it’s all about web app

i ve done some reading (actually a lot) today about AJAX, Ruby on Rails, Darwin streaming server, application design patterns. As i go through this topics, i bumped to a lot and lots more things to explore. my, my.. since when am i getting all the courage to do such surf-bookmark-and-reading stuffs in the net anyway? nevermind.

i still got the momentum from a java awareness session yesterday, here it goes…

eventually, i realize that there’s hundreds of things to explore and most of them are free!(if you are talking about the open source languages)

i share some of my findings here. some sites that is interesting and worth reading.

i am obsessed with php and i found it’s hard to migrate to other languages as i am fond to this on-the-breeze-scripting language. but what the hell, everybody is crazy enough to use the MVC. so, i got to find myself a way to suit my current php crap into this MVC environment. seems like it’s impossible to pot a page oriented scripting language to an object oriented MVC architecture but there’s lots of web framework that offers MVC for PHP.

and i found some php framework that may claims themselves as compliant MVC architecture:
cakephp , blueshoes , seagull , mojavi and prado

which one is better, which one is the best? let’s figure this out… have you ever used any of these please let me know.
so, what’s the importance of MVC? okay, let’s make things simple, i’ve developed my own web template engine which is not a MVC architecture. so, any changes on the engine or the business logic will affect the GUI. this is not good. meaning, the View layer(GUI) is not transparent from the other layer(Model & Controller). in my case, the code are intermingled with the web interface html tags and the pages are scattered all over the place as i implements include statement controlled from a single main page. so, any damn web designers with zero programming & and CSS knowledge won’t be any help to re-design your web template. finally, you have to do all the work yourself and the web designers can relax.

to prevent this, i’ve tried not to use MVC yet but i ve tried a popular php template engine; named as smary but it’s sucks. it is complex(some say it’s a behemoth), slow, and doesn’t work when the page has java scripts and other irritating miscelleneous codes in it. today, i meet savant. i hope it is not as bad as smarty. as i took a glimpse on the codes, seems like even worse…
other than php, there are web frameworks which is Ruby on Rails and Django. both are popular open source web application framework. hoping from page to page, i found out this page which is good to read and i love the comments coming from the rest of the readers. check it out: Rails vs. PHP: MVC or view-centric?

i don’t know when was web 1.0 started and when was the web was patched to version 1.5 but we are now in the age of web 2.0. just ignore the web versioning scheme. just to let you know that AJAX is one ofe the features in web 2.0. familiar with GMail? that is one of the successful implementation of AJAX. for me, a way to describe AJAX is an implementation of a java script to create a store of eye candy effects for the web GUI. AJAX employs requests to the server without reloading the whole page. meaning? some part of the web GUI can be changed based on user’s input without reloading the entire page. example: auto complete feature, details flashes out when you hover your mouse over an email address and lots more. cool isn’t? for sure, there will be more user friendly web UI for users and it will be more pain in the ass added to the developers. why? to suit a java scrip to multiple type of browsers are not easy as it sounds. read: Using the XML HTTP Request object

onoe more thing that caught my intention is the application desing pattern. i’m still totally new to this term and i don’t realy understand yet what the hell are those pattern do. do i need it anyway?

last but not least, darwin streaming server actually a separate entity. nothing to do with MVC, Web 2.0 or all of those crap above. it’s just something i have to research for a project coming in. hehehe. but, nevertheless its interesting to read tough.

conclusion is, albeit any of this languages or tools used, it’s not about which one is better or which one is the best but it’s the matter of which one suits what you are doing best. why would you bother using a full fledge web framework just for a simple webtool for some lame reporting job? certainly no. but in all of those framework, patterns, AJAX are things to look into because you lame reporting webtool won’t be enough without a proper system architecture. no spaghetti programming please. just make sure it’s layered, extensible, reusable and most of all user friendly.

what say you?