The Zend Framework was released a few days ago. This is a PHP5-only web application framework from Zend, “the PHP company.” It has been in development for a long time, but if that had a chilling effect on the development of other PHP frameworks, it’s hard to see.

I’m going to go straight for my grim conclusion here: I think many of the other PHP web frameworks in development have no long-term prayer against Zend. It’s not about technical merits, it’s about the business case that Zend is a safer bet than five random guys with a Trac install and a cool logo.

I just posted this mini-rant over at reddit.com in response to implications that Python is somehow selling out by getting a more business-friendly makeover.

Here’s the thing about the new site being “too corporate” or whatever.

Python is not a band with a MySpace profile and an awesome debut album. It’s a programming language. Programming languages live if they’re used, and more or less die if they’re not used. Enthusiasts, e.g. reddit users, will find what’s cool regardless. Corporations, on the other hand, need to be marketed to. If you love Python, you should love the idea of it putting on a little bit of professional dress – because that ultimately means you are more likely to actually get paid to program in Python down the road.

This must have happened over the weekend. The redesigned python.org has launched. It’s a huge visual improvement over the old design, which really hadn’t changed much in, oh, about seven years.

The Python community has achieved a gradual, grudging acceptance of the idea that marketing and presentation matter, but I think it was Ruby on Rails that really drove it home. Ruby (a very cool language in its own right) has seen a huge surge in popularity in the past year, driven largely by the excitement around Rails. Python.org has been sitting around looking dowdy.

If you frequent any online programmer haunts you may have already been exposed to the writings of Steve Yegge, a former Amazon.com software developer and a technical ranter par excellence. Yegge has re-published his rants, most of which were originally written for an internal audience of developers at Amazon, to the web at large. He urges people not to take them too seriously, but there’s a lot of truth in them. Oh, and they’re wickedly funny.

Ironic that I find myself defending PHP at a point when I’m making a huge effort to move most of my web coding to Python, but I keep running across mini-rants along the lines of “PHP sucks because it mixes business logic into your HTML.”

No, it doesn’t.

It makes it possible, sure. But it’s completely avoidable. As The Daily WTF can show you, it’s possible to do screwy things in any language.

Safari and Opera understand CSS files mistakenly sent with a text/plain MIME type. Gecko browsers, on the other hand, do not. Don’t ask how I learned this.

I’ve tiptoed into the Web 2.0 world by adding a couple small Ajax features to the blog.

First, there’s now a “More” link at the top of my Random Bookmarks sidebar which fetches another seven random links from the server and plugs them into the page without reloading.

Second, I added a gratuitous animated roll-unroll toggle to the comment form, and made it closed by default. OK, that’s not Ajax, that’s just fluff.