@leo's

Well, I do not tend to write technological forecasts. There are people out there how are much better at this and even they are often wrong. But this year I will give it a try. Some idea about next year's trends in the web:

Crisis

The credit crunch will get worse next year. It will also affect the web world. A lot of startups will close the doors because they will not find any money. For others this will also be a good posibility, in a time where you even can't trust the banks, investors will search for startups with serious business plans.

For the big ones in the web the time will be pretty hard. There shareholder will ask question about how they will get their money back. Facebook has to find a way to make more money. I think it might be likely to see in 2009 more ads on facebook or "pro-accounts" for which users have to pay, possibly also both.

Google has possibly to stop some projects that do not generate enough money. Or create also a way to pay for these services. This might affect Google Chrome, Google Analytics and others. Likely Google Chrome will not reach more then 1-2 Percent Market share, Google will stop this project and support Firefox instead.

As there is still no usable micropayment (well paypal is still not there and will probably never be) out there I expect Google or Facebook (or a new startup) to come up with one. Possibly they buy a bank for this (UBS anyone?! Ok, this is not serious.)

Cloud

Well there was already a lot of buzz around Cloud Computing in 2008. But I think this will take off in 2009. Googles App Engine will support fast development off small apps. I think Facebook will introduce something similar for scripting apps for facebook. Most likely this will be in PHP (or JavaScript). Amazons AWS will be the platform for a lot of startups.

But with the accepance of Cloud Computing a lot of classical providers (the big German ones) will introduce new price models and also some kind of cloud computing. I think it will be very likely that also some cloud computing open source solution on the base of xen and the LAM* stack. Some comercial solutions will probably follow. This might include Sun with glasfish, mysql and solaris, Microsoft with the dotNet platform and probably others.

Big companies will provide users (open source projects and big customers) some cloud systems to test their software. Microsoft does this already for some open source project. But also commercial Projects (that write clientsoftware) might profit for this. Probably also Red Hat, SuSE/Novell or Sun will follow this example.

Not out (, yet)

I think 2009 will be a year of vaporware. We will not see PHP 6, Perl 6, MySQL 6 or Duke Nukem Forever. The first 3 of this will fight with a bigger community and it will be hard to find desisions. I'm in doubt if MySQL six will ever be here; Forks of it (like perconas version and drizle) are very likely to overtake the lead and will stop sun to work on MySQL longer then Version 5.

Hard Times

2009 will be a hard year for the whole web. But as long as you think you cannot be replaced trough the 3 bellow your job might be still secure. So I wish a very good 2009 to all of you.

Schon wieder vorbei?! Das Jahr 2008 ist wie im Flug vergangen.

Die wirklich grossen Ereignisse sind dieses Jahr ausgeblieben. Da ich aber wieder Cevi gemacht habe blieb dieses Jahr fürs Bloggen (und auch das Bloglesen) ziemlich wenig Zeit. Meine zwei neuen Teams im Cevi sind grandios und machen den Aufwand fast vergessen. Zudem habe ich im 2008 das erste Mal Lehrabschlussprüfungen abgenommen, was ebenfalls ziemlich gut gegangen ist.

Das Umbauen und das Einziehen in die eigene Wohnung hat leider viel mehr Zeit gekostet als zuerst angenommen. Inzwischen habe ich mich jedoch gut eingelebt und bin (auch zu meinem eigenen Erstaunen) noch nicht im Chaos versunken ;-)

Viel gearbeitet habe ich natürlich auch sonst. Tilllate macht ganz schön Fortschritte: Anfangs Jahr haben wir Trevi abgeschlossen in dem wir einen grossen Teil der Applikation neugeschrieben haben, danach haben wir nach 8 Jahren tilllate in ein neues Kleid gesteckt und zum Jahresschluss haben wir im Projekt Jonny dann endlich ein skalierbares Filesystem eingeführt. Tilllate hat wohl in den letzten zwei Jahren gewaltige Fortschritte in Sachen Performance, Skalierbarkeit und Qualität gemacht, die wir im 2009 hoffentlich Fortsetzen können.

Ausserdem hat es im 2008 auch noch ein paar schöne Reisen gegeben: Zuerst eine Geschäftsreise nach Belgrad (eine wunderschöne Stadt, auch wenn der Reisezeitpunkt nicht so ideal war), dann Skiferien im Westen von Kanada und zum Abschluss noch eine Woche in Prag.

Im 2009 werde ich nur noch 80% für Tilllate arbeiten. Meine andere 20 Prozent werde ich Pro Bono als Beauftragter Helferkordination für das grosse Cevi Fest Conveniat arbeiten.

Meine Vorsätze für's 2008 habe ich grösstenteils erfühlt. Die Vorsätze für's 2009 sind diesmal ziemlich einfach:

• Mindestens einmal Blutspenden, etwas das ich 2008 wieder einmal nicht geschafft habe.
• Mein möglichstes dazu beizutragen dass das Conveniat für alle ein unvergessliches Fest wird.

In diesem Sinn euch allen einen guten Rutsch ins 2009.

After my last post I thought it might be also helpful to publish how many open jira tickets I have to my skype status.

You can get each jira search result also as a rss feed. Your browser does indicate the link to the result as rss. This url might look something like:

http://jira.example.com/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-xml/temp/SearchRequest.xml?&&resolution=-1&assigneeSelect=specificuser&assignee=leo.buettiker&sorter/field=priority&sorter/order=DESC&tempMax=100&reset=true&decorator=none

To call this url, even if you have no valid session, you might add your user credentials at the end. This looks like:

&os_username=$username&os_password=$password

You could now use a xml or rss parser to interprete the returned feed. But for my result even that is too much, I only will count how many items in the feed are. The php snippet to do this will look like:

$jiraRss = file_get_contents($url);
$jiraCount = substr_count($jiraRss,'<item>');	
$jiraMessage = $jiraCount?" and $jiraCount open Jira Issues":"";

There might be a lot of other cool usecases you can simply implement (ticket you currently work on, Tickets closed int the last week, etc.). It's just a little bit sad that there is no REST API for Skype which would be make it easier to change the status between platforms.

You all know the troubles with overflowing inboxes. I'm a bit fan of Inbox Zero and I found a lot of ways to work fast with my mails. I did switch off signaling ingoing mails, I use a lot of filtering and a good folder structure.

But sometimes my own lazyiness get into my way. So I started to put "Inbox Zero" into my skype status if I get my box empty. But after some times I decided to automatised this message.

I do know that Patrice does automated Skype updates with his Mac. After a quick search I found out that on Windows Skype has a COM-Api and they even provide a little PHP Example. With PHP it is also pretty easy so to acess an IMAP inbox (MS Exchange also provide a IMAP access). So I wrote a quick script that updates my Skype-Message:

$mail = imap_open('{mail.example.com}INBOX','leo.buettiker', 'password');

// Create a Skype4COM object:
$skype = new COM("Skype4COM.Skype");

// Create a conversion object:
$convert = $skype->convert;
$convert->language = "en";

// Start the Skype client:
if (!$skype->client()->isRunning()) {
  $skype->client()->start(true, true);
}


while(true) {
	imap_check($mail);
	$number = imap_num_msg($mail);
	$skype->CurrentUserProfile()->MoodText= 
		"Leo has currently $number mails in his inbox";
	sleep(5);
}

This does not only demonstrate how you can overcom your own lazyiness with open comunication and automated tools. It's in my point of view also a nice example what it's possible with PHP outside of the classical website rendering.