Welcome to my new column. It’s basically a grep of all mentions of java in #php from July to December 2005. The nicks have not been hidden to protect the guilty. This is what the people in #php on ef-net think about Java as a programming language: < Johnboyo> java is awful, im a symbian programmer by trade and i avoid it at all costs < @feti> better than a low-level language.

It’s exciting times for PHP. Quality frameworks are popping up like daisies mushrooms skunk cabbage, and it seems like every bob the builder out there is releasing one. Please leave a comment if you know of a framework I haven’t mentioned, or if you have experience with one in the list. For the project I’m doing at the moment I’m using Seagull, but there are so many good frameworks out there – and I’d like to test at least 3-4 of them by implementing a real-world project.

When implementing script.aculo.us’ AJAX In Place Editor for a project I’m currently working on, I ran into some character encoding problems. My PHP framework uses ISO-8859-1, while the ajax script was submitting UTF-8 to my server. Reading the wiki documentation, I discovered that this was a ‘known feature’: The form data is sent encoded in UTF-8 regardless of the page encoding. I was recommended to use iconv to convert back to ISO-8859-1 on the server.

There’s an ancient fable that tells of a frog that falls into a pail of milk. Unable to scramble out, the creature trashes around, seemingly drowning. Eventually however, his frantic struggles turn the milk into butter – and he hops away. Until now, that fable has been a good metaphor of my struggle with the seven headed beast called JavaScript. I’ve written my lines of code, gotten inane script errors from IE, tried, failed and tried again.

In his latest Alertbox column Jakob Nielsen (you know, the usability guru) writes: I worry that search engines are sucking out too much of the Web’s value, acting as leeches on companies that create the very source materials the search engines index. He argues that people are using the search engines as ‘answer engines‘, and that they often do not visit the pages that create the content at all.