php extension

Had always thought of exploring the php extension creation part. Although i have always encouraged my team to go for it wherever it makes sense, never got time to sit down and write my own first piece of extension. Today i sat and decided to write my first php extension. Doing this on a saturday definitely helped as i didn't get distracted with daily fire fightings and meetings.
The whole beauty of writing the extension and making it part of the php you have just installed from source is mesmerizing. I was able to easily write an extension and run it through the command prompt. Running it from the cli was seemless, however it didn't work from the web server. Got to check it out now. Have to rush back home. Will lick this problem later. For now, the boost that i got from writing a small extension is enough to motivate me to write a useful extension soon and contribute to the community. Well here is the Zend url which helped me with my first shot at extensions.

labs.naukri.com
Have started conceptualizing naukri.com developer-network under labs.naukri.com umbrella. Have listed out various sections and resource links for naukri labs. Am planning to start it, fill it with content and then do an SEO for the same. Today, i sat with sonali to discuss its layout. Hopefully she will start working on it from monday onwards. Lets see how it goes. I plan to have resource links for PHP, MySQL, Apache, AJAX, Advanced CSS, Lucene etc on it. Also, have planned an interesting section called "wine tasters" wherein the regular chosen ones will be allowed to taste....Oops..., test and try out products/features in making. I have always believed that true contributions happen through the users. I am excited about it. Not much work, but opportunity to visualize something like this and put it into shape is really motivating.

Finished my days work. Just going through different websites using latest technology. Visted netvibes.com and found it interesting. But i sincerely wonder, how useful these "myspace" kind of concepts would be. Whole lot of it depends on how the entire web progresses crossing limitations of bandwidth. I'll definitely love to create my workarea on the web and stick to it provided i have limitless bandwidth :-)
Web can be so more useful if it continuously reaches out to different medium of communications. Its happening and a lot would depend on how we take it forward. Hmmm... long way to go. Gonna have some coffee..

Web 2.0

I don't know if i should use this (web 2.0) term, but the hype associated with it has definitely given a wider perspective to the web and its components. The emergence of AJAX is the biggest achievement of this era. Although many of us had used javascript to fetch server side data as as early as 6 yrs ago, somebody had to come out with a fancy name like "AJAX" to make it popular. Same is true with "Web 2.0"
The most important achievement of this era was the shift in the mindset of web service providers from proprietory to service oriented approach. Emergence of Opensource has nodoubt acted as a catalyst in this possitive shift. This is now giving way to Service Oriented Architecture (SOS) and Software As A Service (SaaS) theory.
I, as a techie find the emergence of collaborative softwares as a strong point. We have to go a long way. APIs in the web community was just a beginning. I strongly advocate that software architecture should be designed in such a manner that every important feature is available with the help of APIs as a plug-in module. Mashups ofcourse tells you how to make most use of it.
Another important approach is to reduce the number of steps (interfaces) from a web users first click till his/her last action. An intelligence use of JavaScrit, DHTML, CSS and AJAX will help one achieve this goal. The user should be allowed to take all actions on the single page itself, rather than navigating to different pages. A Desktop like feel will soon be in demand. Rich user experience along with fast downloads will become a necessity soon. Ok... i'll stop acting like nostradamus :-)
Going to do some work now. Time is less and i have got to implement so many things. I am planning to use it as a canvas for all my web 2.0 experiments. I am sure, its gonna work.