Open Source News

As per the Firefox 3 Schedule, Firefox 3 Beta 1 is schedule for the end of July and Beta 2 is set for September. Further betas and release candidates will be made available as necessary until the final launch of Firefox 3.

Firefox has released Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 which is now available for testing. New features in this development milestone of Mozilla Firefox 3 include an upgraded SQLite engine, improved cookie performance, support for site-specific text size preference and various Gecko 1.9 bug fixes.  Gran Pradiso is codeword of Firfox 3 Project.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Eclipse Foundation invite submissions to OS Summit Asia 2007, to be held Nov 26 - 30 at the Cyberport, Hong Kong. A ground breaking event, OS Summit Asia is the first joint conference between the Apache and Eclipse Foundations and the first such event in Hong Kong and greater China. OS Summit features a wide range of activities designed to promote the exchange of ideas amongst foundation members, innovators, developers, vendors, and users interested in the future of Open Source technology.

PHP Community announced that all active development work of PHP4 will stop by year end. PHP 5 will be the default supported version. It’s great news with great challenges. While we love PHP 5 for its extraordinary features and call it a modern day language, the truth is that less than 1% hosts provides PHP5 hosting today. I wonder what will happen to those thousands of applications, millions of lines of codes, products that are running on PHP 4. It will be some task to convert the existing applications to PHP 5 compliant.

Community has launched a campaign “Go PHP 5” (http://www.gophp5.org). Applications which are no longer supporting PHP 4 are participating in this campaign. It is a good beginning! This should have started 1 year back giving web hosts, PHP developers to start migrating. Please start listing your applications on gophp5.org and support the transition process.

I hope that PHP 6 is being developed by being completely backward compliant unlike relationships of PHP 4 and PHP 5.

Read more about this announcement on http://www.php.net  

Vineet Agrawal

http://www.osscube.com

10 things you (probably) didn’t know about PHP A few obvious items in this list, but a number of gems too. Even PHP experts should take a quick look—there …

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Duration : 2 months

The IOSN South Asian node is issuing a Call for Papers within the sub-region on the following topics -

Objectives

Each of these papers are expected to :

• Introduce Free/Open Source Software, Open Standards, and Open Content briefly and provide a rationale for the use of Open Standards, Open Source, Open Content in the respective sectors
• Profile FOSS based applications for the domains
• Compare FOSS-based applications with proprietary equivalents and explain benefits and disadvantages
• Provide case studies on successful deployments, scale of deployment and usage
• Provide references to research material used

for more information visit http://www.iosn.net/regional/call-for-papers-july2007/call-for-papers-july-2007/

The PHP development team announced the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.3. This release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Further details about the PHP 5.2.3 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.3 on php.net

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.3:

Fixed an integer overflow inside chunk_split() (by Gerhard Wagner, CVE-2007-2872)
Fixed possible infinite loop in imagecreatefrompng. (by Xavier Roche, CVE-2007-2756)
Fixed ext/filter Email Validation Vulnerability (MOPB-45 by Stefan Esser, CVE-2007-1900)
Fixed bug #41492 (open_basedir/safe_mode bypass inside realpath()) (by bugs dot php dot net at chsc dot dk)
Improved fix for CVE-2007-1887 to work with non-bundled sqlite2 lib.
Added mysql_set_charset() to allow runtime altering of connection encoding.
For users upgrading to PHP 5.2 from PHP 5.0 and PHP 5.1, an upgrade guide is available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.2.3.

Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Managers writes that Zend Framework 1.0 is released.  Hurray!! we were anxiously waiting for the release.  Here is what Bill is saying

“

I am very proud to announce availability of the first production release of Zend Framework.

Many thanks to the scores of PHP developers who have worked for many months to make this product milestone possible. Zend Framework has followed a mission to provide classes that are extremely simple, yet powerful and extensible. Zend Framework is now the best class library available for PHP 5 web application development.

The Zend Framework project has developed solutions to solve frequent needs of web application developers, including the following areas:

• Powerful MVC framework
• Database access solution that balances ORM with efficiency and simplicity
• Lucene-compatible search engine
• Advanced I18N support
• Robust authentication/authorization classes and input filtering
• Rich web services client interfaces, including Google Data APIs and StrikeIron
• Many other useful classes to make you as productive as possible
• Thorough and high-quality test suites and documentation
• Open-source development process with an active community provides continuous review and testing

The Zend Framework is the best PHP 5 framework to meet modern business needs, being licensed under the New BSD license. The Contributor License Agreement assures that all code has been provided freely.

Zend Framework is already in use in dozens of applications, so it is proven to be production-ready.

Download Zend Framework 1.0.0 at http://framework.zend.com/

Best Regards,
Bill Karwin
Product Engineering Manager
Zend Technologies”

There will be a keynote, more than 15 sessions, and exhibition booths over the course of two days. About half the sessions are presented in English with English-Japanese simultaneous translation. We have arranged some especially popular sessions, circling around MySQL high availability solutions and performance tuning — imported from the MySQL Conference & Expo held in the United States in April, 2007. There will also be many great case studies presented by successful Japanese users. The session contents will interest anyone using MySQL, even introductory users. Please secure your schedule and look for additional details coming soon. Date: Tuesday, September 11 and Wednesday, September 12, 2007. Location: National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (http://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/e/guide/map_index.html) Admission fee: Free if pre-registered. Participation on that day is 5,000 yen. Conference registration will open in July.

Mother of all open source events in India is happening on 08-09 September, New Delhi, India.  OSS Camp is based on phillosphy of Bar Camp. Barcamp is an ad-hoc gathering born out of the desire for people to meet up, share, exchange ideas and possibilities in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.  OSS Camp is organized by the community and strictly not for profit.  More than 300 Geeks from accross the world are expected to participate.  Participation is free of cost! A number of MySQL & PHP specific tracks are being presented by different speakers.  For the first time in India, PHP Camp and  MySQL Camp is being organized as part of OSS Camp.  Participate in these Camps by being speaker and share great work that you are doing.  You may also like to join in the organizing committee.  If your organization is willing to sponsor this event, this may be a right opportunity to attract great talent, brand building and showing your support to Open Source Movement.  Come Over and participate in Open Source Magic and meet the best brains from the industry!  You can also send a word around your organization and write blogs to make this unconference a great success!
 

The OSS Camp, Delhi, is a step forward towards the facilitation of the Open Source Community in India. It will be the premier platform for the Indian Open Source community. The objectives of the Unconference are to:

1. Create a platform to discuss the current scenario of Open Source in India.
2. Facilitate the community with sessions on the various Open Source Technologies and available Tools
3. Create a community for the propagation of the Open Source Philosophy in India.

The target audience for the event include:
* Members of open source communities all over the world,
* IT Professionals,
* Students of Management & IT, and,
* Technology Enthusiasts.

For more details you can visit:
OSS Camp, Delhi Website at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi
Complete list of Sessions at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi/index.php?title=Topics  
Complete list of Attendee or Registrations at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi/index.php?title=Campers  
Our Sponsors at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi/index.php?title=Sponsor