grantmichaels'blog

It’s been 7-8 months now that I’ve been intensely researching programming language/web framework combinations for my own interests. Having carried a couple of domain names related to my name itself, I’ve since added a dozen or so to the domain tree I maintain on my Mindmeister map. Still though, no clear cut best-fit tool has emerged for the job. I’ve been through iterations and trials, both windows and linux boxes, and still I’ve yet to find my dream team for web development. I’ve learned a lot, met some very cool bloggers, and generally decided that I’m at least in favor of choosing the open source path. That being said, I’m not sure that having all of the options that are available to linux-based web design/development is helpful in the early stages of programming for the web. If I had spent the past 7-8 months working with Visual Studio 2008 and the newer MVC package for it, I imagine I’d be further along the road to completed projects. For this reason, and because it is a great example of the 80/20 rule, I give the Microsoft designers credit for creating a pretty solid all-encompassing package with a phenomenal development IDE. Unfortunately, I spent the months prior to ASP.NET working with Ruby on Rails and can no longer enjoy the lack of freedom that is the Microsoft ecosystem status quo. All of the recent Microsoft discourse related to moving into the open source realm is worthy of doubt and they are at once late to the party at best. I encourage them to participate in the open source community, however, fear that the ramifications might actually be far worse than the way it has always been. Windows commands a huge market-share of desktops, and I think a lot of programmatic effort will soon be spent trying to interface with Windows-related activities, effort that would historically remain focused on open source projects. This will be interesting as we move forward, at least I think it will be anyways.

So … I’ve been hunting actively regardless, still determined to find my glove-like fit in terms of languages and frameworks. My prior programmatic experience has turned out to be quite useless, and even perhaps may be worse than having no experience at all in actuality. It’s hard to unlearn the thought process of micromanaging memory, and there is precious little concept leftover from IA32 in the modern languages to be honest. I want to discuss a couple of players on my field though, both of which are late to the game in a sense, that being web2py and haXe/Neko.

I’ll start with the latter, and mention that haXe and Neko bring a single environment to create complete products, which can handle flash natively. They are also compatible with some of the faster execution options at present, like tamarin. I think if I had more experience with web development, that I’d be tinkering with this combination more than I have been, but I feel as though it is still worthy of note despite my lack of experience with using it. It eliminates a lot of different dialects of web development and brings the RIA to byte-code execution within a single language if I’m not mistaken. Very cool. I have a sea of new programming books from Amazon to wade through, and the haXe book is there all by itself, a fatally sophomoric reason to ignore it. Nonetheless, I have for the most part …

Web2py has been my latest addiction, and I’ll admit up front that I’m a big fan of anything I can do primarily one-handed. I’m often juggling other activities with programming, and it’s nice to be able to continue building in web2py while I’m on the phone, eating my lunch, or otherwise. Quite often I find myself sneaking in a little development time as a break from CAD/CAM work, or code while I’m eating lunch, and web2py has made monumental gains in productivity as of late. The fact that it lives happily on my thumb-drive with my firefox portable has literally mobilized my programming environment, and thus inherently means it’s at once effortless to backup my work and I don’t have to worry about integrating new code with old code between my office at work and my office at home. These smaller details add up to monumental gains in productivity from my experience thus far. Web2py runs on Google App Engine as well, which is a huge plus, as it seems there will be a push towards distributed computing and file systems going forward. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a concise video or tutorial on setting up web2py with App Engine, however, it seems like a logical follow-up post to this blog entry if I can find the time this weekend. There is a Google group I’ve been reading as of late, which can be found at web2py, and Massimo Di Pierro is both active and accessible in that arena. I still need to do a thorough investigation as to how to deploy web2py to a VPS, like SliceHost or Linode, but otherwise my experience with web2py has been quite rewarding thus far …

grantmichaels