As you know, Sugar 5.1 will be our first release where we support only PHP 5 and will drop support for PHP 4. The minimum supported version of PHP for Sugar 5.1 will be PHP 5.1.

With PHP 5.2 now the primary release supported by the PHP team and no more work being done on PHP 5.1, we plan to drop support for PHP 5.1 and require a minimum version of PHP 5.2 with the Sugar 5.5 release targeted at the end of this year. We still support PHP 5.1, but do recommend that you use the latest version of PHP 5.2 as that is proving to be a far more stable PHP release for Sugar to run.

To summarize:

• Sugar 5.0 requires a minimum of PHP 4.4.1, but we recommend PHP 5.2
• Sugar 5.1 will require a minimum of PHP 5.1.0, but again we recommend PHP 5.2
• With Sugar 5.5 at the end of the year, we will require a minimum of PHP 5.2

Onwards and upwards!

I was catching up on the work done at Sun Microsystems around performance testing SugarCRM and MySQL on the Sun Coolthreads server technology.  I see that Satish Vanga, the engineer working on this project, has updated his blog post detailing his performance results and system configuration.  With further tweaking of the MySQL configuration, he has been able to increase the number of concurrent users from 700 to 900.  Very cool!

We have just posted the Sugar Developer Webinar schedule for June.  We have two great deep-dive developer sessions coming up on customizing SugarCRM.

In the Building Dashlets and RSS Feeds session on June 12th, Majed will take you through the details of creating both a Dashlet and an RSS Feed off of a custom-built module.

In the Adding Custom UI Field Types session on June 26th, Max will show you how to create an upgrade safe custom field type which will appear as a new field type choice in Studio and Module Builder.

Sign up now!

We are pleased to announce that the Funambol-SugarCRM Connector Project led by Phil Shotton is the SugarForge Project of the Month for May 2008.  Phil really deserves this award as he truly exemplifies the dedication and passion of a Sugar Open Source Community member and the leadership qualities of a project admin for a top SugarForge project.  Congrats to Phil!

For those of you who haven’t heard of Funambol yet (where have you been hiding?), Funambol is a top-notch technology that allows you to sync contacts, tasks and appointments between various applications and your favorite mobile phone device.  And of course this connector syncs your Sugar customer info with your mobile phone.  Very cool!

On another cool note…  Funambol is just now launching their own Funambol Forge. How long before Phil earns project of the month there as well?  ;^)

We just concluded a survey of the developers in the Sugar Community.  This was our first developer survey and it is always great to get real data to back up what we think the community looks like and wants.  In general we weren’t too surprised with the results, but we were amazed on how consistent the feedback was across the respondents.

The majority of the Sugar Developer Survey respondents are developers using the Community Edition in small companies in North America and Europe and are relatively new to SugarCRM (less than two years).  They almost all have customized the Sugar code and definitely want to see more code comments and better developer documentation.  Though there was some pointed feedback on how to improve the product and documentation (hey, this was their opportunity to say it all) they still rank us very well against other technology vendors, would recommend SugarCRM to others and definitely plan to stick with SugarCRM going into the future.

About 60% of the respondents are running Sugar 5.0, 30% on Sugar 4.5 and the rest on Sugar 4.2 and 4.0.  About 90% are running PHP 5 and 10% PHP 4.  85% are running MySQL and 15% are running MS SQL Server.  2/3rds  are running Linux and 1/3rd are running Windows.  All of the developers use PHP at work, with Java, C++ and Perl being the next most common programming languages.  Standard text editors were the favorite IDE for half the respondents with Eclipse and Zend Studio coming in at 30% and 20%.  3/4ths of the respondents had worked with PHP applications prior to SugarCRM.

The number one request was for better developer documentation.  We are already moving quickly on this with a dev guide in the works.  Stay tuned for a complete update mid-Summer to the Sugar Developer Zone site including all new developer documentation and tutorials.

I’d like to thank everybody who took the time to answer the survey and give us your feedback. In conclusion, expect to see these community-focused surveys more frequently.  Your input drives what we focus on next!

I just got back from IBM’s Impact 2008 show. This show was a pretty amazing whirlwind tour with a primary focus around SOA. It took place in the MGM Grand hotel in Vegas. I was amazed at the size of the MGM Grand property. The conference spanned multiple buildings and I would say at least a square mile of territory.

The conference spanned most of the buildings in the picture on the right. Many of the meetings were in the larger buildings that are relatively close. An Un-Conference that I participated in was in the second signature tower. The second signature tower is the middle of the three thin tall towers in the middle picture.

One of the highlights of the conference was the announcement of WebSphere sMash. WebSphere sMash is the commercial offering based on the incubator project Project Zero. ProjectZero is an attempt to implement the PHP language on top of a JVM. WebSphere is going to support dynamic languages. The first two dynamic languages that they are going to support are PHP and Groovy. With this project, you can code your application in PHP, Groovy, C, and Java. All four of these languages will run in the same process space making calls between the different languages very easy. They have also included some great tooling. They have an IDE in Eclipse and an IDE in the web browser. They have also been leveraging their own technologies in the development of the project. They have PHPBB running on the project zero site in WebSphere sMash.

I also had the opportunity to sit down with Jerry Cuomo the CTO and IBM Fellow in charge of this project and record a podcast that is available on IBM’s DeveloperWorks site. At this point, they have two software packages running on sMash: PHPBB and SugarCRM. The instructions for installing and configuring Sugar for sMash are still being refined. There is also a 10 minute video of Sugar on Zero being extended to span multiple languages and leveraging a SOAP to REST API conversion layer.

This project started about 10 months ago and is still getting refined rapidly. At this point it is capable of running Sugar pretty well. It is also setup to create separate Java processes for each application that you are hosting on your machine. Each application has its own set of dependencies and configurations. This allows each application to be setup with the resources that it needs to accomplish its mission independently of any other application on the system. They also have a repository system that allows the distribution of projects complete with custom configurations.

At this point, the current code is implemented in a way to get maximum functionality as quick as possible. a the functionality gets further and further towards completion, I am very interested to see how well the IBM team is able to leverage some of the person centuries IBM has invested in tooling, optimization, monitoring, virtualization, and scalability.

Check out ProjectZero and let me know what you think.

Jacob Taylor

CTO and Co-Founder

In working with IBM on a presentation, the TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2008 came to my attention.  Here is a quick preview of the top few languages:

It looks like PHP is holding its own as one of the top languages.  The biggest surprise for me was how quickly VB just gained on C++.  VB has been gaining ground for quite some time.  It had the single largest gain.

Jacob Taylor

CTO and Co-Founder

The next Sugar Developer User Group webinar will be held on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 10AM Pacific Time.

Join Sugar database expert Travis Swicegood as he discusses database tuning tips and tricks for Sugar.

For more information, or to register for this free event, please visit this link.

If you missed our first Dev-User Group session, please visit the tutorials section under customizations for more information. Sugar Lead Architect and Master Module Builder Majed Itani walks through dramatic upgrade-safe customizations. Here’s your chance to see how far Sugar’s flexible architecture can be taken.

If you’re like me you sometimes find the Module Builder terminology of “Deploy”, “Publish” and “Export” a little fuzzy.

This article summarizes the terminology nicely.