bZ's Frequently Asked Questions

What is bz ?

Bz is a tool to help you in web developpement. It is meant to be useful in these three areas :
- compatibility, because it requires XHTML.
- efficiency, thanks to keywords that perform very common tasks like searching a database or controling the access to a page.
- ability to build easy-to-maintain websites : bz helps you separating the presentation from the code.

Doesn't all that already exist ?

There are a few good softwares that can help with web developpement, most of them being commercial products. Bz is free.
It aims at being efficient (coded fast, compiled fast, executed fast), being easy to use, generating fast compiled code (while a few software compile the templates at run-time). The issue with bz was not to bring new concepts or to force people to adapt to a totally new way of working (bz does not force to use its keywords, they are only here to help), its only goals are being simple and useful.

Where does the name come from ?

Bz (pronounce it like the englishword 'busy' ) is a stupid name, like many names of software everybody uses all the time. Why this one ? Two reasons can acount for this fact : first I am a busy man, and second it tooks ideas from another software called 'bleetz' ; a good way to keep it in mind was to keep the first and last letters of the original name.

Where does the idea come from ? Who wrote bz ?

Bz was written by Eric Vaudaine, a french student from a computer science school (www.enst.fr) in 2002. The original idea comes from a software called 'bleez' (www.bleetz.com) that was written by Carmelo Guarneri beginning in 1997.
Using bleetz for quite a long time, a few drawbacks of the system were discovered and bz basically consists in a total rewriting of bleetz from php to perl, correcting a few things and making it work the way the author thought was the easiest for the user. A few features changed, there is no real compatibility between bleetz and bz, and for this reason, the name had to change.

Which platforms does bz run on ?

Bz is written in perl. This means that once the required modules are installed on a system running perl, bz should work. It has for the time being been succesfully tested on Linux, Solaris, Win32 using ActivePerl and Cygwin. This is not a complex software, bz is only a (very ?) useful tool ; there is no reason why it would not run on a specific platform.

Is this free ?

Yes. Bz comes with license, meaning you can use it freely for personal and commercial applications whithout any constraint. You can distribute it as soon as you don't change the code.

I realized bz didn't do anything I couldn't do by myself...

True, bz in NOT a programming langage : it does not add anything new to the php world. Its only goal is to save time avoiding repeating the same tasks.

What can I do if I want to help bz ?

If you have ideas about optimizations of the code or new functionalities, write us an email containing your suggestions...

I hate xhtml, how do I get rid of those silly messages ?

It is possible to get rid of the xhtml check setting disable_xhtml to true in the configuration file. It should be used carefully, though, because in that case bZ just turns into a huge seach-replace tool tracking very few errors.

Since bZ's keywords are placed between curly braces {}, how can I use a curly brace that is not parsed as a keyword ?

You should use { instead...

I obtained a strange behaviour, looks like a bug...

Please report them to bzsoft@free.fr.