We developed Resin Personal based on feedback from Resin Pro users who want to deploy hobby sites and take advantage of compiled PHP. Using Resin Personal, the incredibly fast PHP-to-Java compilation mode is now available to hobbyists, students and no budget startup sites running on one server. Previously this mode was only offered to enterprise customers with high performance demands. Resin Personal includes the reliable and high performance of Resin Open Source. Details at http://www.caucho.com/press/2009-01-29.xtp

We’ve got a full schedule here at Caucho, with a huge number of events coming up for 2009. I’ll announce everything as it comes along, but just to mention a couple that are coming up soon:

• Devoxx - Devoxx is less than a week away! I’ll be presenting Quercus and we’ll have a booth on the expo floor where I and other Caucho team members will be available to answer your questions about Resin, Quercus, BAM, Hessian, and even sales/business questions. If you’re at Devoxx, stop on by the booth for info and the chance to win some prizes!
• Caucho Admin Training - We had a great time in October with the first training session. So good, that we decided to book a full schedule for 2009! The next session is exactly two months from now on February 4, so start making plans to attend. During the last session we had several students from all around the US and one from Denmark, so even if you’re not based in the SF Bay area, we hope you’ll make it.

Over the last week, I had the pleasure of trying to get Pligg, a PHP content management system (CMS), to run on Quercus. It wasn’t easy due to a diabolical bug (more on that later), but it’s resolved for our upcoming 3.2.2 release and Pligg should run pretty swell.

So why another CMS? Quercus can already run Wordpress and Drupal, arguably the heavyweights in the PHP CMS arena. Well one of our good Resin users has over 50 Pligg sites and he wanted to migrate to Quercus. He had observed that PHP was being overloaded to such a point that all the linux swap space was being used up. So Quercus’ performance is very appealing to him. Checking my emails, it appears that he has been trying to run Pligg on Quercus for over a year :0. Talk about persistence and commitment!

The thing preventing him from running Pligg was that Pligg was reusing variables inside functions and declaring them global later on:

$a = "initial";
function test()
{
  $a = "changed";
  ...
  global $a;
  //$a here on out should be "initial"
  ...
}

Quercus is highly optimized and has optimizations for variables. If it sees the global statement inside a function scope, Quercus assumes that variable is global throughout the function. The issue was that any modifications to that variable was modifying it globally, when it should be modifying it locally, until the global statement is reached of course.

The question is: why would Pligg be reusing variable names and changing their scope? Why not use a different name? Why not put the global statement at the beginning of the function?

Sifting through their code, it appears that they eagerly initialize a copy of config objects. They do so by using includes. The includes store the results in a specific variable. So if you don’t want the includes to modify the global variable, then you better not have the global statement before these includes. We would never expect this, hence the Quercus bug. This is an example of unorthodox coding that PHP permits that we see all the time and it’s what makes it extremely difficult when we debug PHP applications.

The Silicon Valley Code Camp is coming up in just under 3 weeks and they need to figure out how big of a room to assign to each talk. If you’re coming to the Quercus and/or BAM talks, please go and let them know your interest on this page: Caucho Sessions. That way we won’t have to worry about not having enough seats.

As a brief respite from the training preparation, I spent yesterday fixing a slew of Hessian Flash/Flex bugs. Check out the changelog for more detailed information. This is the last snapshot that uses the old Hessian 2.0 draft spec, so you’ll need to upgrade your Java implementation for the next release/snapshot. As you might have noticed from reading the hessian-interest list, Scott’s been busy streamlining the Hessian protocol. While these changes have resulted in a number of efficiency improvements, they also break compatibility with older versions of Hessian. The next version of Hessian Flash/Flex will support this new version of the Hessian draft and only this version.

BTW, the new Hessian Flash/Flex supports the [RemoteClass] metadata, which does the same thing as the old hessianTypeName field, only better. Turns out that the Flash VM has support specifically to allow aliases for remoting. You can check out the feature request for more info.

You might have noticed that posts slowed down here after my talk at JavaZone, which is because I took some time off to see Scandinavia. But I’m back now and getting ready for even more upcoming events! Just a quick review:

1. San Francisco Java Meetup - I’ll be speaking here again, this time about Resin’s OSGi container implementation, as well as general OSGi issues along with fellow Java Meetup regular, Andrew Headrick. This is just one week away on Monday, Oct 6 at 6:30. The signups are full right now, but keep an eye on the page in case anyone drops out…
2. Resin Administration Training - There are still a couple of spots left for this course, so sign up ASAP to guarantee your seat. I’ll be teaching this at Marakana’s facility in San Francisco on October 22-24. It should be an action packed 3 days!
3. Silicon Valley Code Camp - This informal, but highly technical conference is growing by leaps and bounds. With already over 500 signups, I expect the Code Camp to be a ton of fun and very successful. I’ll be speaking on Quercus and BAM, so stop by for those and the other speakers’ talks on Nov 8 & 9 at Foothill College.
4. Devoxx - You might know this as JavaPolis or briefly JaVoxx, but the newly renamed Devoxx is still the same great conference that attracts developers from all over the world. It will be held Dec 8-12 in Antwerp, Belgium. I’ll be giving a talk there and Caucho is a plugin partner, so look for us on the convention floor as well.

I’m going to be speaking at JavaZone this month about Quercus. If you don’t know JavaZone, it’s Scandinavia’s largest developer conference and will be half in English and half in Norwegian. If you’re in Oslo on September 17 at 3:45pm, stop on by and have a listen. This is a developers’ conference, so I’m going to take some liberties and dive into some real technical meat with code examples and an inside look at how Quercus works. It should be really fun.

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve teamed up with Marakana to do a training course on the administration of Resin. I’ll be teaching the course on October 22-24 at Marakana’s San Francisco offices and writing the course materials with the guidance of other Caucho engineers and the Marakana guys, who really know their stuff when it comes to training. If you sign up for the course this week, you get a significant discount. I’d jump on it sooner than later since we’re limited to 10 students (we wanted a really good student:teacher ratio). Here’s the link: Caucho Resin Administration sign up

I’ll be giving a talk at this week’s WordCamp in San Francisco on using WordPress with Quercus. Of course this site uses WordPress on Quercus, so we’re happy to get a chance to talk with other WordPress users. Are you running WordPress on Quercus? If so, let us (and the world) know!

If you’re interested in Quercus or WordPress or both together, come on out to WordCamp this Saturday.

Resin 3.2.0 is now available at the usual location, http://caucho.com/download

The release notes are at http://caucho.com/resin/changes/resin-3.2.0.xtp