Free PHP Scripts |
|
|
The idea of this website is about sharing PHP scripts, website development related information and links about what useful is out there.
Feel free to submit new stories or scripts, rate or comment on them.
You can also submit post in the discussion forums. There are forums related to php development, website design and content management systems.
We would be more then glad to hear your comments.
|
|
|
|
|
| Browse one of the categories above for PHP scripts |
|
|
How Fast is Attivio?
Published on 05 July 2008 20:00
|
The Fast Search & Transfer news continues to keep me on my toes. The Norwegian business weekly Dagens Næringsliv seems to have come up with some decent evidence (English translation) of many things everybody already suspected -- and a couple of new ones.
It covers the Convera acquisition and the "separate" but surprisingly coincidental deal where Convera bought several million's worth of Fast software it didn't need. Or as rival Autonomy (which was also in the running for buying Convera) has pointed out, Fast pumped up its revenues for that quarter with part of the money it paid for Convera, then got back for licenses. The DN article also covers a few other very suspicious deals, and some outright fraud. It's now even getting to the point where calling Fast "the Enron of Norway" is getting long in the tooth.
While that train wreck was unfolding before my eyes in slow motion, my fellow analyst Theresa Regli pinged me last February about a new enterprise search company called Attivio. Information Today raved about their new product AIE, with analysts quoted as saying things like "they are moving rapidly to develop tools that will eliminate many of the practical barriers to easily and efficiently deploy robust enterprise search solutions," with the unique selling point of "data integration plus search and content processing," a "hot niche for the next few years."
Since I'm always interested to find out more about robust enterprise search tools to fill hot niches for the next few years, I scrolled down to read what the Attivio CTO would explain about how the product would achieve what "should have been solved by the integration of text search and XML into relational database managers such as Oracle." As it turns out, it is based on a "mash-up" of open source Apache Lucene and "licensed commercial software."
As described in our Enterprise Search Report and on this blog, Lucene itself is just a Java text search API. To be able to actually gather, convert, and query content you need many more components. It is perfectly feasible to put together a working enterprise search product around the core Lucene JAR (as demonstrated by IBM's Omnifind Yahoo! Edition). But in order to get there, and to have Lucene index, for instance, Office documents and PDFs, you will have to first convert those documents to text. The filters to perform that conversion can be bought from other vendors, based on open source such as pdftohtml, or you'll have to build them yourself, which is a lot of work. There aren't too many vendors building their own filters, or even just modifying open source to do so. So if you do build the filters needed to use Lucene yourself, you'd probably like to mention this as an advantage, and as Attivio states, "we developed our own Microsoft Office, WordPerfect, and PDF connectors to improve performance and reach deeper into the files than the conventional converters."
Since, like most enterprise search products, Lucene isn't based on a database and couldn't even connect to such content without help, it isn't surprising Attivio had to develop a "unique RDBMS data loader" which "indexes the tables individually." This, again, is presented as a major advantage -- remember, converting documents and integrating structured and unstructured data are "a hot niche."
I remember seeing a vendor at a conference a few years back, with banners jokingly stating its product was "buzzword compliant!" Attivio certainly seems to have that skill down. The engineering effort is marketed as a "technology mashup," "breaking down silos" between "open source and commercial software." "We have lived with the challenge of having to choose between the precision of databases and the richness of search for a long time, but no longer" sounds great, but I don't see Oracle and Thunderstone's RDBMS-based solutions breaking out in a sweat just yet.
Maybe my over-exposure to marketing materials and flashy demos has turned me into a cynic, and Attivio's downloadable trial version will have to do at least a decent job to convince me of the product's added value. Fortunately, that free download is "coming soon!" Yes, I'm sorry, I'm finding it increasingly hard to turn off that cynicism, especially when I turn back to the DN article about Fast Search & Transfer. Attivio was founded by former Fast employees and the Attivio CTO is Sid Probstein, formerly vice president of technology at FAST. More importantly, Attivio's CEO is Ali Riaz, who was COO at Fast but unexpectedly left the company in late 2006. Well, in hindsight, perhaps not so unexpectedly, though DN quotes him as saying "I had nothing to gain from manipulation of the accounts. I had no shares in the company. I wanted shares and quit because I didn’t get any. If you want to find out what’s wrong with the accounts, you need to look at those who could gain from it. And it wasn’t me."
Dagens Næringsliv doesn't appear to agree with Riaz, however; if you want the full analysis of the what and why, I suggest you read the article. I myself find it surprising that the CEO of a technology startup backed by $6.2 million in venture capital would drive an Audi R8, but that doesn't mean anything (other than that I'm envious of his car). I also find it surprising a former Fast COO would be co-owner of a company reselling Fast licenses, but walking like an Enron duck and quacking like an Enron duck doesn't necessarily mean that it's really anything like Enron. And Attivio's clouding the core technology in marketing hyperboles and buzzword compliance is slightly disconcerting, but many renowned companies engage in the same practice.
DN quotes Riaz as saying "you should be much better at praising the people who have success, instead of pushing them down." And I would certainly love to be proved wrong by Attivio's software; as soon as I get my hands on the trial download I requested, I will let you know if it lives up to the high expectations. As one of my teachers in school once told me, "I'm known for being cynical, or even sarcastic -- myself, I prefer to call it healthy skepticism and mild irony."
Being a cynic isn't a lot of fun -- but for now, I would advise you to be at least healthily skeptical of what Attivio has to offer.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
Open Text - acquire or be acquired?
Published on 04 July 2008 20:00
|
Open Text is back on the acquisition trail. The company announced Thursday that they had bought Spicer for $12m. Spicer is a document/file viewing tool vendor that markets "Imagenation," software that competes against the likes of Snowbound.
It's a logical enough addition to the panoply of content applications within the Open Text portfolio, and appears to have been bought at a bargain price. It's not exactly a game changer, but it does resurrect the question of Open Text's own future.
Acquire to grow and compete, or be acquired -- those are the current options. It seems likely that if Open Text itself does not get bought by HP, SAP, or Microsoft in the near future (the most likely bidders), then they will themselves acquire again, probably on a more ambitious basis. Now that they find themselves competing against giants like EMC, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft it seems the only route to survive. Most likely in their sights is Interwoven, an acquisition that would bring near complete dominance in the Legal and Services sectors, along with some interesting new technologies in the bargain. I'll predict that one of these options -- big acquisition or get acquired -- is highly likely to occur in the next year.
But is Open Text really able to absorb so many counter-cultures and technology stacks? The firm has swallowed up rivals at a pace only Oracle could match -- but Open Text is not Oracle, and they simply do not have the resources to handle this kind of acquisition rate. Indeed many Open Text customers that we have interviewed for the ECM Suites Report regularly complain about disjointed and uneven support, confusing product roadmaps, and long-term concern about the future direction of the company. At the same time it's fair to also report that Open Text customers generally like the company and don't regret choosing them, but goodwill can only go so far.
With this small acquisition, Open Text has put itself back under the spotlight. The industry is again abuzz with rumors -- some of which may be true some of which may not. This remains a very uncertain time for buyers and partners alike.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
NVIDIA - "significant quantities" of laptop GPUs defective
Published on 04 July 2008 08:00
|
informed investors that "significant quantities" of previous-generation graphics chips have been failing at "higher than normal rates," and that it's lowering its Q2 estimates due to pricing pressure.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
Graphics board vendor touts faster Linux drivers
Published on 03 July 2008 20:00
|
AMD has released faster new ATI Catalyst drivers for Linux customers of its ATI FireGL professional graphics cards. The 8.49.7 Linux driver provides 33 percent faster OpenGL performance than the previous driver, claims the company.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
Not just for Games Anymore, The Present and Future of GP-GPU
Published on 02 July 2008 20:00
|
It wasn't so long ago that 3D graphics cards were only expected to deliver higher frames-per-second in your favorite 3D games. But now we are about to enter the age of "GP-GPU," general-purpose computing on a GPU, and it's about ready for the mainstream. Here's some of what you can look forward to.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
White paper on SharePoint for public websites
Published on 02 July 2008 16:00
|
We've critiqued SharePoint's rather awkward web publishing capabilities in
different evaluation reports (on Web CMS tools and SharePoint itself). But we
also see customers who seek to deploy SharePoint for their public websites,
either because they want to experiment with the platform, or because the business
side is being forced to use it (often under the misimpression that it will be
"free").
The latter case is a bit ironic, because for years some enterprise web teams
had to put up with bloated Web CMS tools from the likes of Documentum or IBM
in a mistaken effort by IT to overreach and standardize on a single ECM supplier.
Now we sometimes see IT throwing SharePoint over the wall to the business as
almost a kind of abdication of any involvement.
But using SharePoint for traditional web publishing is not a trivial undertaking.
If you go that route, I'll commend you to a
very useful white paper published by our partners at JBoye, which offers
some best practices in deploying SharePoint for web publishing. If you've already
decided to take the plunge (or someone has decided for you), "Best Practices
for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide" can
help you sort out how you should (and should not) proceed.
Some of the advice is germane to any web publishing automation effort, but
that's exactly the point: whatever its unique particularities, employing SharePoint
does not suspend the need for essential project management. If anything, the
complexity of the platform and array of implementation choices puts a premium
on dotting your i's and crossing your t's.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
Tracking Nightlife Activity : Mapping the Cool Quest
Published on 30 June 2008 04:00
|
Jebara’s creation, Citysense, uses advanced machine learning techniques to number crunch vast amounts of data emanating from thousands of cell-phones, GPS-equipped cabs and other data devices to paint live pictures of where people are gathering. Fed to websites such as Google or Yelp, the data reveals what’s happening at any location.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
Enterprise Social Software Evaluations available for download
Published on 28 June 2008 16:00
|
The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008: Networking
& Collaboration Within and Beyond the Enterprise has now been officially published and is available for download.
The report evaluates 20 Social
Software vendors against eleven common scenarios, with 250 product screenshots across 450 pages.
If you are a previous CMS Watch customer, check your in-box for a message offering a discount on this new report. Contact us with any questions or feedback.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
Most Powerful Visualization System: Faster than 600 Consoles
Published on 28 June 2008 04:00
|
What you see here is not a simple array of LCD displays. This is NASA's hyperwall-2, the world's highest resolution visualization system. At 23 by 10 feet wide, hyperwall-2 uses 128 screens driven by 128 graphic processing units with a total of 1,024 processor cores capable of displaying quarter billion-pixel graphics. That's 74 teraflops of power.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
Tips For Keeping Your RSS Feeds Lean and Clean
Published on 28 June 2008 04:00
|
Are your feeds well-formed? If not, maybe it's time you gave them a good scrubbing. Webmonkey offers these simple suggestions for cleaner, faster-loading Atom and RSS content. Follow our tips and you'll be validated, compressed and optimized to rule in no time.
Read more...
(0)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
(44)
Fresh updates on PHP related scripts.
|
|
(623)
News that are related to Content Management Systems.
|
|
(59)
Templates that can be used for Websites and also using Content Management Systems...
|
|
(2434)
Website hosting companies which are tuned to run Content Management Systems...
|
|
(69)
Resources for website contents...
|
|
(132)
RSS Feeds which can be uses to provice content for your website.
|
|
(296)
Graphics is an important aspect in website design and CMS...
|
|
(11)
Find out how to make your website a success...
|
|
(13)
Talk about the development of web applications, scripts, tools and content management systems...
|
|
(101)
Tools for webmasters that will make your life easier...
|
|
(77)
What every website designer needs to know about HTML to make attractive web pages.
|
|
