ecosystem

You may have heard about Composer and Packagist lately.

In short, Composer is a new package manager for PHP libraries. Quite a few people have been complaining about the lack of information, or just seemed confused as to what it was, or why the hell we would do such a thing.

This is my attempt at clarifying things.

This second part of this post, tentatively titled Use Cases, will be out next week if time allows.

In this new post to the Symfony Blog, Fabien Potencier shares some of his thoughts about the Symfony community and tosses out an idea of a way to "gameify" the process to let community members proudly show off their level of involvement.

Charlie Kindel was the general manager of Microsoft's Windows Phone Developer Experience, where he was responsible for growing the third-party apps ecosystem for Windows Phone 7.

Microsoft has given us a tantalizing glimpse of its new touch-friendly UI, and what an HTML5-and-JavaScript multi-form-factor app ecosystem might look like.

Law Technology News: "Android's many-tiered ecosystem represents multisource development at its best, yet it adds complexity to the Android platform.

Independent developers may contribute code under a variety of licenses."

Google wants to connect all your devices to the Android ecosystem and then expose their functionality to app developers.

Apps to control your light, wash your dishes and even grow your vegetables in your in-house garden are just part of a bigger plan of real-world domination.

While PHP remains my primary programming language for various reasons, my recent projects have involved quite a bit of JavaScript development.

And I have to say I like it: the event-driven paradigm is quite elegant, closures are a joy to work with, and tools like Node.js and jQuery really open up the possibilities of the language.

I’ve had several conversations on Twitter about how it could be a good idea for someone to setup a new community website for PHP components.

This website would not host components itself; it would track all of the independently-published PEAR channels, and be the one-stop shop for users to come to whenever they needed to find a component to solve a requirement.

I think this would be a good thing for the PHP ecosystem.

Developer.com: "The open source Eclipse Foundation is known for its namesake Eclipse IDE and its related ecosystem of projects and plugins, most of which are desktop based."

Computerworld UK: "It seems hard to believe, but the venerable LAMP stack – Linux, Apache MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python – is beginning to fade from people's memories.

And yet in many ways it was LAMP that created the flourishing ecosystem of Internet startups"