PHP 5 has been released, and on the same day a new version of 4: 4.3.8.
Version 5 has several improvements over 4, the most important of them being the completely rewritten XML support and the use of the new Zend-II engine that has real object support (instead of a modified document model to suit OO-programming). Browse to their website, and find out everything there is to know about this new version.
Yesterday I had a good day in my mental/personal(/midlife?) crisis, so I started Delphi just to do some programming. Nothing real, just playing around. A while ago, I downloaded SuiPack, from SuniSoft, so I installed that.
Let me tell you about the installation first. You start the installer, and in less that a minute a message is showed that the installation is complete. Okay, I thought, I haven’t even noticed something.
Starting Delphi again gave me 4 more tabs in the pallette: SuiPack, SuiPack DB, SuiDialogs and SuiUtils. The first one is so filled with components, that it doesn’t even fit on one page. It seems to contain just about any object you already know! SuiPack DB holds the components that are database-aware. SuiDialogs hold some predefined dialogs and then there are some utils.
Working with the components is easy. Converting old projects is easy too. Just drop a converter-component on your form, and suiPack will try to convert all components to the Sui-counterpart. If you don’t use too many third party components, converting should give you no problem. Switching themes on the fly is easy. Just drop a SuiThemeManager on the form, double-click it to select which components will be effected and at runtime change the SuiThemeManager.SuiUIStyle to something else. A predefined theme, or something you load from a file. It’s already in there.
Two thumbs up for this product. Its price is good too. Individual licenses are $59, or $99 with full source. Corporate licenses are more expensive, but still very cheap if you have a couple of developers on your payroll.