Gena01.com Forum

Today was another NyPHP event. This was my 2nd time that I attended NyPHP group meetings. The event is kindly hosted by IBM. Today was also their chance to present some of the exciting things that they are working on.

The presentation started off with a couple of overview slides and then jumped right into the demos and showing what the whole Web 2.0 is all about. One of the things that IBM has built is a rather sophisticated wiki that allows you to add web widgets and combine them together and have them interact and talk to each other. Apparently the term for this is "mashup". There are also a ton of standards that have been started or already approved. They also explained that they use and love PHP and use Zend Framework as well as other Open Source frameworks and technologies. They are also trying to get an approval to Open Source some of the frameworks and toolkits that they showed us today. It was a rather interesting on-hands presentation which later turned to questions and feedback discussions on how Open Sourcing some of the technologies can help IBM.

Some of the items mentioned today were:
1. IBM Mashup Starter Kit (http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/ibmmsk) - which was the focus of the discussion and a way to show off some capabilities.
2. Programmable Web (http://www.programmableweb.com/) - was mentioned as a great resource on the topic of mashups. Apparently there are other companies working on similar solutions as well as documenting and trying to standardize this as a new platform of development and interaction.
3. Open Ajax Alliance (http://www.openajax.org/)
4. Open Search (http://www.opensearch.org/)

There were some other websites that I can not remember right now. But overall this was something new and interesting to me. I do see some possible applications of this technology. I am curious to see what happens and if IBM manages to Open Source some of the pieces of this platform.

UPDATE: Brian has put up some pictures from the last NyPHP event (http://www.flickr.com/groups/652238@N23/). My apologies for not posting these sooner.

P.S. Also next NyPHP meeting will cover SEO. Which should be very exciting stuff.

Gena01