Amazon's EC2 service is one of the most attractive web services you can get; pay per use, high availability and extremely cheap. Some time a go, I blogged about how Drupal could use a "reverse throtteling": role out more servers when under load (instead of, reduce functionality when under load).

Now check out this extreme cool screencast on how to do automatically loadbalancing on EC2 at
WeoCEO . A must see for anyone in to ICT architecture, webhosting or Drupal.

NB: there is at least one Drupal site on EC2, about EC2: http://elastic8.com/, not frequently updated but a good read!

Over at Nexen.net there is an article on how a combined effort of multiple Open Source project will drop support of PHP4.

PHP projects join forces to Go PHP 5

A consortium of PHP developers has announced today that several leading Open Source PHP projects will be dropping support for older versions of PHP in upcoming releases of their software as of February 5, 2008 as par t of a joint effort to move the PHP developer community fully onto PHP version 5. The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the effort.

Dropping PHP support has been a hot issue since Rasmus asked Drupal to do so. It has always been a chicken egg problem, many shared webhosters only supported 4 and many OSS PHP projects supported 4 meaning a slow rise of PHP5 and hence installed legacy and no more "fail fast, fail cheap" slogans.

More information can be found on drupal.org/gophp5, gophp5.org (a Drupal site) and you can digg it as well

Go PHP, Go Drupal!

Over at Gregory Szorc's blog there is Yet Another Rant on why Drupal (and other PHP applications) should focus on PHP5.

Although I pick on WordPress for under-utilizing PHP, there are countless-- and many of them successful-- projects that do the same. Drupal, which I love because it is one of the few web applications that handles modularization and feature extensibility properly, only utilizes PHP 4 features. Although I love the design philosophy of the software from a 20,000m overview, when you start to hack away, you find that the API is very difficult to understand. There are no classes, so all functionality is provided via functions in the global namespace. And, the include files are named .inc, so Apache will serve the content at plain-text by default, so users can easily see what version you are running and cross-reference against known exploits (luckily a .htaccess is generated that prevents this for many, but not all installations).

It continues:
I believe the biggest problem hindering PHP 5 adoption is ignorance. The average PHP "programmer" is ignorant of the features available in PHP. ... The differences between PHP 4 and PHP 5 are staggering. I consider them to be two separate languages. .

I think some of the logic is false. And as long as conservative -but widely used distros- liked Debian still use PHP4 even if 5 is stable, we should at least support PHP4 IMHO.

The poll I have on my site about using PHP5 vs 4 is far from academic and just for fun. But hours after the poll was posted on Planet Drupal there were nearly 100 posts split even between 4 and 5 so I think it is fair to say that many Drupal.org readers host still their production site in a PHP4 environment

I think the the social software building block posting of Gene is to the point. I dont know what "Web2.0" is, but I like to see it as "the net as a platform". Strangly enough it was not Oreilly who saw this first. It was Tim who popularized the term, maybe even first coined it though I doubt this very much. But it was sun who first really saw this and acted op on it. Sun's slogans always have been cheesy:

1. "Take it to the nth" (nobody gets this)
2. "We are the dot in the dot-com" (timeless :-) )
3. "We make the net work" (note the net, they worked together with Microsoft during this period)
4. "The Network is the Computer" (now thats the one!)

For a computer company it was daring and visionary to say that the network is the computer. If it was cisco that would have this slogan it would be normal, but for a computer / software vendor, it was a great slogan and still is and basically sums up what "Web 2.0" is.

But Gene Smith looks at the social web and defines it as:

1. Identity - a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
2. Presence - a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
3. Relationships - a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
4. Conversations - a way of talking to other people through the system
5. Groups - a way of forming communities of interest
6. Reputation - a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who's a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
7. Sharing - a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

(based on sylloge.com)

He puts that list in a nice diagram so even managers get it:
[image:7925 size=preview]

And then plots a couple of "social sites" (twitter, flickr, digg) with colors on how they score in what area. Based upon those scores and the honeycomb, I plotted Drupal.org (the site including subsites as groups.d.o, not the software) on it:

[image:7926 size=preview]

The Drupal.org site lacks "presence" and to be honest there is I think no need for this on Drupal.org. Most people know how to find each other and use other communication channles like IRC or skype to communicate in real time with presence/availability integrated in that medium.

Drupal.org is not really made for "sharing". Sure, code is shared, and there is some good workflow around patches, but it is not a "sharing site" like flickr is for example.

Relations is also a point not implemented at Drupal.org, there is groups.d.o but it is a bout organic groups, not about social networking. And the same holds true for "reputation". You can see what a user displays about himself or how many commits someone made. But users cant rank other users like on eBay.

Conversation, Identity and Groups is the core of Drupal.org and hence score high.

Now Drupal (the code, not the site) can score high on all these areas I think, with maybe "relationships" as a weaker area. I will redo this diagram in time wit the Drupal code and contributed modules plotted on it.

I know that the ranking in the different areas as I did for Drupal.org is debatable. So please post your comment if you disagree (note: they will be published after a couple of hours, anti spam tags most ham spam)