Spanish open source venture provides tools and documentation for PHP developers who want to create Android apps.
Developers at an open source company in Spain are leading an effort to boost PHP application development for Android-based phones.

Called PHP for Android (PFA), the project supports Google's Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) project, formerly called Android Scripting Environment (ASE).

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"PFA aims to make PHP development in Android not only possible but also feasible [by] providing tools and documentation," said PFA founder and developer Ivan Mosquera Paulo, a software engineer at Irontec, near Bilbao, Spain, in an email on Friday. More information and releases are found at PFA's website.



PHP support would follow the availability of Android interpreters for Python, Lua, and JavaScript, Mosquera Paulo said.

"I thought that there was no reason why PHP support couldn't be added, so I started to work on it with my team at Irontec. We were really interested in achieving this because we had already worked in Android development (in a project for Vodafone) but our favorite tool is PHP," said Mosquera Paulo. "We thought that it would be great having PHP available.

"We thought that this project would be really interesting for any PHP developer. And we have had far more than 10,000 unique visits, so this proves that we were right. We want this project to be a chance for a lot of people for whom there was a huge development wall: Java," Mosquera Paulo said. The Java language is the primary means of authoring Android applications.



Currently, it is possible to run PHP scripts on Android via PFA's unofficial ASE build or its PhpForAndroid application.

"Our current APK (Android app) provides support to SL4A," Mosquera Paulo said. "Thanks to this, PHP developers can run scripts and test their PHP code on their Android phone or emulator. Our APK installs a PHP version compiled for Android phones and a few extra needed files."

Soon, it will be possible to distribute that PHP code as an Android application.

"We're working on this, and this will mean that PHP developers will be able to sell their apps like Java developers do," said Mosquera Paulo.

The success of the project depends on community feedback and support, Mosquera Paulo said: "We have seen a lot of interest, so we hope that more and more people get involved."

SL4A brings scripting languages to Android by allowing developers to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device, according to Google Labs.

This article, "PHP development comes to Google Android," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

Hosted version of the open source CMS moves to public beta stage

Drupal Gardens, the planned cloud version of the open source Drupal content management system, went into a public beta stage Thursday, thus making it widely available for tryouts , said Drupal founder Dries Buytaert.

The technology previously had been available through a controlled, private beta program, said Buytaert, founder and CTO of Acquia, in an interview at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland.

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"As of today, everybody can go to our Web site, drupalgardens.com," to get the beta release, he said.

The long-term vision for Drupal Gardens calls for setting up a marketplace where developers can offer application templates for the CMS. "It's a little bit like an app store," said Buytaert.

Drupal 7, the next major version of the CMS, still is in development, with developers still needing to fix about 44 critical bugs before it can be released, Buytaert said. A beta version of Drupal 7 is anticipated for August, with the general release eyed for the third quarter of this year.

Drupal 7 will add support for the Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, said Buytaert. Support of these databases should make it easier for large organizations to adopt Drupal, he said.

Also at OSCON, a Microsoft official cited Microsoft's efforts with cloud computing via its Windows Azure platform. But there are no plans to offer the technology via open source, said Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability strategy at Microsoft. "We're not going to be open-sourcing Azure," said Paoli in an interview.

Azure, he said, will work with open source technologies, such as Java and PHP. Also, developers using Eclipse open source tooling can build applications for Azure, he said.


During a keynote presentation, Paoli cited Microsoft's launch Thursday of a Web site devoted to conversation about cloud interoperability, at www.microsoft.com/cloud/interop. He cited four key interoperability elements of a cloud platform: data portability, standards, ease of migration and deployment and developer choice.

Thursday's brief series of keynote presentations at OSCON also featured David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, who suggested possible additions to the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Perl Python) technology stack. Additions could be considered for caching and data analysis, he said, noting Facebook's extensive network and its use of technologies, such as the Hadoop distributed computing platform.

Facebook has seen its data storage level increase by about 70 times in the past two years, Recordon said.

This article, "Drupal Gardens getting ready to bloom," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

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