Archive for the ‘web 2.0’ Category

Why is PHP so popular?

Monday, December 4th, 2006
Anything which is simple is initially criticized by people. Take the example of google search interface. Poeple tried with many complex interfaces but all came to same conclusion that the world just need a simple text box for search. I think the reason is human mind does not like complexities. It is easy to extend and share something which is simple.Another example is TCP/IP. It does not provide any QoS like ATM. But I think that shortcoming became its biggest advantage.

Same thing can be said about php. Some people says PHP is too simple and only focusses on views. The data gets mixed with the display logic. There is a lot of talk about MVC programming paradigm. I feel good programmers do not really need an MVC model to code good. Bad programmers will code bad anyway. I have been coding using MVC for quite some time without knowing that it was MVC. PHP gives you flexibilty to code anyway you want. That is what makes it a very popular programming language.

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Rise of AJAX/Web2.0

Sunday, December 3rd, 2006
Many times when I interview people they want to be backend engineers and don’t want to learn DHTML/AJAX. Traditionally web development has been considered a field for pseodo-techies and not many people wanted to learn it.
Many think that it is a less paying job or less challenging work. General perception is that less challenging means less paying. This is not always true. Its the demand-supply which govern these things.This has changed with the rise of Web 2.0 applications. Now we need people who can do both web development and backend development. The whole gmail is build using this paradigm. I found is strange that many Indian programmers are still reluctant to leann web 2.0 stuff. I think they seriously lack vision. When I wan in US, I never noticed this problem. Probably that is why America is America.

The good news is some people are changing the image of web 2.0 development. The new sites which are coming up, are slowly educating people on what will be needed in future. We Indians need to learn how to move up fast in value change and think more and more about building products rather than just learning few programming languages. Again my only hope is new generation which has not yet been spoiled.

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RubyOnRails

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

I had been thinking about starting my blog for quite some time. Finally I’m starting it with a nice topic. I spent some time on exploring ruby on rails. I feel like telling the whole world about it.

First I could not find why ruby is a great language. Then Himanshu, a friend of mine, mentioned that ruby is a cute language. I guess that describes ruby. Its a nice and cute language but no major differentiator.

But Rails is what makes it special. Its great tool for psuedo-techies who want to build quick websites. Having said that, I dont mean it is not a great tool for techies. But I could not get answered to some questions on it.

  • It works in a fast-cgi mod. Which does not look very clean. The latest recommendation is to use apache+reverse proxy+mongrel. It looks pretty geeky and nice but has some fundamental problems with it. Apache does a nice job of taking care of memory leaks etc. by restarting apache after every N requests. That may not be possible with mongrel. Also, I am not sure how easy is it to monitor mongrel.
  • rails generates some code for you which I personally dont like too much. The way one will package such things is generate rails code and then check-in it in cvs or another source control system. But in next version of rails, things may change. In that case merging changes will be a pain.
  • I have a feeling that scalaing will not be easy with rails as it does too many things for you and hides details.

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