Willowgarden is an application platform/framework for PHP 5 that I started work on towards the end of August 2005, with serious development progress starting around the beginning of the year. On April 28, I released Developer Preview 1 of Willowgarden, and while that was a good start, I knew that the project still had a long way to go before it would resemble the level of quality and scope of functionality that it really deserved.

Well today, I’m so pleased to announce that Developer Preview 2 is ready. This is where the project is really starting to solidify and settle into a cohesive whole that can be used for hands-on development. I’ve been working on several Web site and applications using the DP2 codebase, and it has made my life as a PHP developer so much more fun than the bad old days of cobbling together scripts nearly from scratch.

Along with DP2, I’ve set up a new wiki that houses the partially-complete Users Guide as well as areas for future tutorials, how to’s, and more. I’ll be spending a lot of my time in the near future working on that end of things rather than code. You are most certainly welcome to contribute content to the wiki as well, so be sure to check that out.

And now I am going to make a bold statement: I am asking the cutting-edge PHP 5 developers reading this — and I know you’re out there! — to consider joining the Willowgarden project if it piques your interest. I would like to start moving interim versions out there at a more rapid pace, leading towards a stable 1.0 release of Willowgarden, and to do that I need the help of people with many different environments and expertise in fine tuning installations. I also have a huge number of ideas in store for future versions, and I’m sure you do as well. This is the time to get on board while the project is still young! To contact me, feel free to send me an e-mail (remove everything after jared before the @ sign).

Thanks for reading, and I hope you download Willowgarden DP2 and give it a thorough look-over. This release is stable enough that I encourage you to start using it for your experimental development efforts, and your feedback and ideas are very much appreciated. Also, I’ll be posting a lot here now about DP2, so check back soon for more information as well.

Hey folks, if you’re developing Web apps with PHP (4.3+ or 5+) and have been wondering how to take full advantage of all that Ajax has to offer, you owe it to yourself to check out xajax! 0.2.4 started out as a quick big-fix update and ended up containing a few really neat new feature that will make your life easier, the biggest of which is the new addScriptCall command for the response object. Now you can call functions in your client scripts (or other Javascript functions/objects including script.aculo.us effects!) using a simple PHP method that automatically converts your PHP data structures to Javascript data structures. No, it’s not using JSON, but a simple XML format we were already using for passing Javascript data structures to PHP. One cool thing about this is that I didn’t write the bulk of the code for this feature — it was submitted as a patch by Luis Fagundes to Sourceforge and our community forums. Open source in action! I love it!

So be sure to check out xajax and let us know how you like it!

You know what? Microsoft is really starting to fire on all cylinders. Maybe buying Groove and getting Ray Ozzie was a bigger event than I realized at the time.

Ray’s come up with one of the most brilliant technologies ever to hit the Web in my opinion: a standardized XML format describing clipboard data formats that can be used for site-to-site, site-to-desktop, and desktop-to-site copy & paste. Whoa. Let that sink in for a minute: with this technology (pure Javascript that works in IE and Firefox to start with), you can now right-click on an image on a Web site, select “copy”, right-click on another image somewhere else on that page or on a totally different Web site, select “paste”, and the data is transferred through structured XML and inserted as customized HTML into that page. Even RSS feed URLs can be brought along.

Check out the screencasts and the code, which is still in its infancy so it can only get better from here. This is big, folks. Really big.