Meanwhile, we’ve also been making giant strides toward getting WarpShare ready for our initial launch. We’re currently in a private pre-alpha, but we’ll be opening it up to larger audiences over the next few months. Keep an eye out!

The WarpShare™ service is taking a bit more time to prepare than we’d originally thought. We have lots and lots of cool ideas, but we can only build them a day at a time. There isn’t much else I can talk about at this point in terms of technical progress, but I wanted to pass along the info that WarpShare is still on the horizon and will be coming as soon as it’s a bit more cooked.

Thirteen months ago, we open-sourced a piece of software that we’d been building called Tarzan™. In the time since then, Tarzan has become quite popular and at times difficult to keep up. We’re doing our best, however. Tarzan 2.0.4 will be going out very shortly. This is mostly a bug fix release, but we cheated and added a couple of minor new features in this release as well. Keep an eye on the release notes for more detail on the changes.

Also, Tarzan is beginning to branch out a bit. Up until this point, Tarzan has been built specifically for Amazon’s Web Services stack but that will soon be changing. As AWS has become more popular, new projects have been created that allow you to run services like EC2, S3, and SimpleDB on your own servers with an API that is identical to AWS. Tarzan intends to begin unofficially supporting these services soon (2.0.4 is a start). We’ve also been looking at the Rackspace/Mosso stack and are considering supporting their cloud as well. We will continue to evaluate this as we free up some resources to work on it.

To better reflect this beyond-Amazon direction, we will soon be re-branding Tarzan as CloudFusion™. If you’re on the mailing list, you may have seen a previous announcement for the name “CloudCore,” but we didn’t do enough homework up-front and discovered that there is already a trademark on that name. Our close-second choice was CloudFusion, so we’ll be moving forward with that. Tarzan 2.1 will be CloudFusion 2.1 and will come with a refreshed website, documentation, examples, and other goodies that we’re trying to get built.

Lastly, we’re now supporting a technology called OpenID for comments. What does that mean for you? It means that you can sign-in and comment on our blog with your existing account from Google/Gmail, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Windows Live, Hotmail, Flickr, AOL, Blogger, WordPress.com, and others! We also intend to enable this technology to make registering for and logging into our upcoming WarpShare service as easy and painless as possible. Watch for that!

Look forward to more news soon!

We know it hasn’t been long since our 2.0 release, but in that time Amazon has added support for European EC2 instances, SQL-like SELECT queries in SimpleDB, and they’ve recommended a new method for generating authentication signatures that provides better security. Tarzan 2.0.1 addresses ALL of these updates.

Because of the security enhancements in this update, we highly recommend Tarzan 2.0.1 for ALL of our new and existing users. Please see the release notes for more information.

You can download the 2.0 release from http://bit.ly/tarzan2, and please Digg us at http://bit.ly/digg-tarzan.

The latest trunk build has fixed a number of bugs and finally includes COMPLETE support for EC2 and Amazon Associates. All of the methods have been implemented and documented in all classes now (except for incomplete support for logging in S3). The latest builds also have support for the new Amazon CloudFront service which provides a CDN for your S3 content.

There are only 5 known bugs left before I announce an official “2.0″ release. The latest trunk builds are STABLE, and I would encourage everyone currently using Tarzan to begin using the latest development build to help us catch any remaining bugs before the big release. I’ll probably branch off a new pre-release before the end of the weekend as the last pre-release before 2.0.

You can see the remaining bugs for 2.0, and download the latest development build.

• Added the ability to change the content-type of an existing object in S3.
• Fixed some minor bugs in SimpleDB and S3.
• Re-wrote all of the documentation in the entire project (which enables us to generate awesome documentation which can be found on the Tarzan documentation page).
• Launched an entirely new website!
• Added support for caching frequently requested data to enhance performance. Caching types currently include file-based, APC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Informal tests tend to show a speed-up of between 600x-1000x, depending on the request and the type of cache being used.

If you’d rather not use the bleeding-edge subversion trunk builds, you can grab the latest pre-release build from the Tarzan download page. Check it out!

To generate the documentation directly from source code comments, I chose to use (a heavily customized version of) NaturalDocs 1.4. My number one, biggest problem with source code documentation systems is the inability to easily edit the output HTML. I’ve used PHPDocumentor, phpDoc, and Doxygen in the past, and although the CSS editing is fairly straightforward, I prefer to fine-tune my markup before I publish it. Although I still can’t say that it’s easy to edit (fix) the (crappy) HTML that these documentation systems offer, NaturalDocs was the easiest of the bunch.

I, personally, find the new docs easier to read, follow, and link to. Hopefully you will also find them equally as useful. Let us know what you think! Fire away in the comments!

One of the things I learned in my experience working on SimplePie was that presentation is, indeed, everything. It wasn’t until we launched http://simplepie.org in January 2006 that the project really began to take off in a big way. We’re hoping to replicate that success with the new http://tarzan-aws.com site.

In addition to making a better looking website, we also wanted one that was more useful, more user-friendly. The homepage now has a straight-forward description of what Tarzan is, and includes “calls-to-action” for a variety of typical tasks. We have a new customized wiki, documentation that lives on the same web server as everything else, a good-looking yet detailed description of many of Tarzan’s features, and links to the various ways to stay in-touch with what’s going on in the project. The guts of the project (subversion repository and the package downloads) are still on Google Code, but we’re okay with that for now.

We’ll be tweaking and tuning the site over the next few days, but we believe that this will be a solid platform from which to build a successful project. If you haven’t seen the new site yet, check it out!

One facet of WarpShare’s ultimate goal is to become the “Library of Congress” for digital media. As you can imagine, this requires a crap-ton of processing, storage, databasing, and infrastructure in general. Since we’re an early-stage startup with no major financial backing yet, we realized that cloud computing (and related things) would be a fantastic way for us to get rolling. The ability to pay for usage instead of having to buy servers up-front is a huge thing for us. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the answer to our prayers.

I’ll let you read up on AWS on your own, but in a nutshell you can utilize Amazon’s pay-per-use infrastructure via web service APIs. We’re a PHP shop, so I sat down, began digging through the online documentation, and started putting together a series of classes to interact with the services we knew we were going to use. Back in 2005, I’d started a project that interacted with Amazon’s E-Commerce Service (ECS, now known as Amazon Associates Web Service (AAWS)). I called this project Tarzan since it worked with Amazon Web Services (get it?). I decided to restart the project, throw out the code that sucked, and begin adding support for cloud computing, online storage, messaging, and simple databasing.

In April 2008, we decided that although the project was still a bit immature it was good enough to open up to the larger community (with the very liberal Simplified BSD License) with the hope that we could begin collaborating with other developers who were also interested in seeing a project like this become more useful. We also knew what we were up against: “official” PHP APIs provided by Amazon themselves, along with a barrage of other AWS-related projects that were — for the most part — little more than itch-and-scratch-ware.

In the few months since we released our code to the open-source community, we’ve had people like you submit a variety of bugs and patches, we’ve had some really cool features requested (and implemented), we’ve received some terrific feedback from our users, and we’ve put a TON of time into making the project better for the entire Tarzan community — including ourselves. But we know there’s still much to do.

In an effort to make a bigger splash in the AWS development community, we’re going to be launching a brand-new Tarzan website in the next couple of weeks. The goal being not only give Tarzan more users, but also more feedback, more bug reports and patches, more cool features, better approaches to new and existing methods, and all that other good stuff. It should be noted that Tarzan is not a diversion from WarpShare’s goals, but rather a fundamental piece that will help us reach them.

As part of the new site, we’re going to be integrating a wiki for ad-hoc and community-contributed documentation and tutorials, publishing how-to videos, showcasing the cool things that people are building with Tarzan, (hopefully) bringing on additional developers, and encouraging the Tarzan community to grow beyond the walls of the WarpShare office.

We look forward to watching this project and community grow, and expect more great things in the future.

Starting with today’s trunk build, Tarzan is entirely self-contained. Besides moving to the HMAC hashing function that is built into PHP 5.1.4, the new TarzanHTTPRequest class has been written from the ground-up based around the cURL extension for fetching data from remote servers. Its methods are the same as what we used with PEAR HTTP Request, so if you had custom code that relied on that functionality it should still work with this new class.

Today’s commit laid the groundwork for future MultiCURL support, which will substantially improve performance in classes with lots of requests like AmazonSQS. I also noticed today that Amazon added COPY support to the S3 API last month, so you can expect that functionality to make it into Tarzan in short order.

If you’re a PHP developer looking for a set of classes for working with Amazon S3, SQS, EC2, AAWS (formerly ECS 4.0), or SimpleDB, take Tarzan for a spin and let us know what you like and what could be better.