Vision Helpdesk Integration

Our friends over at Vision Helpdesk have been hard at work, they just launched v2.3.2 with Blesta integration! Now you can create invoices in Blesta directly from Vision Helpdesk, and I’m told they’ve got login share working too.

Vision Helpdesk is emerging as a leader is the support desk industry, and we recommend you check them out. They even have a free trial, so there is no obligation to buy.

Go Go Gadget Cart Racing

We’ve been cooped up inside, cranking away on code.. so we thought Labor Day weekend might be a good time to get out and do something that didn’t involve a keyboard. We went cart racing at K1 in Anaheim on Saturday and it was good times all around. K1 Speed does indoor electric cart racing and the carts are pretty fast, fast enough to get into trouble around some of the bends. Here’s Cody, while we’re all waiting to race, sporting his iconic and all around incredibly awesome Blesta t-shirt.

Here’s Cody and Tyson, both Blesta developers. You know those video tutorials? Tyson made them.

And here are our scores after our second race. As you can see, Tyson beat me by 1/5th of a second! I’ll have to get him back next time…

Saasdir Top 25 Award

Blesta won the saasdir.com award for Top 25 most popular for August. Check it out and place your vote for us for September!

PHP & C

For those familiar with C, PHP seems strikingly similar. From the syntax to the function calls. It’s almost as if you could replace a couple asterisks (*) with dollar signs ($) and add a PHP-tag or two, and you could run your C source raw.

#include <stdio.h>
 
main() {
	char *phrase = “hello world!n”;
	printf(“%s”, phrase);
}

<?php
function main() {
	$phrase = “hello world!n”;
	printf(“%s”, $phrase);
}
?>

The Big Blue C In recent time PHP has diverged from C’s familiar convention, in an attempt to offer a higher level experience. Much of this relates to IO. For example, PHP 4 required you to call fopen, then fwrite, and finally fclose in order to write content to a file, just as you would do in C. In PHP 5 file_put_contents was added in, which operates more of how you would expect from a scripting language. Although much has changed, some things likely never will. For example, command line parameters are handled in just about the same way. And while I haven’t viewed the source, I suspect fgetc directly invokes the C library. In fact, just about every function in the standard IO library (stdio.h) in ANSI C is represented in PHP. Static, Extern and Global PHP and C handle static variables within functions in exactly the same way. However, since PHP refuses to search the call stack outside of a function’s scope, a global keyword is required to pull these variables into scope so they can be used within a function. While this works similar to C’s extern declaration, unlike in C, you can’t ever use a variable defined outside a function, even if declared before the function, unless it is declared global or is one of the special “super global” types. C You Later PHP never had pointers, though they do offer references similar to Java. The difference being that a reference can’t be moved or reassigned as a pointer can using pointer arithmetic. PHP 5 raises errors when attempting to pass references to functions. While it’s still possible to pass by reference, the function or method signature must define it and the call must not include the ampersand (&). This is because, as of PHP 5, non-primitive types are implicitly passed by reference. While in some respects PHP has moved away from its C influence, in other aspects it’s become more similar. PHP 4, for example, added capabilities for variable length parameters, although in a much different way than C. Nevertheless, the C influence appears to be dwindling, in favor of higher level capabilities, such as XML parsing, and simpler IO. So it’s unlikely we’ll see new primitive C constructs, such as goto’s any time soon… or will we?

VPS.NET Module Released

Yesterday we announced support for VPS.NET on our forums, and it turns out Blesta is the first billing app to make use of VPS.NET’s new API. You can read about it on their blog too. VPS.NET has a unique node based VPS offering where more nodes mean more VPS and we’re proud to be the first to offer support. Big thanks to Carlos and Ditlev from VPS.NET! You can watch a video tutorial on configuring the module

here. In the future we will be extending functionality including.. 1. Implementing the VPS.NET node selector tool in an order template. 2. Allowing clients to select the OS Template at order, as opposed to only being set on the package level. 3. Adding a reboot option to the client area. If you’re looking to resell a VPS solution, be sure to check out VPS.NET!