In this edition…

• About This Newsletter
• What Were You Thinking? => How I Got Here
• On the Web => Fences for Windows
• On the Web => PhpStorm IDE
• On the Blog => Interview Posted Online
• On the Blog => What Everyone That Writes Should Know About Writing
• Q&A => With the availability of so many PHP frameworks, what is the role of PEAR?
• Q&A => What happened to PHP 6?
• What is Larry Thinking => Doing What I Do: Writing
• Larry Ullman’s Book News => “PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites” (4th Edition)

On Saturday, April 30th, 2011, sometime late in the evening or overnight (EDT), this site will be temporarily unavailable on account of server maintenance. The outage is not expected to exceed 15 minutes. Apologies in advanced for any inconvenience.

For years I was a devotee of Quicksilver, an application launcher and power utility for Mac OS X. And I was not alone: Quicksilver was such an excellent product that the developer got hired by Google to create a similar application for them. Despite Quicksilver’s source code being available, the project languished. Bugs created by the Snow Leopard operating system (or maybe just Leopard) led me, and many others, to finally give up on Quicksilver, begrudgingly, and turn to alternative products (I went back to what I was using before Quicksilver: Launchbar, with which I’m still quite pleased).

Well, I’m thrilled to say that Quicksilver is back! In fact, a new release, b59 went out on April 24th. Quicksilver now has a new Web site, at QSapp.com, and a corresponding blog at LoveQuicksilver.com. Quicksilver is still free, with tons of plug-ins, many of which have been recently updated.

If you’re using a Mac, and aren’t already familiar with Quicksilver, Launchbar, or Alfred, you owe it to yourself to check one or more of them out. It’s totally diminishing to label these applications as just a launchers, although that’s the easiest label to apply. You can launch applications with these programs, or open files, but you can also do thinks such as: perform arithmetic, send emails, move and copy files and folders, and much more.

Version 4.5 of both the Flex framework and the Flash Builder IDE is due out May 11 and the outlook is very exciting. As announced some time ago, the focus in Flex 4.5 is on developing for mobile apps. This means a new wave of components optimized for mobile platforms. That alone might sound “kind of cool”, but this release is much, much bigger than that.

Instead of using Flex to write Flash content that runs in a Web browser in a mobile device (i.e., non-Apple devices), thanks to Adobe AIR 2.6, you’ll be able to write true mobile apps in Flex. When the first release comes out in May, you’ll be able to create apps for the Google Android platform (the largest platform, in terms of sales of mobile devices today). In June, an update to Flash Builder and Flex are expected that will add support for iOS (iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad) devices and the Blackberry Tablet OS. To summarize:

Version 4.5 of the Flex framework makes it easier to develop applications destined for mobile devices (and there are some crazy-exciting developments along those lines, which I’ll post about separately), but version 4.5 of the corresponding Flash Builder IDE also comes with a nice bonus: even better integration with PHP.

PHP is my Web programming language of choice, and in version 4 of the Flex framework and the Flash Builder IDE, Adobe made a purposeful attempt to increase usage of Flex among the PHP community (this is also when I really began embracing Flex). For example, Flash Builder 4 comes with a wizard for connecting to PHP scripts, including creation of boilerplate PHP code. The new Flash Builder 4.5 IDE, due out May 11, comes in a couple of versions: Standard, Premium (with extra wizards, debugging tools, and profiling utilities), Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP Standard, and Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP Premium. The Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP versions were created in conjunction with Zend, and include an integrated version of Zend Studio 8. As both Flash Builder and Zend Studio are built upon Eclipse, this is a natural fit. And Flash Builder 4 started using Zend AMF to transmit data in Action Message Format between Flash applications and PHP scripts; the two companies have been working together for a while.