UDzone interviews InterAKT
Today InterAkt Online (www.InterAkt.ro) has released PHAkt, a wonderful extension for Dreamweaver UltraDev that allows web developers to make dynamic websites using PHP. This is the first third party developed Server Model for Dreamweaver UltraDev and it is available for free. Waldo Smeets from UDzone interviewed Alexandru Costin from InterAkt. Alexandru is one of the driving forces behind PHAkt together with Bogdan Ripa.
Waldo:
Hi Alexandru, thanks for taking the time to give us this interview. Can you please introduce yourself and InterAkt Online to the public?
Alexandru:
Bogdan and I are known as the PHAkt creators - and in case you don't know, PHAkt is the "de facto" PHP extension for UltraDev dynamic site development for the PHP application server. We are also the founders of InterAkt Online, a software development company focused on the Linux/PHP application server. Bogdan is 22 years old and I am 24 years old. We both are students in the terminal year at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, French Stream.
Waldo:
So you are the brave guys who dared to develop an entire PHP Server Model for UltraDev! When did you decide to make such a great product?
Alexandru:
It all started in January 2001 when I discovered the power of UltraDev. We hd started to implement a PHP server model by ourselves, but in the meanwhile we became aware of the PHP4UD project of Dan Radigan. That implementation was more complete that ours, so we decided to contact him to offer some hosting space and a potential partnership in return for his model. We also found ADODB, a transparent layer that allowed database connections from PHP in a more intuitive way, one that would fit nicely in the server model. We hd contacted Dan through some chat sessions, and we started to work on a common implementation, but Dan soon allowed us to continue the development ourselves.
Waldo:
Did you do any extension development for UltraDev before?
Alexandru:
No, no extensions. We have learned computer science in school and in our previous jobs, and we are proud of having very highly skilled computer professionals in our company. Some of us are participants and winners in computer science nationals. We are awarded with many prizes in regional and national contests. Extending Ultradev still proved to be a challenging task.
Waldo:
So you are real experts. Which web developers should have a look at PHAkt? I mean, which people do you expect to download the product?
Alexandru:
We foresee two main categories of users: the newbies who want to work on the performing and not too expensive Linux/PHP application server, and the experts that want to ease their work on developing dynamic web sites, which understand that Linux/PHP can help them pursue this task. From our statistics we have seen that PHAkt is being downloaded by developers all over the world.
Waldo:
Well, I think that you are giving UD developers a new chance to earn their money. PHP is getting more popular every day and now you have enabled UD users to developer PHP sites even without having to know PHP. UD knowledge is enough. I think that lots of Web Developers will thank you for that.
Alexandru:
We have to thank Macromedia for making such a great product. It is very extensible and all the bugs we have found so far (when adding a complete server model) were only minor ones. Using XML and JavaScript has proved to be a winning choice and we are sure that UD will remain the main development product for web authoring.
Waldo:
You are also developing two other products related to PHAkt. Can you introduce them to us please?
Alexandru:
Designing PHAkt was a very complex task, and now we understand that PHAkt can be improved from the design point of view. We took a "brutal" approach in developing PHAkt to satisfy as many users as fast as possible. And now we know that PHAkt can be substantially improved. The improvements we plan to add will need a lot of supplemental work, and that's why we can't afford to continue developing it for free. That’s why the commercial version of PHAkt will come at a moderate price, but will lighten the load on the servers, while offering greater flexibility for developing software with it. It is called ImpAKT - Improved PHAkt. We feel that there is need for a more robust version of it, with unified error reporting, improved algorithms, internationalization and other miscellaneous improvements. We will also try to provide a migration utility to convert PHAkt made sites in ImpAKT ones, allowing rapid optimization for existing solutions.
Waldo:
So we can expect an even better but commercial version of PHAkt soon, although it might be a little bit strange for PHP users because they all are used to the Open Source model?
Alexandru:
Yes, we are aware of the Open Source mentality ... We are adepts too, but the problem is that at some level, you have to decide if you want a full Open Source solution, or a backed up solution...
As far as I know, GreatBridge does this for Postgres and Nusphere for MySQL, so we presume it is a viable business model. One serious developer will always take the "supported" solution, even if this will cost him something (reasonably priced). The extensions have to be tested by us or by other third parties in a more robust way. We want to have PHAkt improved in a public way - and the Extensionologists have done this brilliantly - but we feel that the extensions should be tested under real life conditions.
Waldo:
Talking about Open Source: UDzone expects that the PHP developers will soon release additional extensions. We already have some of them hosted at UDzone. Which extensions do you expect from those third party developers in the near future and how will they affect PHAkt?
Alexandru:
We know that an UltraCart extension is needed. We expect one of these soon for the PHP server model. We have already seen some Mail extensions from Tim Green and we know that there are some other extensions for Conditional Region and PHP Includes, etc. We expect that every extension developer will soon try to migrate their ASP only extensions to PHP, because PHP developer numbers are increasing and they will have to get the same comfort the ASP developers have. Moreover, we have talked with Jag (the maker of UltraSuite 2000) and he plans to release a Magic Suite for PHP soon.
Regarding our own extensions in the future: With our current experience in creating server behaviors, we are now able to create customized server behaviors. We think that companies will love a custom extension that creates source code complaint with the company internal code conventions. This is a service we will propose soon, and this is the first time we are making this idea public.
We have also designed and researched another potential product which allows form developers to create database forms in a very intuitive way, while using UniFORM and UniVAL (we'll explain this later) to minimize work. A big problem we've encountered when working with the insert and update behaviors is the need to duplicate the form creation and validation work for the insert and update pages. That's why we have unified the form creation for the insert/edit/delete actions in a single command, allowing developers to create the form once for all actions. This is what we call UniFORM, and it helps because it allows us to maintain a single application logic for all three actions. In the same manner, we have designed UniVAL, a single form validation algorithm that allows us to validate the data both on the client and server side using regular expressions.
Waldo:
Cool, well I think they will find their way to www.InterAkt.ro to contact you about all these great extensions. And I hope that you can make the new ones ASP compatible!
Alexandru:
We have the ASP compatibility in mind, we know this is a great market, but we would love to have an investor to sponsor us to do this, because ASP is out of our strategic areas right now.
Waldo:
Alexandru, my latest question for this interview. We have talked about PHP in UltraDev and about new PHP specific extensions. But you have spent thousands of hours developing extensions. What do you advice to other people/companies that want to develop a new server model for UltraDev? For example: we are all waiting for someone to develop an ASP.NET server model for UltraDev.
Alexandru:
We have only one very important piece of advice: understand the UltraDev architecture first. Then learn JavaScript and Regular Expressions. Then be ready to spend *a lot* of time and money implementing it. There are hidden traps and there are many things that can make the whole thing come down, etc. We were lucky to make PHAkt GPL, because the user community helped us a lot, mainly with beta testing, but also with code suggestions and other contributions.
Waldo:
That’s a good advice for any future developers. Thank you very much for this interview Alexandru. I am sure that lots of developers will enjoy PHAkt. And off course I hope that you can learn from them how to improve the product even further for the future. And at last but not at least: I hope that the small group of extension developers and extension developer wannabies can learn from all the great work you have done!
Alexandru:
We want to thank all the people that helped us along the way: Mihai (which is in a France internship), Dan, Waldo, Tim, Massimo, Randy, Nacho and all the others.
Waldo:
Thanks Alexandru.
You can find more information about InterAkt, PHAkt and all the other PHP products they make at www.InterAKT.ro.
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