Topic: PHP

GWT and the Static Versus Dynamic Religious War

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, November 11, 2009 @ 5:33 am

Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

-- Vizzini, The Princess Bride

.

Also, never get involved in a religious war about statically versus dynamically typed languages. Well, maybe just this once.

Periodically, an angry Javascript developer will let loose and flame GWT as a misbegotten spawn of evil. Then all the GWT developers point and chuckle and move on to developing more cool applications. Every so often, though, someone will make a thoughtful comment about GWT, and then we have a fruitful discussion that helps clarify what GWT is and what it does and doesn't do well.

William Shields has either posted such a thoughtful comment or a very high end version of a flame, entitled Lost in Translation or Why GWT Isn’t the Future of Web Development. It is well worth reading, along with Google's Joel's somewhat heated response.

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Software Development

PureMVC, Spanning the Platform Spectrum?

Dietrich Kappe, Tuesday, December 16, 2008 @ 3:51 pm

At Pathfinder we do a fair amount of desktop style development -- iPhone/Cocoa, WebForms, Swing -- and web application development -- Grails, Rails, JSP, ASP.NET, etc., etc.. In the last two years we, like a lot of other software development shops, have experienced a convergence in our efforts. The web is coming to the desktop in the form of Air and the Desktop is coming to the web in the form of RIA's. Now web MVC, which used to be a pretty benign pattern mostly concerned with app flow and validation, is starting to resemble desktop MVC, which has to deal with document-centric models and long lived views and all of the plumbing that requires.

So we recently had a powwow between all the different parties to talk about MVC and this convergence. With the exception of the insufferable Mac and iPhone developers and their disgustingly mature Cocoa framework, we all agreed it would be nice to have an application level MVC framework for each platform. We also agreed that Swing is a great example of what happens when the vendor doesn't provide such a thing -- spaghetti code that relies on component level MVC and hard wiring at the application level. There are a few MVC frameworks for Swing, such as TikeSwing and Spring Rich Client (soon to be superseded by Spring Desktop), but for every Swing app that has this sort of design, there are hundreds that are just a mess.
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Software Development

WordPress sucks, but it doesn’t matter

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, May 27, 2008 @ 3:31 pm

It was with great amusement that I read PHP Sucks, But It Doesn't Matter, a recent post from Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror. Here's an excerpt (emphasis his):

Some of the largest sites on the internet -- sites you probably interact with on a daily basis -- are written in PHP. If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?

The only conclusion I can draw is that building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language. While PHP wouldn't be my choice, and if pressed, I might argue that it should never be the choice for any rational human being sitting in front of a computer, I can't argue with the results.

With all my recent work on the Pathfinder blog migration, I've been getting to to know WordPress - and, by extension, PHP - pretty well. Now that the experience is (mostly) over, I've got a few observations about WordPress:

• It sucks.
• Its PHP foundation contributes to its suckiness.
• If you're a developer, it doesn't suck nearly as bad as other blogging platforms.

Let me elaborate.

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Software Development