I have just come back from an all company meeting of Sun Australia/NZ, and I must say that I am impressed by their commitment to open source. Coming in as part of the MySQL acquisition, there was a real concern that the open source mantra coming from Sun may not have any substance. Nothing could be further from the truth. In every presentation I've seen, both at this meeting and at other meetings, and in talking to other Sun employees, there is a real will and drive to make sure just about everything in the Sun portfolio is available as open source.

This has given me faith that the integration of MySQL into the stack has real synergies and buy-in from the entire company. It has also made me feel a lot more comfortable in coming from the open source heartland into a company that has multi-billion dollar revenues and tens of thousands of staff worldwide. Sure there will be teething problems. Sure there will need to be a shift of focus for some in the company. Sure there will be scepticism in the wider open source community. None of this will matter though, as open source is no longer the future, it is mainstream, it is now and it is starting to shift perceptions to match the reality on the ground. I feel privileged to be part of a company that has recognised that and is making some bold moves that will no doubt prove successful.

Why the title "Everything Under the Sun"? Have you looked at Sun's portfolio recently? There are very few gaps in what they can offer in the IT arena, from hardware to operating systems to software all the way up to enterprise solutions. I think it is going to be an interesting time.

Since we made the decision to go to Zend Framework in dotProject 3 it is interesting the places it shows up (well, only if you ignore the fact that I'm involved). At the MySQL Users Conference and Expo this year two of the Web Team at MySQL will be presenting on the use of Zend to restructure an existing website and in developing a new application. These are guys I work with every day, and it was as a result of some of the work we were doing in this regard that I decided that Zend was likely to be a great basis for taking dotProject into the future.

Dups and Markus have both converted smaller sites across to Zend to determine how well it performs and what the gotchas were going to be. The MySQL website is a big beasty, with lots of code hanging off of it, and the task was going to be monumental. It turned out to be a lot easier than that, but you can find out how it all is going and what the benefits to MySQL are in their talk.

You might also want to take a look at Dups' blog site - great photos, and Markus' DB4Free site where you can get a MySQL 5.1 or 6.0 account for free!

So getting back to dotProject 3. The experience in the MySQL site conversion has really made an impression on how to effectively use Zend and on how well it can perform in a real-world situation. This experience has really helped get a handle on all of the quirks of Zend that we are likely to hit with dP3 (and in fact it has already answered some tricky questions I had), so the synergy has been, and will continue to be, great for both dP and for MySQL.

On a side point, this is one of the great things about working on Open Source projects. You can quite often develop and hone skills that will have a direct benefit to your daily work, and can also improve your ability to get a job. In the proprietary world you often see resumes that talk about the great work you did, but you can't show anyone the code. In the open source world you can point to the SVN or CVS repository and say - take a look at what I've committed, and judge for yourself! This is a truly powerful tool when discussing skills with a prospective employer. I know that my work on dP and other Open Source projects was what sealed the deal at my current job.

Title: THE DRAGON QUEENS
Publisher: Voyager
Author: Traci Harding
Edition released: 2007
ISBN 0-7322-8111-3
477 pages
Reviewed by: Adam Donnison

It is 1856 and a document that could rock the entire foundation of Christianity has come to light. Dug up from what is believed to be the ancient city of Ur, the document lays out Genesis, but not the one that many are familiar with. Ashlee Devere, through her ties with the Sangreal Knighthood, is asked to travel to Persia to verify the document. Little does Ashlee realise the extent of the adventures that she, her husband and her son will be thrust into.

Ashlee is also on a personal quest to discover her true genesis, and how she shares the blood of the ancient mythological Dragon Queens.

THE DRAGON QUEENS is written as a series of readings of journals of relatives of Tamar, daughter of Mia Montrose, a 21st century linguist. This results in a first person account from the perspective of the relevant protagonists, spanning periods from the time of Atlantis to the future.

While Tamar reads the journals she finds her own psychic ability expand and even her physical appearance change.

Traci Harding has written a well researched fantasy that is likely to have wide appeal. The writing style is likely to trouble some readers, changing perspective and using a stilted style for some of the journals that may have been meant to capture the period, but somehow falls a little flat.

It may well be that the target audience of THE DRAGON QUEENS is younger, and with a few more X chromosomes than this 40-something male. I can see this appealing to a younger audience with its strong females and the search for identity.

THE DRAGON QUEENS is the second book in The Mystique Trilogy.

If you are a regular visitor to dotProject.net you may have noticed a maintenance message being displayed for a number of hours today. There is nothing much wrong, except that we have changed our upstream hosting provider. We hope that this will provide a better service with less outages. If you notice anything wonky, please let us know.

dotProject 2.1 is coming closer to realisation. The 2.1 release candidate 2 that I pushed out today is the result of a large amount of effort in cleaning up the codebase and closing off a number of bugs, including some potentially serious security flaws.

I won't be foolish enough to say that we've fixed all security flaws. In a codebase that is now nudging 150,000 lines of code (including third party libraries), you'd have to be an idiot to suggest it was bug free.

You can download from SourceForge and documentation is available at our Status Page on our docs site.