.Cecil: A library to manipulate ECMA CLI files (the native format used for executables and libraries).
• Mono.Cairo: A binding to the Cairo Graphics library to produce 2D graphics and render them into a variety of forms (images, windows, postscript and PDF).
• Mono’s SQLite support: a library to create and consume databases created with SQLite.
• Mono.Posix: a library to access Linux and Unix specific functionality from your managed application. With both a low-level interface as well as higher level interfaces.

Third Party APIs bundled with Mono

• Extensive support for databases: PostgresSQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL server, SQLite and Firebird.
• C5 Generics Library: we are bundling the C5 generics collection class library as part of Mono.

Compilers

These compilers are part of the Mono 2.0 release:

• C# 3.0 compiler implementation, with full support for LINQ.
• Visual Basic 8 compiler.
• IL assembler and disassembler and the development toolchain required to create libraries and applications.

I am pleased to announce that Mono C# compiler (gmcs) has now full C# 3.0 support. Most of the features has been available since Mono 1.2.6 release. However, with the upcoming Mono 2.0 release we will also support complex LINQ expressions and mainly expression trees which is fairly overlooked new feature with a lot of potential.

For anyone interested in compiling and running this LukeH’s slightly extreme LINQ example I have good news. It compiles on Mono and it runs as fast as on .NET.

Lightweight REST framework for Java

Do you want to embrace the architecture of the Web and benefit from its simplicity and scalability? Leverage our innovative REST engine and start blending your Web Sites and Web Services into uniform Web Applications!

Java is making things more lightweight now with lots of emerging kits that compete with other web ready platforms like Python, Ruby, .NET, PHP etc. After this many years things get bloated and need to be simplified.  I think this will start winning people over in this direction.

Each platform has their own way to do this, but there is a common baseplane way to do caching, yes even in .NET. That is with memcached. Memcached is a very common and useful tool that makes caching data and cache layers in an application something that can be the same on every platform. The benefit of using memcached is it is open, common and it has APIs for nearly every popular web development platform (and can be wired in easily to platforms that don’t have their own cache mechanism). Why write your caching layer specific to a certain platform when you can memcache?

If you write high performance web apps and don’t memcache, I feel bad for your server budget and your late nights when that ad buy hits or something popular on your site becomes all the rave.

Perl API

An object-oriented Perl module can be found on CPAN as Cache::Memcached or in Subversion (ChangeLog). (GPL/Artistic)

The Perl API takes advantage of the server’s opaque flag support and sets its “complex” flag whenever the object being stored or retrieved isn’t a plain scalar. In that case, the Storable module is used to freeze and thaw the value automatically going in and out of the memcached.

There is also Cache::Memcached::Fast—another Perl client written in C, largely compatible with the original Cache::Memcached. Available on CPAN at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Cache-Memcached-Fast/.

PHP API

There are tons of PHP libraries available, in different conditions. But it now seems there’s an official one:

• PHP PECL memcached client — official PHP client

Python API

The Python client we’d previously released was just a prototype, and we don’t have regular Python programmers on hand. The folks at Tummy.com have took over maintenance. See ftp://ftp.tummy.com/pub/python-memcached/ for the latest versions.

Ruby API

• http://www.deveiate.org/code/Ruby-MemCache.html
• gem install memcache-client
• http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/doc/fauna/memcached/. C backed client wrapping libmemcached.

Java API

A Java API is maintained by Greg Whalin from Meetup.com. You can find that library here:

• http://www.whalin.com/memcached/ — Java API for memcached

An improved Java API maintained by Dustin Sallings is also available. Aggressively optimised, ability to run async, supports binary protocol, etc. See site for details:

• http://bleu.west.spy.net/~dustin/projects/memcached/ — Improved Java API for memcached

C# API

There are multiple C# APIs:

• https://sourceforge.net/projects/memcacheddotnet/
• http://www.codeplex.com/EnyimMemcached/ – Client developed in .NET 2.0 keeping performance and extensibility in mind. (Supports consistent hashing.)
• http://code.google.com/p/beitmemcached/ – Client developed by BeIT with many new features.

C API

Multiple C libraries for memcached exist:

• apr_memcache by Paul Querna; Apache Software License version 2.0
• libmemcached by Brian Aker; BSD license. This is a new library, under heavy development.
• libmemcache by Sean Chittenden; BSD license. This is the original C library. It is no longer under active development. You should try libmemcached instead.

Postgres API

The pgmemcache project allows you to access memcache servers from Postgresql Stored Procedures and Triggers. More details and downloads are available at:

• http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgmemcache/

Chicken Scheme

• http://chicken.wiki.br/memcached — Chicken Scheme library

Lua

• http://luamemcached.luaforge.net/ — Lua library

MySQL API

The memcache_engine allows memcache to work as a storage engine to MySQL. This means that you can SELECT/UPDATE/INSERTE/DELETE from it as though it is a table in MySQL.

• memcache_engine

A set of MySQL UDFs (user defined functions) to work with memcached using libmemcached.

• MySQL UDFs for memcached

Protocol

To write a new client, check out the protocol docs. Be aware that the most important part of the client is the hashing across multiple servers, based on the key, or an optional caller-provided hashing value. Feel free to join the mailing list (or mail me directly) for help, inclusion in Subversion, and/or a link to your client from this site.

The best part, they support all good platforms and even Lua, and wisely they left out VB.NET, no worries, VB.NET’ers will never know. Only kidding…

Finally, memcached is distributed, most cache layers included with platforms listed above are in process and per machine.  If you are running your code on a webfarm memcached is the only way to go.

PHP gets alot of heat mainly because it is critical mass and when that happens mediocrity comes in but since PHP5, PHP has really grown to be a great web development toolkit with many frameworks to choose from. But which one do you choose for your development? Do you want an MVC, or do you want to piece together an MVC from a template library, model framework and custom controller?

Well if you want to pick an MVC there are some great ones.

There is a site that has a decent ranking that is similar to my own likings in PHP frameworks that lists them like this:

I have not used QPHP, Zoop, Prado or PHPDevShell but plan on doing reviews of all of them. I have a simple application that i will be building in the latest versions of each platform to help show highlights, pros, cons and the ins and outs of each.

Why? And why PHP? I have long been a developer of web sites and applications. Until around 2005 PHP was not accepted in enterprisey, but this is changing. Usually .NET, Java, Perl, Python and recently Ruby were the dictated choice of the clients or environments to code in. But with PHP5 now stable and PHP4 being retired, PHP is a insurgent platform that muscled its way into the web development world in a grassroots effort, from the bottom up. That takes work and the platform deserves a second look from people that have written it off.

PHP runs many large sites from Facebook, to Digg, to Yahoo and many other platforms even Microsoft is trying to buy. PHP might even be responsible for MySQLs meteoric rise to just recently being purchased by Sun. It is a platform that is being used to build platforms. It works on any platform, it is low-bar entry and high bar scalability and architecture if using a great framework or architecture (if custom or using an existing framework).

I am an engineer, developer, architect and interactive/game developer, I use the tools for the job no matter what is chosen. Any good developer can make a system work even with bad technology but today there isn’t alot of that going around. So many great platforms, languages and frameworks, why limit to a certain OS or platform. Open your horizons and stop specializing yourself out of special skills. Choose a tool that works on just about anything on the server side and doesn’t take over servers and take 3 times as long to develop. Try some PHP5 MVC frameworks today.

Of course this is just a heuristic check and only finds out if your application on the surface has issues with running on a mono platform such as calls to p/invoke to windows apis or unsafe code that uses native calls but it is a great place to start.

The Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA) tool helps you identify issues you may have when porting your .Net application to Mono. It helps pinpoint platform specific calls (P/Invoke) and areas that are not yet supported by the Mono project.

While MoMA can help show potential issues, there are many complex factors that cannot be covered by a simple tool. MoMA may fail to point out areas that will cause problems, and may point out areas which will not actually be an issue.

Use the results provided as a guide to get you started on porting your application, but remember the true test is actually running your application on Mono.

For a description of the errors that MoMA detects and how to deal with them, see MoMA – Issue Descriptions.

I have recently been really interested in making platforms and applications that aren’t limited by the OS they are contained in.  Thus mono is a very interesting platform now that it supports 2.0 fully and all the generic goodness to limit boxing/unboxing, common code between .net 2.0 apps (which are pretty much mainstream now) and developing for more of a standard that ensures your apps are portable.

Granted .NET 3.0 and 3.5 (pretty much the same version really with the addition of new frameworks such as WCF, LINQ which is very cool and functional as well as Silverlight) but most places deployed code is still .NET 2.0 and the poor souls working on very constricting .NET 1.0 and 1.1.

Also, recently Moonlight the Mono version of Silverlight has been released for alpha.

Here is a list of the Tenjin Templating engines:

• pyTenjin
• phpTenjin
• rbTenjin
• jsTenjin
• plTenjin

Changes

(Python) (Ruby) (PHP) (Perl) (JavaScript)

User’s Guide

(Python) (Ruby) (PHP) (Perl) (JavaScript)

FAQ

(Python) (Ruby) (PHP) (Perl) (JavaScript)

Examples

(Python) (Ruby) (PHP) (Perl) (JavaScript)

Presentation

2007 LL Spirit LightningTalk (full-version) (Japanese)

Here is what the template markup looks like:

This

<table>
<tbody>
<?py i = 0 ?>
<?py for item in ['<foo>', 'bar&bar', '"baz"']: ?>
<?py     i += 1 ?>
<tr>
<td>#{item}</td>
<td>${item}</td>
</tr>
<?py #end ?>
<tbody>

</table>

Produces This

<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><foo></td>
<td>&lt;foo&gt;</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>bar&bar</td>
<td>bar&amp;bar</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>"baz"</td>
<td>&quot;baz&quot;</td>
</tr>
<tbody>
</table>

Here are some speed results