A week ago, I let ya'll know that the core PHP team had been brought to Facebook's main campus. That team were forced to sign NDA's, and taken to a very quiet, secluded meeting room where some cool new Facebook-backed open source project was described.

Well, I was able to put all the pieces together on this one, finally, and I now understand exactly what is up: Facebook has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch. This coming Tuesday, they will make a big announcement around this project, and will make it available as open source software. I'm not really sure of any of the details of the project, but I do know that Facebook hired someone two years ago to do this, and I'm relatively sure this was a one-man project during that entire time.

So, why has Facebook rewritten the PHP runtime? Because PHP is obviously too slow for their tastes. A few years ago, I had a coffee meeting with some of the folks from Zend. When they asked what I had been hearing about PHP in the market from my sources, I hemmed and hawed, then told them that I had heard people complaining about how slow PHP was. Now, I don't personally consider PHP slow: it is simply not a language designed for the sorts of workloads that Java and .NET are.

But that still doesn't change the fact that PHP can be a tad pokey on the server. Well, when I said this to the Zend folks, their immediate reaction was similar to that of a gestapo officer looking for a spy: "What? Who said that? Tell us their name!"

Clearly, Zend does not think there is a problem. But Facebook did. Not enough of a problem to support more than one paycheck, but then, considering how many users they have, even a 1 percent performance gain would be a massive help.

This Tuesday, salvation should arrive. I would imagine this new project will push a lot of the weight in the PHP community into Facebook's corner of the world. It will be nice to see what they can do with all that interest, since Yahoo!, in the same position 6 years ago, largely squandered their opportunity to mold PHP into a more robust platform and language. 

UPDATE: After sifting through the comments here and elsewhere, I'm inclined to agree with the folks who are saying that Facebook will be introducing some sort of compiler for PHP. This sounds highly plausible, and fits into what I've heard. Obviously, I don't have absolute specifics. Thanks for the extra info, readers.

A friend in the valley clued me into a juicy bit of gossip that I have been unable to confirm or yet uncover. Perhaps y'all can help. I've heard that a whole gaggle of PHP core developers were invited to Facebook's offices today to discuss some grand new open-source project from Facebook. The company has already opened a number of projects, including Hive, a data-access layer for Hadoop.

But I'm as yet unable to uncover the actual nature of this new project. Considering the PHP developers being called to the scene, I'd imagine this has much more to do with the Facebook presentation layer than with its back end. We already know the back end is producing a ton of data, and that Facebook's biggest challenge is to make heads or tails of all that information. Hence their use and development of Hadoop-based solutions to the problem.

PHP is certainly the underpinnings of Facebook's presentation side. Does this mean we're about to see Facebook open its platform?

Over the weekend, a fairly large shift in the balance of power in rich Internet applications occured. As we all know by now, Adobe's Flash is the most popular browser plug-in and the most common way to play games in your browser. It's also the plug-in used to bring us video, audio and animations resplendent with silly characters and non-sensical music.

For some time now, the lack of a Flash player for the iPhone has been a big problem for mobile users. They've complained that the iPhone uses a full, real browser, but does not have access to whole swaths of the Web due to lack of Flash support. Certainly, Flash shouldn't be used as a front mend to data for this very reason: It may make data pretty, but it offers no text search or little accessibility support, and it confounds low-tech users who prefer Lynx to Firefox.

But this weekend, German developer Tobey Schneider may have shifted the balance of control on Flash away from Adobe. You see, Tobey has written a Flash runtime in JavaScript. The project is called "Gordon," and it looks to be in very early stages thus far. But I would imagine Mr. Schneider will have an awful lot of people interested in helping him flesh out this effort. Gordon relies on HTML 5 and the SVG standards, so this isn't going to take over for Flash anytime soon. But it may just help to remove the need for Adobe and Macromedia's love child once HTML 5 becomes widely adopted.

Frankly, having dealt with an obnoxious phone directory listed in Flash with no search function, and having been forced out of websites because I wasn't using a graphical browser, I can't wait.

Agner Fog is a computer science professor at the University of Copenhagen's college of engineering. As he puts it, “I have done research on microprocessors and optimized code for more than 12 years. My motivation is to make code compatible, especially when it pretends to be.”

Fog has written a number of blog entries about Intel's compilers and how they treat competing processors. In November, AMD and Intel settled, and Fog has written up a magnificent analysis of the agreement.

If you have any interest in compilers, and in Intel's compilers, you should definitely read his paragraph-by-paragraph read through.

Fog broke it down for me:

The machine code is actively testing for vendor ID before testing for any CPU models or instruction sets. When the vendor ID is not "GenuineIntel" then it chooses what Intel calls the "generic path", which is the least advanced among the possible paths, using the oldest instruction set for compatibility with old processors.

This happens in code generated by the Intel compiler if you allow CPU dispatching. It also happens in many Intel function libraries that are called from code compiled with the Intel compiler or with any other compiler, even if you are not explicitly asking for CPU dispatching. — Agner Fog

The big question now is: Will Intel remove barriers to its compilers working on other processors? And thus far, no one seems to know the answer.

But Fog has written some code to solve the problem. You know. Just in case. He says it's "very easy. Remove the check for vendor ID and check for supported instruction sets only. I have made a small function library as a showcase to show how to do this and how to support all x86 platforms. http://www.agner.org/optimize/#asmlib"

The W3C and Microsoft are finally seeing eye-to-eye on scalable vector graphics. Today, Microsoft took a seat at the SVG specification table. This was the last major hold-out for Microsoft on HTML 5, and the SVG community had already been building IE workarounds. Now, if Microsoft decides to support the specification, those workarounds will not be needed.

I had a lovely chat today with a sleep-deprived Doug Schepers, who is on the W3C's SVG working group. I'm pasting it below as a Q/A because he talked about a lot of cool stuff. My questions are in bold, and everything else is verbatim Schepers.

So, Microsoft joined the SVG working group?

They've gotten on board with the working group. Let's hope that leads to them implementing it in IE. But the working group is very excited. We've been talking to them about it for years but we haven't seen much positive response from them until just recently. It's possible the state of SVG in other browsers has reached the point where it's something they felt they needed to pay attention to.

I've been talking with them for a couple of months, now and all my interactions with them have been technical, and very positive, very productive discussions. There were three Microsoft people who went to the SVG conference in Santa Clara back in October, and some of them did have some SVG experience. It's not like it's a complete unknown to them. They're fairly active on HTML 5. I am the team contact for the WebApps working group, and we're working really close there. I am also the editor of DOM 3 Event specification. I have been having very productive teleconferences with MS. Let's just say MS has been very positive.

What's with this new Canvas tag? Are y'all going to clutter up HTML with even more languages and syntaxes?

SVG and Canvas are both vector instruction sets. Canvas is script only. SVG is like HTML for graphics, and it has a markup script. Canvas has been widely supported because it is a little bit simpler than SVG. The canvas tag does nothing itself. It's a JavaScript API that lets you draw to the page. One thing the SVG working group is doing is making a common API for both canvas and SVG. We want one open Web graphics API.

If Microsoft supports SVG in IE 9, will Canvas go away?

Basically, this lets you draw to canvas or SVG. Dojo uses SVG and everything. All the other browsers except for IE have it. There are JavaScript libraries that allow you to transcode things. This has all been predicated on the idea IE isn't going to support SVG. If they do, we won't need those as much. But we will still need it for old browsers.

What use does Canvas have in a unified SVG world, then?

Canvas also has some raster functionality. I think Canvas is going to be more comfortable to people who are used to programming OpenGL, and SVG is more comfortable to people who are graphics designers. Canvas outputs a raster even though the command is a vector. SVG can be saved as its own image format. Many developers will want the richness of SVG, and some people will want the speed and high performance of canvas. There's not a DOM that's weighing canvas down. That's the advantage of Canvas instead of SVG.

Why is SVG better than Flash or Silverlight or what-have-you?

I'm not trying to dis Flash or Silverlight, but SVG was designed with integrations with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, the open Web technology people who already have those skills in that are already on the road to using SVG. Text in SVG is actually text, so it can be read by screen readers and it can be searched through. You no longer would have this blob that's a raster, a Flash file or an image. You can find text, select it, copy it and paste it like you can with regular text.

So, has anyone written Logo in SVG?

It's so trivial to do. I'm sure someone has.

If I may be indulged with a moment to brag: I would like to hereby take full and total credit for breaking the Google Phone story back in 2007. Today, Google unveiled its real phone: the Nexus One. As I reported back in October of 2007, this is a real Google-branded phone, made by Google and distributed by the phone carriers. Of course, I got some things wrong in that initial story. I don't now expect that Google will be getting into the wireless carrier game. Also, the Nexus One is notably not based on the X86 architecture, but that's OK. I expect my source from this original story simply got this device confused with specifications for the Google Netbook. 

Thanks for indulging me. You should all feel very cool and hip for reading our humble blog and newspaper. After all, we saw this one coming.

What do all these new phones mean for developers? Well, they mean that mobile application development just got a lot easier. Essentially, there are now only three platforms: Apple, Research In Motion and Android. All those other also-rans are going to slowly vanish from view, or concentrate on non-smart phones. The second wonderful thing about these three platforms is that they all have browsers. Why bother building a native app from three forks of the same code, when you can have a Web app with no code branches?

Finally, with a Google-made phone, we also get Google-made development tools. And I think we can all agree that Google understands developers, perhaps even a little more than RIM and Apple do. 

While Apple is a developer-friendly entity, it's AppStore policies are a source of frequent complaint. Those complaints aren't from users, but from developers who want to distribute their applications therein.

RIM understands its developers, but they are also something of a walled-garden, and that whole single-point-of-failure thing is a big headache sometimes.

So we are left with Google and Nokia. Nokia's ideas are present in the new n900, but it's still a big bag of mobile thingies that aren't quite integrated yet.

That leaves Google. Of GWT, Closure, AppEngine fame.

I'll just get it out of the way: I'm probably wrong on all of these, and sticking them up on the wall for all to see forever is an act that screams for temporal retribution. And retribution there shall be. But first, there must be an affront to the very fabric of time. And here it is:

1. Google will continue to grow its influence over developers around the world. Their APIs, tools and services will form the beginnings of what could be called the Internet-based stack.
2. API management will be quite important. Incoming API usage will need governance, and outgoing API services will need formally enforced policies.
3. Web-based IDEs will start to make big waves. Project Bespin and the forthcoming Atlas will both change developers' perceptions of what a Web-based IDE is capable of. Call it cloud-based development.
4. Functional languages start making more headway in the United States. Europe has already figured this out.
5. Remember all that increadible optimization work that went into JVMs over the past 10 years? It will really be appreciated by all the people running Ruby, Clojure, Python and Scala. In a few years, I expect JVMs to be the standard runtime for most non-C-ish languages.

With everyone in the world building application stores on the iPhone AppStore model, it's refreshing to see such an effort applied to actually getting things done. I'm not saying the iPhone marketplace is frivolous, but it isn't completely focused on work. The Eclipse Marketplace is, itself, the solution to a big problem. It's long been a pain to find and install all the various bits and baubles you need to customize Eclipse for your corporate environment.

So the Eclipse Marketplace makes it easier to find all those things in one place. Certainly the core Eclipse tools are hosted at Eclipse.org, but as we all know, every software company in the world seems to have some sort of Eclipse plug-in these days. And the Eclipse Marketplace is the place to find them. Ian Skerrett wrote up a nice introduction to the Marketplace when it launched on Dec. 9.

There's already a vast selection of tools hosted there. Check out the screen mockup/UI design tool, Wireframe Sketcher. Or Pulse, the automated update and management tool for all your Eclipse stuff. And as long as there's an Eclipse, there will be a need to figure out what the heck it's doing: The Eclipse Log Analyzer is the most popular tool in the Marketplace right now.

The Lambdas are coming to Java. Mark Reinhold, principal engineer at Sun Microsystems and member of the OpenJDK guidance committee, began talking about his proposed addition of closures to Java earlier this month. It's a very big step in terms of how the language will evolve, and we can expect a lot of interesting commentary on the concept from all areas of the Java world as the first implementation is fleshed out over the coming year.

This has been an ongoing debate for years, however. Mark's recent blog entries address many of the concerns and ideas that have been proposed over the years. Neal Gafter has posted an excellent summary of how closures would work in a Java universe. Gafter and Peter von der Ahé have worked up an initial draft specification for closures, as well. Sun has also posted a new website for the so-called Project Lambda.

Here at Supernova, Twitter and Facebook are mentioned in every single talk, without exception. This is becoming increasingly common at tech events, and I sometimes wonder whether it is overhyping or the sign of a genuine revolution.

From the right angle, it's as if the world at large is waking up to the amazing world of Internet Relay Chat, the original real-time Internet communication device.

But that makes Twitter and Facebook no less revolutionary. First, though, let's refine this description to simply that of Twitter, because Facebook, in this context, is largely aping the Twitter functionality. And what is the Twitter functionality? It has nothing to do with communication, and everything to do with the fact that 100% of the text on Twitter is searchable. That's the power: being able to see, in real time, what people are thinking, doing, seeing, having trouble with.

As a hardcore IRC addict for going on 14 years now, I can say that this is exactly why I've always been addicted. IRC is not searchable, however, and provides a modicum of anonymity, as you can change networks, nicknames, hostmasks, etc. At Supernova, I was discussing this with David Weinberger, one of the authors of the Cluetrain manifesto. He said that he noticed that the IRC back channel, #supernova on Freenode, was empty.

In previous years, we had used the channel to comment on speakers, occasionally calling people on their BS, or badmouthing somnolent speakers behind their backs. The fun of it was that IRC wasn't logged and put online, so we could be fairly uncensored with our assessment of who was pitching a product instead of giving a real talk.

Unfortunately for one speaker, that back channel chit chat had moved to Twitter, and it was projected onto the screen behind her while she spoke. This is a bad idea, for the record, as some men in the audience were saying rather rude things about her on Twitter, and these thoughts were then immediately projected above her head. 

One nice thing about IRC is that no one will ever be projecting an IRC channel's contents onto a public wall. The medium is well-known to be uncensored and often the harbor of inappropriate talk.

Yesterday, 95% of the attendees had laptops open during the talks, and I can say that 100% of them were looking at Twitter at some point. Speakers would check, immediately after talking, to see what people had tweeted about them. Questions were posited for speakers from audience members, a welcome change from the typical mumbling, rambling self-agrandizement that comes from open mic question sessions at these shows. It's hard to name-drop your company and go off topic in the limited space of a Twitter posting. 

And Twitter is powerful stuff to mine for data. This is the heart of that big data problem I've been so on about recently. Twitter provides an unfiltered glimpse into the ego of humanity (IRC being the id). But with that view comes the sensory overload William Gibson hints at in some of his more recent works. The heroes of Gibson's newer books aren't hackers and programmers, they're data analysts.

Why? Because if you know how to plumb Twitter, you can reap immensely useful information. But you have to know what to look for. Danah Boyd of Microsoft Research suggested searching Twitter for, simply, "The." I'd advocate selecting some key words, maybe 100 or so, and scraping Twitter's API, then pouring that info into some pretty charts and graphs. 

Either way, it's not easy to just reach into Twitter and pull out meaning. You can do so for the past hour of chatter, but to really get your mind around the constant influx of information it can provide, you're going to have to write some code to track data over timespans as long as a year or more. Of course, this all assumes that you can scrape Twitter enough before the fail whale surfaces.

So, basically, Twitter is the way of the future. That's the gist of Supernova. Make your applications capable of dealing with Twitter-like data feeds from users. Status updates, evidently, are one of the most powerful business tools to come around in the past 10 years. I guess that means your company needs internal status updates for all of its employees. And if you're going to do that, you might as well add a social network in there as well.

And, incidentally, #supernova on Freenode, though empty yesterday, came to life today. I guess anonymously taking about speakers and events still has a place.