So I need to create a portal site, where we will require multiple frontends. As most portal's we need to store some state information inside a session. We also need to show how many users are online, but more importantly be able to filter searches in the member database by who is online (we do not need to filter by how long the last site interaction as been, but you never know with changing requirements).

A recent post by Rasmus really reminded me of something I have noticed often before, but never really done anything about. The fact that we do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?

I think there is something wrong with Matt’s argument in that he overlooks the fact that we are talking about open source here. The developers of said applications are probably all among the people that have servers available. So if the decide to move on, its only a question of the hosters flipping the switch to increase the number of machines they deploy their PHP5 images on.

Optaros, the company I am working for, released an open source catalog which lists close to 300 so called "enterprise ready" OSS applications. I guess most of you reading my blog are not exactly in the target group as to me it mostly seems to be directed about people that lack deep networking into the various OSS communities. That being said I still think that it might be worth a look, even if its just to blog about how we totally got the rating on a specific piece of software totally wrong.

Georg, Andrey and Ulf have been hard at work designing, implementing and testing a replacement for libmysql only for us PHP users. The idea is that mysqlnd can leverage all the internal PHP infrastructure for communication and memory management. It can also be much more PHP aware, removing old cruft we do not need while adding extra goodies just for us!