Facebook has announced “Hip Hop”, a PHP to C++ compiler stack that they hope will overcome some of the scaling and speed issues associated with PHP apps. The video above lays out the reasons they started the project and the types of things they want to accomplish with it. As a PHP developer, this project is of great interest to me. Most encouraging is the fact that someone other than Zend, the primary developers of PHP, is putting significant resources toward the popular language for Web apps. The project is set to be released to the open source community in the near future.
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This is a made up scenario, but it brings up very interesting points. On the surface, it does appear Apple never wanted the app store and tried to steer everyone toward Web development. Chris Messina lays this out very well with numerous links for context.
Steve Jobs hates the App Store for the same reasons I do: development for the iPhone platform is a distraction. It’s taking our eyes off the ball, and ignoring the bigger shift that’s happening beneath our feet. Developing iPhone apps now means postponing a better and more capable web until later, because so much energy is fixated on the cool whiz-bang effects in the iPhone platform that just haven’t been implemented in browsers… yet. We’ll look at this period as a great Dark Age that preceded the real next leap in computing — the age when we moved away from the stale metaphor of applications and moved to a world of ad-hoc connected identity agents living and feeding on a mesh of interwoven open data.
