Bitflux doing impressive stuff with a range of Open Source technologies for a museums “Information Screens”.

Just been catching up on the Bitflux blog - Christian Stocker talks about a project they’ve just completed here. Impressive stuff.

What’s most interesting is when you look at the list of technologies used: Apache, Linux, PHP, MySQL and Mozilla (and Python - see comment). Where are those platforms “you must have for success” that we keep hearing about?

It’s a shame Bitflux couldn’t have been given the contract for the buses in Zurich, which now have their own on board “info systems” (a screen which shows the bus on a simplified map, telling you where you are and how long it takes to the next stop). From time to time I get to ride to work on a bus with a blue screen....

On the subject of blue screens, it’s interesting reading the Artima Interview with Anders Hejlsberg (of C# fame most recently) The Trouble with Checked Exceptions. My opinion is the article was part fair point on how to reduce development times and part attempt to claim C# is better than Java. What seemed to me revealing was where he says;

“Surely in any kind of event-driven application like any kind of modern UI, you typically put an exception handler around your main message pump, and you just handle exceptions as they fall out that way.”

If that’s really common practice at MS, it might explain why Windows blows up from time to time without an obvious reason.

Anyway - back to Bitflux - one other interesting blog here leads to Zzoss Installer: ZZ/OSS Installer is a PHP-based installation wizard for professional release management of modular PHP applications. The first release (LGPL) is up on SF here.