PHP stuff
Been spending a lot of time looking at SugarCRM, an open source PHP-based CRM app. I remember looking at it over a year ago to determine if it would be a good fit for my wife's graphic design business. At the time, it seemed to make more sense for small sales teams who need a way to collectively track and collaborate and overkill for a single person to keep track of leads and contacts.
But I've had to go back and take a look at it because at my day job we're evaluating CRM concepts for our web-based sales proposal application, and I wanted a refresher on the basic data/object model, etc. In doing so, I've come across a lot of press about Sugar, its founders, and a new community of add-on developers that has sprung up. To be blunt, I think this dog might hunt.
Unrelated, today I came across www.symfony-project.com. I happened upon it through Digg, which had a nebulous reference to AJAX (doesn't everything these days?) and PHP5. Having spent no time developing on PHP5 yet, I figured it was worth a read. Based on a cursory glance and watching an online video they have, symfony has more than a passing resemblance to Ruby on Rails, which I downloaded and toyed with a couple months back when working on a grad project. I know it's no accident, but this has to get you wondering about whether the open source community and language zealots specifically spend too much time rebuilding what already exists and not enough time coming up with new, better ideas.
Anyway, dumping this hear as a reminder to go look at these again someday when I need them.