Sun Microsystems has purchased MySQL for $1 billion dollars. That sounds like a lot of money but. considering the popularity of MySQL, I think it was a bargain for Sun.

What does the purchase mean for developers? Nothing yet.

It’s as if your favorite restaurant just got a new head chef but the menu is the same. Some of the dishes may change slightly over time—you might not notice. Someday the chef may decide to make more radical changes, even revise the whole menu. Changes to the kitchen operations and to the food may improve the quality and service of the restaurant, or it could hurt it. But for the near future, you can still order your favorite dish, pretty much the way you’ve always had it.

I’m happy to announce that my latest video training, Ruby on Rails Beyond the Basics, has been released on the lynda.com Online Training Library.

Ruby on Rails Beyond the Basics is the sequel to Ruby on Rails Essential Training and is 11.5 hours of video training for web developers who already feel comfortable with the fundamentals of Ruby and the Rails MVC framework. I teach more of the Ruby language and spend a lot of time on code blocks. Then, using the example of a blog as a project, I show you how to use migrations, demonstrate how to create CRUD that doesn’t simply mimic scaffold, and give you a better understanding of ActiveRecord and some of the pitfalls that often trip up developers. I also cover validations, callbacks, routes, pagination, performance improvements and more.

Ruby on Rails Beyond the Basics is available online as streaming video to subscribers of the lynda.com Online Training Library ($25/month, $250/year, $375/year with exercise files included). It is will also be available as a CD-ROM soon both through lynda.com and Amazon.com.

If you are a beginner, you will be better off if you first start with Ruby on Rails Essential Training which is available online to lynda.com OTL subscribers and on CD-ROM, both through lynda.com and Amazon.com, for $99.95.

If you try either of them and find that they are helpful, be sure to let me know!

Topics include:

• Updating Ruby, Rails and projects
• Using irb and the Rails console
• Intermediate Ruby language techniques
• Understanding code blocks
• Catching errors and raising exceptions
• Using migrations to manage database changes
• Understanding ActiveRecord and avoiding common pitfalls
• Creating flexible controllers and views
• Improving performance with eager loading and cache counters
• Working with form validations and model callbacks
• Using partials and helpers to organize views
• Salting passwords for increased security
• Choosing how to store session data
• Understanding and defining custom and named routes
• Pagination
• Using plug-ins

I already announced the online release of PHP with MySQL Essential Training. I’m really happy that it’s been getting tons positive user feedback. It seems to be helping a lot of people understand PHP as well as web development in general and that’s very gratifying.

Now you can also purchase the CD-ROM version. It’s $149.95 for 10.75 hours of training on 2 CDs. You can purchase it from lynda.com’s store or from Amazon.com.

The nice thing about the online version is that you can access it anytime, anywhere and you’ll also get access to all the other great lynda.com titles (including my Ruby on Rails Essential Training).

Why might the CD-ROM be right for you? A few reasons come to mind: No internet connection is required so you can watch offline or even when you travel. You’ll have speedier access to higher-quality video and sound. It includes the tutorial files so you can work along with me. You’ll have it on your shelf to refer to anytime, even if you don’t maintain your lynda.com subscription (but why wouldn’t you want do that?). You can share copies around your office or school. For large organizations, lynda.com can work out multiple-copy, site license deals too. And some people like having both the offline and online versions—one for the office, one for home or on the road.

If you’ve already watched either the PHP or Ruby on Rails training found it helpful, I hope you’ll consider taking a minute to write a review on Amazon.com with your opinion. Amazon.com shoppers don’t always know Lynda.com’s great reputation and your review will help them trust that the training can be helpful to them too.

The Atom Publishing Protocol is now a real web standard (RFC 4287).

APP is different from, but closely related to, the Atom Syndication Format which is an XML format used for web feeds and an alternative to RSS feeds. The Atom Publishing Protocol goes a step further than syndication and uses XML-formated requests over HTTP to manipulate Web resources. In other words, it’s not just for reading, it allows for creating, reading, updating and deleting (CRUD) resources over the web.

Those of you following the development of Ruby on Rails will recognize APP as being an example of a RESTful protocol. (The REST model is one of the new features of Rails.)

With it’s ability to edit data and support for arbitrary media resources, Atom becomes useful for web feeds, wikis, calendars, photo libraries, podcasts, video distribution, document management… even software distribution. You can publish anything to the world and the world can interact with it!

The days of complicated web services like SOAP and WSDL are behind us. Atom and REST are on the rise and I’m interested to see what developers do with them. For example, there’s been a lot of discussion recently about opening up closed social networks like Facebook (here, here, here and here). Atom/REST could allow a simple way to share information between social networks. An update to your profile or friend list on one social network could ripple out to all of your others using Atom.

A good place to start learning more about Atom is Atom Enabled.

Firefox has implemented httpOnly cookies in version 2.0.0.5.

What’s the big deal? How are they different? Basically, httpOnly cookies are mostly just regular cookies, usable in the standard cookie ways, but also tagged so that browsers keep them invisible to JavaScript. That means that if you have an XSS hole (Cross-site scripting, a technique for inserting JavaScript into sites and databases) in your website, it will be harder for malicious evil-doers to view cookies and to hijack user sessions. They can only be accessed by a HTTP request (which is probably what you as a developer intended).

In terms of technical implementation, it simply adds “HttpOnly” to the cookie header.

# Standard cookie header
Set-Cookie: person_id=42; expires=Wednesday, 31-Dec-07 23:59:59 GMT;

# httpOnly cookie header
Set-Cookie: person_id=42; expires=Wednesday, 31-Dec-07 23:59:59 GMT; HttpOnly

Internet Explorer added support for httpOnly cookies in IE 6.0. Safari and Opera still do not support them, but it’s planned for Opera version 9.5. I couldn’t find any hints online as to Safari’s plans.

PHP added support for setting httpOnly cookies and sessions in version 5.2. Ruby on Rails has a patch (#8895) ready that will hopefully make it into the next version.

I’m happy to announce PHP with MySQL Essential Training has been released on the lynda.com Online Training Library. It’s almost 11 hours of video training on PHP. I start with the basics of the PHP language and work up to dynamic web pages with a MySQL backend by demonstrating how to build a content management system.

Some of the topics it covers include: installation, PHP language fundamentals (variables, arrays, loops, functions, etc.), blueprinting an application, building dynamic pages, structuring and interacting with databases, how to build, validate and process forms, and regulating user access with passwords. I also provide practical advice, give best practices examples, and demonstrate refactoring techniques to improve existing code.

PHP with MySQL Essential Training is available online as streaming video to subscribers of the lynda.com Online Training Library ($25/month, $250/year, $375/year with exercise files included). It is will also be available as a CD-ROM soon both through Lynda.com and Amazon.com.

I also recorded Ruby on Rails Essential Training for the lynda.com Online Training Library which is available online to lynda.com OTL subscribers and on CD-ROM, both through lynda.com and Amazon.com, for $99.95.

If you try any of them and find that they are helpful, be sure to let me know!

Six Apart, the developers of the popular, blogging-application Movable Type, are developing an open source version of Movable Type alongside their commercial offering.

Why go open source, especially if there will still be a commercial version?

“It’s simple: our customers and our community have asked for an open source version of Movable Type. Many customers and developers in the Movable Type community were looking for a version of Movable Type that they were free to modify for their own needs. Additionally, there are community members who are looking to bundle an open source distribution of Movable Type with other open source products. We have been considering this option for some time but decided to base MTOS on the MT4 line, which is why this announcement coincides with MT4.”

This week they launched a website to support the Movable Type Open Source Project (or MTOS Project) and the first open source distribution should be available for download in late summer.

Movable Type is written in Perl, which is not something I usually blog, but I think it’s interesting to watch companies adopt open source as part of their commercial strategy.

Update: Carthik Sharma made an interesting post on this announcement from the WordPress perspective. (WordPress is Movable Type’s competitor.) Sharma thinks it may be an attempt to pull back customers who have switched to free and open source tools and that it may be too little, too late.