Breaking Friendster
WTF?
PS3 Update
I still don’t have a Playstation 3 in my house. This time it’s not a programming issue. It’s just good ole life that’s causing the delay. Weddings, kids going back to school and a short vacation has kept the PS3 out of reach. Fall is here now and I’ve decided I’m ready to try again. I’m thinking of putting Grails up to the challenge before I totally just beg off with a basic Apache Struts 2 CRUD app. I’ll keep ya bastids posted.
How my addiction to web frameworks lost me a Playstation 3
I have a buddy that is a SEO nut. He has a gizillion domain names that basically pay for his Jigaratti lifestyle. Unfortunately, though most of his sites run on php, he refuses to learn the language, and often IMs me for help when he gets stuck on something LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP) related. Being that it’s not my real mortgage paying job, his stuff usually takes a back seat to real work. 2 weeks ago, he was desperate, he needed 3 CRUD (create retrieve update delete) apps for 3 already existing databases. He did not care what language I used, as long as it worked. No design work was needed, no fancy css, no background colors, just CRUD forms. In exchange for building the apps , I would receive a brand new PS3. A PS3 is not in the “family” budget right now, so I was excited. I set aside that coming weekend to work on the project. That week, the bastard called me from the store to tell me that he was in Walmart picking up my PS3 and did I need an extra controller? We joked about being able to play it before the weekend was over. All I had to do now was decide what platform I was going to build this on. Had this been 1999 , this would have been a no brainer, LAMP : a few html forms , a connection to Mysql (maybe even put that stuff in a fancy dancy include file) and I would have been golden. As far as the PHP platform has come, you can still do sh** like that today , throw up apps in less than a day. This is why you never want to make PHP your 9-5 job. More on that another time. I decided it would be so much cooler if I used this as an excuse to try out a new framework, Jboss Seam. Read more
Pointless download of a downloader
I thought the days of the standalone “download assistant” were gone with the 90s. For some reason though Adobe continues to hold on the dream that people will add their downloader to their list of startup items. Hint: We don’t need a program to download shit. We have things called browsers that do a much better job.
SugarCRM is not the crown jewel of PHP
I admit that when I first downloaded it and started playing with the open source CRM (Customer Relations Management*) that dared to challenge smug industry leaders like salesforce.com, I was impressed. The application seemed well thought out and was very simple to use for the end users. I was thinking that finally, web devs had built an app a non-tech could easily use. Not just another cool app for their fellow programmers to hack against. I was there in the company boardroom talking about the cost savings of using the fully supported SugarCRM over. Though I cringed a the thought of having to dirty my hands with PHP code again, to me the big win was that we would have our data on our own databases. In case you didn’t know, salesforce.com keeps the data on their servers and you can get it back either as a csv file at various intervals of time or if you are lucky enough to have the enterprise edition, you can get it via a web services call.
So what went wrong? When did the milk turn sour? It begins not so innocently enough when a sales guy asks: Can we make Sugar do X the way that Salesforce does it? From that point , you have no choice but to be sucked back into the PHP family. In the PHP family, you have some great coders and you have some really scary coders. The SugarCRM team seems to have a mix of both. The concept of the MVC pattern is something that is lost on the SugarCRM project. As I dug deeper in the code , the more worried I became. At the time Sugar supported Mysql and Oracle, which covers a pretty big percentage of the servers out there. Does that mean you should have code
that looks like this if(MYSQL) else if(ORACLE) ? Crap like that is littered everywhere. You never realize how far you’ve come till you go back to the old neighborhood. And the neighborhood has gotten worse, kid. PHP is an easy programming language and that is it’s strength as can transform an office worker who was formally on the dead end track into the company programmer and playing golf
with the boss. It’s low barrier of entry is also it’s greatest weakness. People that should not be programming, do. Having said that, there are quite a few excellent programs written in PHP , including the blog I’m using now, Wordpress.
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