SVG made a very good progress since I checked it out last time a while ago – now editors and rendering tools seem to be ready for mainstream.

Some quotes:

• May 2002: yScript -> PHP
• Why we picked PHP
  1. Designed for web scripting
  2. High performance
  3. Large, Open Source community
     • Documentation, easy to hire developers
  4. “Code-in-HTML” paradigm
  5. Integration, libraries, extensibility
  6. Tools: IDE, debugger, profiler
• ./configure –disable-all
• Security: open_basedir, allow_url_fopen = Off, display_errors = Off, safe_mode = Off; input_filter hook
• Performance: Opcode Caches, PHP Extensions in C++
• Globalization: PHP Unicode (2006)

Historical trail of talks about PHP at Yahoo! (worth reading too):

• One Year of PHP at Yahoo! on October 23, 2003 at PHPCon 2003 and July 9, 2003 at OSCON 2002 (HTML, PDF)
• Making the Case for PHP at Yahoo! on October 25, 2002 at PHPCon 2002 (HTML, PDF)

Interesting quotes:

• Still running Apache 1.3, actively porting to Apache 2.2 (2006)
• What’s wrong with threads?
  • too hard for most programmers to use
  • even for experts, development is painful
• Custom log files format
• Signal-free log rotation
• Bandwidth reduction
  • Smaller 30x bodies
  • Custom gzip
• No need for StartServers, MaxSpareServers, MinSpareServers – just MaxClients (constant pool size)
• Accept Filtering on FreeBSD
• SendBufferSize 229376, NO_LINGCLOSE – don’t wait for the client to read the response
• YahooHostHtmlComment
• SSL Acceleration cards, stunnel
• ysar

Quotes:

Designing for the Next Ten Years

• Other minimal JS1 solutions seem likely to scale poorly too
• We can’t make so big a spec jump again, so this is it
• Browsers implementations should show up in 2007 (Mozilla and Opera for sure)
• Some browsers will lag, but let’s think long-term: 2010
• Are there useful tools to speed migration?
  • A JS2 to JS offline translator, for example
  • Write your web app using JS2 exclusively
  • Run the translator over all of your JS2 code
  • Serve the translated files to old browsers

Motivation

• Fix problems in JS1 that bug people daily
• A type system to enforce invariants
  • instead of writing/debugging lots of value-checking code
  • optional annotations, an extension to JS1
• Programming in the large
  • Package system
  • Visibility qualifiers (namespaces, private internal public)
  • Optional static type checking
• Support bootstrapping and metaprogramming
  • Self-host most of the standard objects
  • Self-host compiler front end and type checker
  • Reduce need for future ECMA Editions