Oracle has decided to start shipping PHP on it's application servers. I think that's a positive sign for PHP.

Somehow Rotor completely missed my line of site. Shared source C# compiler for Mac OS X? Pretty cool, I have to say. Now I can play with C# without having to boot my virus prone Windoze box.

I gave the blog a new Frank Lloyd Wright style look so that it ties in with my personal page on jherr.com.

David Heinemeier bought the book, and apparently read it. However I'm not sure if 'overwhelmingly impressed' applies to the book, or the purchasing process. ;-)

I just got the word that my introductory article on Java code generation will come out early next month on the O'Reilly Network. Woo hoo!

Ejen 1.1 was released.

This article provides a fascinating perspective on the problems that we have in an industry where everything new is cool and old is bad. I'm still appalled at how engineers with five years of experience are telling me that SQL is horrible and should be hidden or ideally replaced.

We have a couple of new interviews on the site. One is with Anneke Kleppe about her book MDA Explained. Another is with Iron Speed about their generator for .NET IT applications. Both of these are worth a look.

I've been spending a little time outside of the site, the book and code generation in general, to work on a project that I was on at when I worked at Certive. The project was a Form and Table Manager for HTML::Mason which I have recently convinced them to Open Source. The result is the FMTM project on SourceForge.

There hasn't been a lot of interest yet. Probably because it's only been out for a day. It's just nice to get something that I have wanted to see in the public domain out there.

I used to work at a company called Certive writing accounting software for small businesses. We wrote that in Perl using HTML::Mason as the front end technology. While we were developing it we built two components, the form and table managers, which made it very easy to create web forms and interactive tables.

As we were developing the FM (forms manager) and TM (table manager) I was thinking about how those might be open sourced, and we talked about it extensively.

I left the company after the fourth release of the software and we had not yet opened up the source. Soon after I left they started migrating the project to Java and no longer had any use for the Perl code.

Recently I started up a conversation with Certive about putting FM and TM up for open source and I was able to convince them it was a good idea and that I would handle all the legwork. Finally after about a month of negotiations and work on the code I can now put the code up into the SourceForge project. Woo hoo! It should be up there in a couple of days.

Feedster rocks. Here is an RSS feed which gives you daily updates on code generation.