Waldo Smeets .com

The former UltraDev PHP community is in panic. Now Dreamweaver MX ships with a PHP server model they have decissions to make. In the past they used PHAkt, a third party PHP Server Model extension for Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, created by InterAkt. There are lots of a extensions that support PHAkt and the entire UltraDev PHP community depends upon them.

Now with DWMX they don’t know what to do:

• DWMX not not support PHP in the same way as UltraDev with PHakt did. Especially the lack of extensions and the lack of support for a database transparant layer seems to be a problem.
• PHAkt and therefor all third party extensions don’t work in DWMX (yet), which means that all PHP Projects can’t be ported to DWMX yet
• The extension developers don’t know which server models they will be supporting in the future releases of their extensions. Some of them say that it’s too much to support 3 PHP models (Macromedia’s PHP-MySQL Model, PHAkt and the professional version of PHAkt named ImpAkt). Others are happy that they can develop for an alternative model than PHakt because they are frustrated by their changing behavior which caused to break their extensions every now an then.

So now the UltraDev PHP community is in doubt… should they go for the Macromedia PHP-MySQL model, or should they go for PHAkt 2 and ImpAkt 2? For which model can they expect the most additional extensions to be developed in the future? What to do with sites previously build with PHAkt? And the list of questions goes on. I’m wondering where this will all end.

Follow this story at the UDzone TalkZone [topic 1: MX transition], [topic 2: PHPLib abstraction layer in DWMX and open source project for Dreamweaver PHP model] and in the Macromedia newsgroup.