PHP is the latest language getting the NetBeans treatment, with a PHP version of Sun Microsystems' open-source environment hitting early access today.

Ruby implementors, including Ruby creator Yukihiro Matusomoto, held their first design meeting this week to hash out niggles with the scripting language.

The guy leading Microsoft's port of Ruby to .NET has warned of a potential Balkanization of Ruby, which could impair the language's success.

Tim Bray, the co-creator of XML turned Ruby on Rails enthusiast, has told developers to face up to lingering performance problems in the scripting stack.

Zend Technologies is introducing paid support along with APIs to help build and maintain business-critical applications using its integrated and certified PHP stack.

QCon 2008 It is not the Java language that's important - it is the platform that has grown around it.

Sun Microsystems has furthered its ambitions in open source development by hiring top Python developers Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki.

NetBeans and Ruby, part 2 Having limped along in the wake of Eclipse, Sun Microsystems' NetBeans is getting its second wind. One thing that's helping is a fresh focus on scripting, particularly around Ruby on Rails.

The launch of a low-cost Ruby on Rails integrated development environment from SapphireSteel Software based on Microsoft's Visual Studio comes at a turning point for both the Ruby language and its associated Rails framework. But quite what the turning point will be is open to question.

Hands on The Portable Document Format (PDF) and Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet are commonly used for presentation of reports and data.

PHP, meanwhile, has become one of the most commonly used scripting languages on the web today, with 35 per cent of web sites running PHP. The TIOBE index of programming languages also indicates an increase in the usage of PHP.

Book review To some, Ruby is going to take over the world. With prominent Java developers and propagandists jumping ship, there has seemed to be no stopping its momentum, particularly in web development.

And so to Barcelona for Adobe Max 2007 Europe, the company's developer conference, where we caught up with chief software architect Kevin Lynch.

We asked him to explain Adobe's platform ambitions. He was happy to oblige.

Now that PHP is taking that big step from popular webhead scripter to serious enterprise tech, PHP coders need to add a new word to their vocabularies: methodology. Of course, there’s no quicker way to send cowboy coders stampeding for the hills than to say that word. (“Process” would do it, too, and there would be screaming.)

But Eddo Rotman says the change doesn’t have to hurt - much. His solution: agile development methodologies.

The Eclipse Foundation says building rich internet applications (RIA) just got easier with the release today of its much-anticipated Rich Ajax Platform (RAP 1.0) toolkit.

The toolkit enables developers to build RIAs using a combination of Java, Ajax and the OSGi standard within the Eclipse framework.

Zend Technologies is turning to application server vendors in the next phase of its work fine-tuning PHP for enterprise development.

Self-appointed PHP steward Zend has had talks with unnamed middleware partners with a view to improving the performance of its favorite scripting language on their application servers, by putting PHP inside the application server.

Curl, the rich programming language specialist back from obscurity, is turning to open source to gain a foothold in rich internet applications (RIA).

The company, founded on MIT research and that burned through its cash during the last internet bubble leading to a $1.5m acquisition, has said it plans to open source the Curl libraries and web kit within weeks, and to integrate its run-time with Eclipse.

Apple is about to launch a consolidation portal hosting WebApps for its glorified slates, the iPhone and iTouch, whilst developing proper applications with Electronic Arts and others.

WebApps are web pages using AJAX as an application environment: for the moment they have to be re-downloaded each time you want to use them, but the catalogue about to be launched by Apple will include Remote Buddy (for remote controlling your Mac), Solitaire and a Nutrition Database as well as a WebApp launcher called iHome.

Zend PHP 07 Lately, Zend Technologies has worked to put PHP in the enterprise by optimizing its tools for Oracle and IBM databases and middleware.

Today, Zend makes its latest move on the enterprise, by throwing open early code for an up-coming PHP suite based on Eclipse. Zend thinks this will let it integrate with other Eclipse-based Java tools from IBM and Oracle.

Zend PHP 07 Zend Technologies, the industry's PHP steward, today delivers the first fruits of its collaboration with Microsoft while expanding the companies' relationship.

The open source scripting specialist will open its PHP Conference and Expo today announcing the release of FastCGI for Microsoft's IIS in Windows Server 2003 and the forthcoming Window Server 2008. Changes to boost PHP on Windows have been contributed back to the community, Zend told The Register.

A scripting error in Adobe's website gave outsiders broad access to internal files on the company's webserver that could prove valuable to malicious hackers trying to penetrate its security.

Remember when Java father James Gosling got flamed for uttering the ultimate Web 2.0 heresy: scripting languages aren't good enough for enterprises?

The world's second favourite Canadian was taken down a notch or two for the thought crime of "not getting it". A year and a half later, and a user case study has popped up that supplies a nuanced twist to the debate.

At the Mix07 conference in London last week, Scott Guthrie, co-inventor of ASP.NET and Microsoft's general manager for the technology, presented the latest plans for ASP.NET and Silverlight and took a swipe at the competition in the process.

An open source version of Microsoft's potential Adobe Flash challenger, Silverlight, has been developed within two months of being unveiled as a beta.

Miguel de Icaza and a team of dedicated open source coders have hacked together an implementation of Silverlight they are calling Moonlight, for Linux and Unix.

We’ve all used Google to search the web. What if we could add Ajax to the web search operation? Google Ajax Search API does just that – could this facilitate searching?

Ajax is a web technique which refreshes content on a web page without reposting the web page and the Google Ajax Search API provides a search control and various searchers that can specialise a web search.

For example, using the Google Local Search service the web search may be localized to a specified region. Throw in a Google map and who needs to ask for directions? And the Google Blog search service is used to search only blogs.

Adobe Systems today lets loose beta code for Apollo, a software developer platform that runs web applications such as Flash, HTML and Javascript on a browser and integrates them with applications running on a desktop PC.

The outcome of this software mind-meld will be, what some commentators are already calling 'WebTop applications'. Adobe has a different name in mind. It is jettisoning the Apollo moniker in favor of a new official name: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). This means that Apollo developers are all AIR-heads, and that can't be a bad thing.

Depending on who you talk to at Microsoft, Silverlight is a way to design good-looking interfaces with Ajax, a way to stream your content or – in version 1.1 - a new programming model for developing cross-platform rich internet applications with real languages.

According to Keith Smith, product manager of the user experience platform and tools team at Microsoft covering Silverlight as well as WPF and tools like the new Expression Studio, Silverlight is designed “to provide a very lightweight implementation that can be distributed across platform in any browser, with a rich underlying programming model, aimed at those who have a penchant for dynamic languages but don’t like the limitations”.

JavaOne Sun is seeking developers outside the "Java rank and file" to join the Java Community Process (JCP) standards body. The company is eying up content authors and scripting developers as JCP recruits to deliver feedback and drive platform and language changes.

JavaOne Sun Microsystems has jumped in headfirst into Web 2.0, urging developers to change the world with cell phones and online services powered by its Java software.

Using inspirational statements and not always functioning software demonstrations, Sun executives opened JavaOne outlining a world where Sun's open source and Java technology really can connect people.

MIX07 Despite the early batch of criticism that Microsoft’s Silverlight has already generated, there is still much to interest applications developers in its arrival as a beta product, as well as issues for them to ponder, not least being whether Flash is still the better option for now.

MIX07 Microsoft has released IronRuby, an implementation, an implementation of the fast-growing scripting language Ruby, on the .NET Framework. IronRuby follows Microsoft's implementation of Python, called IronPython, released last year on .NET.