Over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site, Jeremy Jones noted last week the release of SQLAlchemy 0.30. Lloyd Kvam had mentioned in his TurboGears presentation last month that TurboGears was going to be expanding their current support for Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools to include SQLAlchemy. I'm looking forward to playing around with this and trying to grok the difference beween ORMs and cursors and views. So much to learn…
Tag Archives | LAMP
SQLAlchemy 0,30 released
Over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site, Jeremy Jones noted last week the release of SQLAlchemy 0.30. Lloyd Kvam had mentioned in his TurboGears presentation last month that TurboGears was going to be expanding their current support for Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) tools to include SQLAlchemy. I'm looking forward to playing around with this and trying to grok the difference beween ORMs and cursors and views. So much to learn…
Baystar exec says MSFT behind high-burn-rate funding of SCO
OSNews is pointing to the story that Microsoft's SCO Involvement Revealed. “A declaration by SCO's backer, BayStar has revealed that the software Giant Microsoft had more links to the anti-Linux bad-boy. The declaration made by from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb has turned up as part of IBM's evidence to the court. Goldfarb says that Baystar had been chucking USD 50 million at SCO despite concerns that it had a high cash burn rate. He also claims that former Microsoft senior VP for corporate development and strategy Richard Emerson discussed “a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would 'backstop', or guarantee in some way, BayStar's investment”.
I don't think it's really a surprise that MSFT and SUN are behind the funding of SCO to take a poke at IBM and slow the adoption of Linux through FUD. If you'd like to learn more about this incredibly complex case, GrokLaw is the place to visit. But be warned: it's easy to be dragged into all the fascinating nooks and crannies of the case.
The real question for me is whether MSFT and SUN succeeded in their ventures. SUN has done a turn-around and is re-inventing themselves as the green company with better price/power/performance for the internet. MSFT has… almost shipped Vista. Linux, meanwhile, has moved, up, out and around, scaling to greater multi-CPU architectures, developing a better virtualization story, making huge progress in hardware compatibility, and fielding several worthy desktop competitors. LAMP is not a risky choice for IT; it's a question of which commercially-supported distributions and stacks to choose and ensuring the eager technicians in house get the training they need. If the SCO case cooled enthusiasm and take-up any, it gave FOSS advocates time to get their act together and pay a little closer attention to governance and provenance and licensing terms, cleaning up their houses and getting their story straight. Meanwhile, Microsoft… almost shipped Vista.
If SCO/Baystar/Microsoft/SUN thought that IBM would roll over and settle out of court, they badly miscalculated.
Fonality acquires TrixBox
Slashdot post: Fonality Acquires Trixbox. An anonymous reader writes “MySQL's Brian Aker has a good commentary on the big news in acquisitions today that Fonality has acquired Trixbox, the Linux Telephony distribution.” From the article: “So why is this big news? Trixbox is the distribution for telephony on Linux today. They have put together a vertical Linux distribution dedicated to telephony. It combines Asterisk with a web based interface backed by MySQL, integrated into the SugarCRM solution. As Redhat today is the LAMP of the IT Enterprise and Web Framework, (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP), Trixbox is the LAMP stack of the Telephony market, Linux , Asterisk, MySQL, Perl/PHP.”
Good news. I saw TrixBox (nee Asterisk @ Home) demonstrated at the MonadLUG group by Tim Lind, who's gone on to do a couple of very successful Asterisk installs, and it's on my “I'd really like to try that out if only I had more time” list.
Web site disasters made easy…
InfoWorld: Application development relays a delightful tale of classic bungling in replacing an app in no need of replacement: Web site disasters made easy. “In 1997, I was working in the IT department at a midsize consumer products company in the San Francisco Bay Area. My job was mainly to keep the network up; the company had no Web presence. But as our competitors ate more and more of our lunch, it gradually dawned on management that we ought to be selling online. So I built a LAMP (Linux, Apache, and Perl/Python/PHP) sales portal that handled online ordering and a corporate Web site. It generated revenue from the outset.”
I think most software developers have seen similar tales. This one's told well.
XAMPP
I've been involved for a couple of years in developing Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python apps for various clients. During most of that time, I've used in-house Linux servers for prototype, development and testing, and Linux servers deployed at the client site or a hosting provider for production work. Recently, I wanted to spin off a second copy of an application on a local Windows laptop to test some radical changes while the rest of the development team continued to work away on the dev server. Ideally, I wanted to install the entire LAMP set on my local workstation without a lot of work, configuration, downloads, HowTos, and so forth. XAMPP offers free, prepackaged installation modules for Linux, Windows, OS X and Solaris, bundled with a dozen handy utilities like PEAR and phpMyAdmin. Installation was a click, click, click, done! process. Reading a few READMEs got a few non-standard settings like enabling InnoDB data storage. Slick!
If you need a quickly set up XAMPP stack, you'll want to check this out.
Hacking WordPress with Visual FoxPro
My first attempt at importing blog postings from Radio Userland to WordPress resulted in over seventy categories. Every post with a different combination of categories like “MySQL; LAMP; Technology; Security” created a new category with that exact name, rather than a one-to-many post-to-categories representation. WordPress supports this, as does Radio. The communication breakdown occured between the two, in an export routine I used that created MT-compatible text files.
I could have kept experimenting with different imports, but I’d rather just plow ahead with what I’ve got, so I took a look at the WordPress schema and figured out what I’d need to hack. I used Visual FoxPro to read in the category table, figure out which (multiple) category posts I should have instead of the single, multi-category category, and rewrote the many-to-many file that joins the posts to the categories.
That narrowed it down to 15 categories. I added a new one, “Personal” for notes about politics and personal goings-on. I hope to squash the four, now three “My” categories, which are the old example categories left over from the original Radio install. Stay tuned!
I noted the counts of the number of posts per category was showing zero for several categories. There’s a (denormalized) category_count field in the category table. I popped open phpMyAdmin on the server to poke around and finally issued a “update wp_categories set category_count = (select count(*) from wp_post2cat where category_id = cat_ID)” to get the counts to update. Thirteen rows updated in 0.0635 sec. Darn near as fast as Rushmore.
MySQL OLEDB driver
I’ve been doing a lot of work with MySQL lately, developing in-house LAMP applications for clients to do data entry as well as internet-facing sites for data retrieval and processing. A couple of clients are querying their in-house MySQL database for mail merge, form fill-in and analysis. I’ve used the MyODBC driver available from the MySQL AB web site. They offer a number of connectors, including ODBC, JDBC, a C interface. I was surprised to see they did not offer an OLEDB interface. In a recent conversation on Ed Leafe’s OpenTech forum, Sam Thorton pointed out that an OLEDB provider is available at SourceForge.net. Cool! I’ll have to check it out.
Introductory Python course in Merrimack NH
At last night’s PySIG meeting at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Kent Johnson announced that he’ll be teaching a course on Programming in Python for beginning programmers for the Merrimack Schools Adult Ed program. At $120 for 10 nights of two hours each, it sounds like a bargain. Unfortunately, I’ll be teaching LAMP at the NHTI Center for Training and Business Development, otherwise, I might attend myself.
Jon Udell on LAMP and WAMP: the best of both worlds is somewhere in the middle
Jon’s Radio blogs LAMP and WAMP:
“Although LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) is often synonymous with open source, Windows can be a solid leg supporting the platform. The rising popularity of PHP on Windows servers is one indication of this trend. To zealots in both camps this may look like an unholy alliance, but I live in both camps and it makes perfect sense to me…. In some ways Windows and open source are fellow travelers, and have been for a long time.” [Full story at InfoWorld.com]