Installing SugarCRM 4.5 OS on my SuSE 10.1 was clean and nice as expected. It was just the php-json module, which SugarCRM installer stated it's optional, made SugarCRM perform very slow and in most cases exceeding execution time and leaking memory. Anyways I wanted to install the JSON module to see how things will go, but unfortunately my dear SuSE 10.1 repositories didn't like it when I made 'smart install php5-json'.

Hi all, I liked vTiger 4.2.x as a good and balanced OpenSource CRM solution. Most other powerful solutions weren't LAMP, Java and other technologies. Anyways I developed for some time over vTiger 4.2 and things were fine, still I had some criticism about the vTiger code which I had discussed with Gopal, one of the core developers. Anyways, I was awaiting the release of vTiger 5.0 unpatiently and as soon as an RC was there I was grapping it, installing, watching the differences.

A month ago, I was working on some AJAX stuff on vTiger. I was generating some form elements with JavaScript with appendChild() function. The elements appeared fine but when testing the form with some data and submitting, the generated form fields passed on data on neither POST nor GET. The problem was with Firefox, Opera and Konquerer but not on Internet Explorer!! After doing some checks and re-building the whole thing I found out it's a problem with nesting page elements, for example when you put start a FORM tag inside a DIV then you close the DIV then finally close the tag.

Some long time ago, I decided to move from simple text editors (mine was Macromedia Dreamweaver) to an Integrated Development Environment, aka IDE. I have so far tried some good number of IDE's (or software that promises to be so) and text editors. The major problem with IDE is system resources, a normal IDE will kill your 256MBs Ram machine, a good one may not feel comfert with 512MBs of Ram dedicated to it! After spending some enough amount of time with each one, I think it's a good time to give credit when credit is due: Zend Studio: 8/10 Pros:

Autocomplete for PHP built-in functions and your own functions, variables in your current scope (this is a good one).

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a seminar about Ruby on Rails, things were nice with Ruby and Rails, I liked scaffolding, I also liked the various features of Rails and I think it's the real power of RoR. Afterwards I deceided to put Rails versus Cake PHP, a PHP framework that works on all recent PHP versions from 4.3.2 till 5.0 (I haven't tested it on PHP 5.1 but I think it will need some hands-on work to have it error-proof). I started by creating a simple e-commerce database-driven site with them both and overall result I get is: I really see that Cake PHP is a PHP version of Rails.

Since the lauch of PHP3, many things has changed. PHP is now dominating (according to NetCraft), with some great number of projects created everyday on SourceForge and FreshMeat, still I see a problem with PHP developing: PHP was not built for developers. PHP was built for designers and programming newbies, maybe this helped many snthausiasts to join the developing community, but it, for sorrow, convinced some PHP developers that what they do is correct which isn't the case usually. This is, IMHO, the point that sets ASP.NET in a higher rank against PHP: it was built for developers and it's a real programming language.

Since I started to read the news about PHP5, I was happy that Zend has finally deceided to bring us some real OOP to the world of PHP, regardless whether the OOP approch in PHP5 is what really we all wanted or not, still a good step I see in PHP5. The major problem with PHP5 was its bad backword-compatibility with PHP4; forget about PHP3; thus major PHP scripts specially open-source mostly faild to work on PHP5 environment. The reason I saw behind this failure was mainly in the pass-by-reference since PHP5 passes by reference while PHP4 passes by value (which is extremely strange thing). Anyways, I; like many PHP coders; started to gather news and stuff about PHP5: what's new, how to convert current code, and so forth. I do not think I was that late to do this but after I was OK with all the new stuff in PHP5 I suddenly read in the news about PHP6!!