Who says COBOL is dying?! Here is a web development framework built with COBOL! Okay, fair enough, this is a day late :P, but looking at those pages in true legacy style made me smile. I used to support a financial package for municipalities called ABAKUS (developed by ICL. Anyone remember them?) a long time ago, and this brings back shivers to my spine!
The Mail & Gaurdian, one of South Africa’s leading newspapers, ‘leaked’ some inside info about their main news site’s redevelopment. Going from ASP to PHP and going with a custom developed system rather than an Open Source solution.
I love it! I think it is a stunning move on behalf of Matthew and Vincent to keep readers/bloggers up to speed with the redevelopment process of the site. We’re so used to stealth tactics and keeping new development under covers to release with a bang that we tend to forget that doing the whole process in public could be just as effective as proven here. It almost create a sense of belonging. It creates a lot of interest. It is all-in-all pretty exciting.
I’d love to know more and I have a suspicion that if you’re going to ask, the guys will tell! Magic! So Vince, tell us. Are you going to use some sort of MVC framework or is development happening from the ground up?
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All geeks love gadgets. Every geek I know has drooled over the Thinkgeek.commerchandise. In South Africa, we sure as hell have a shortage on whats cool and what is downright hot! Now Nic, Justin and Gregor introduces Nudjit.com!
It looks fantastic. It already have some great reviews on some really hot gadgets and I’m excited to see whats happening next. Boys, keep it coming! If only I had a big enough budget for all these funky stuff… My bank manager would kill me, though!
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Every programming language seem to have some sort of Ruby on Rails like framework. PHP got a couple lot. Python got Django (Django is not Rails though). Now the BBC went and made a Rails-like web framework with PERL.
This I found quite amusing:
“Like most organisations the BBC has its own technical ecosystem; the BBC’s is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files. This means that the vast majority of the BBC’s website is statically published - in other words HTML is created internally and FTP’ed to the web servers. There are then a range of Perl scripts that are used to provide additional functionality and interactivity.”
Their sites are statically published?! I did not know that and find it quite, uhm, shocking that a big organization would have such a primitive way of publishing their sites.
“For applications that run internally we use Ruby on Rail. Because we enjoy using it…”
No surprise there.
They built PERL on Rails because:
“We need to use Perl, there are restrictions on which libraries can and can’t be installed on the live environment and we needed a framework that could handle significant load.”
Now I’m just wondering, are they planning to release the source code, or is it going to stay an internal framework exclusive to the BBC? Should be quite interesting to see it and experiment with it. No-one knows yet. This part of their site is powered by PERL on Rails, they say.
They would almost certainly have to change the name. When PHP on Rails first saw the light, it was quickly slapped with a lawyers letter and had to change its name. Now known as PHP on Trax.
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I’ve just listened to the Ruby on Rails podcast where they interviewed Avi Bryant from Seaside, which is a web framework developed in Smalltalk. I’m no Smalltalk guru, but I know it is quite a mature object orientated language so it does sound very interesting! Specially due to the fact that the framework not only eliminates SQL, but also the HTML! That and the fact that it allows for developing modal components on the web, much like you would for windows or osx. It all sounds extremely exciting and interesting, but I would probably not have any opportunity to play with it anytime soon! If you have or do get the opportunity, please let me know what you think!
You can listen to the podcast on odeo, or download the mp3 here.
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I feel like I’ve been in the stone age the latter part of this year, but saw tonight that the new release of Mambo (version 5) is going to be powered by CakePHP. Wow! Interesting move. If you do not know this, Joomla! used to be Mambo and a lot of the Joomla! version 1.0.x code is still like mosMainBody or mosLoadModule. mos as in Mambo Open Source. That was until there was some serious disagreement about corporate influence by the company who funded and founded Mambo, Miro International. You can read more about that saga here. Ever since the fork between Mambo and Joomla! it has been Joomla! pretty much all the way for me.
What is kind of strategic interesting is that Mambo nr 5 will be powered by a great (Open Source) PHP MVC framework called CakePHP. I’m undoubtedly a Code Igniter fan, but Cake, although more complex/heavyweight, is a pretty good MVC framework! So I think this is a very clever/sensible move on Mambo’s side. Joomla! 1.5 reinvented the MVC wheel by developing their own MVC framework for developing plug-ins. This means that although you have been developing Joomla! components up to now, you will have to learn the MVC side of 1.5 from scratch if you want to use it.
Mambo users, both old and new can start playing with CakePHP and get a feel for how it would work in Nr 5. They might even win a couple of new supporters with this move to CakePHP. I’m dead sure the old supporters would not mind either as the API was starting to feel a bit outdated anyway.
I know this goes without saying, but it is less obvious given the nature of how Cake works, and that is whether existing Mambo components would be completely backward compatible. I suppose that would depend on how deep the Cake integration is going to go. It would be suicide to throw away all the existing component code! Thats a no-no. Then again, as I said, it goes without saying! Joomla! 1.5 has its own new MVC built in with funky ways to do new components, but they made damn sure they cater for existing ones to some extent. Lets see how Mambo handles it.
What would be interesting to see is whether Mambo would be powered by Cake or whether Mambo would become a CMS built for Cake…
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If you work a lot on the command line and specially if you are used to Gnome on Linux, then you will find out very quickly that the default Terminal.app application for OS X does not cut it. It is okay for smallish and quick jobs, but if you are living on the command line and using ViM as your editor of choice, it becomes a mission.
All you have to do though is to download iTerm. iTerm is a GPL terminal emulator which is far better than the default terminal application. The biggest drawcard is the support of tabs. If you are used to Gnome on Unbuntu you are used to opening one terminal window with an array of terminal session windows. iTerm allows you to do the same. In the Terminal.app application (the default one) you have to open multiple windows and arrange them to make sense.
There was one quirk I found, but with a quick solution. When using ViM in iTerm, you are restricted to the hjkl keys to move the cursor. This is fine, but when you are in INSERT mode and forget to press escape and try to move the cursor, you’ll irritate yourself.
So how to fix to move your cursor with the arrow keys:
In iTerm, click on “Bookmarks” and “Manage Bookmarks”
You will see a list of bookmarks if you more than one set up so select the one labeled Default by clicking on it and highlighting it and click the edit icon (the button with the pencil in it or the third from the left).
All you then do is change the keyboard setting from xterm (OS X) to Global.
Once you are done, you need to quit iTerm and fire it up again and “Viola!” your arrow keys are hunky-dory in ViM.
I seriously don’t get it. Lately a lot have been doing the rounds of people cloning other people’s ideas. W.T.F. Rather S.F.W!!! I mean, was Wordpress the first ever blogging software created?! I seriously doubt it. Yet most people uses it!
So, was Wibble the first ever group blog? Did Vince and Matthewclone Wibble? Really, who cares! Did Muti rip off Digg or Reddit? Did Amatomu and Afrigator clone Technorati? Surely that NOT relevant AT ALL as what is important at the end of the day is which service is liked and used more and by whom. THAT is what is relevant IMHO. Not who cloned who and how and why. Wibble does not allow me to comment without having to register. M&G’s Thought Leader does! Guess where I will spend my spare minutes…
So Nokia is cloning the iPhone! As far as I am concerned (and I hope that transpired in my previous post) it gives us more choice and/or options. If I don’t like it I go to the “clone”. If it was not for “cloning” sites, we would not evolve at the rate we currently do! (Almost) every clone adds to the functionality of the greater idea and gets better and better. If it does NOT get better, well, then if the developer’s goal was to knock the original he failed miserably! Only if that was his plan… If it was done for different reasons, then you go boy! Clone away!
Cloning web services is an integral part of the internet’s evolution. If you have a problem with it, you should maybe stop and think for a minute… If you are the creator of the cloned product, then boy! you better watch out… There is a lot of pretty talented people out there and you better stay on top of your game, else you’ll be (God forbid) knocked out by a clone!
Time is so limited lately. And to top it all off, we had to pay more school fees to the Gator… Fortunately, a bit of database caching made life a lot prettier on the performance side!
In between everthing we’ve managed to bring out two new things with a whole lot still to come!
The first is that the Gator is catching birds now. Twittering birds. How? By Twittering himself, of course! If you are a keen twitterer (specially if you use your instant messenger to update your Twitter status and follow your fellow twitter friends) you can select to follow and/or receive IM notifications at http://twitter.com/afrigator. You will be sent a random item selected from a pool of the latest 24 hours posts in the african blogging continent. Only 1 random item an hour! We have no intentions to flood your IM. 24 a day is what you’ll get.
The second thing is quite a nice one. It is some very interesting stats, which will (hopefully) prove that social media is NOT dead! A bunch of cool graphs indicating some community statistics like:
how many clicks does the gator send to users per month
how many clicks per day
how many blog posts per month
and per day
how many unique visitors and pageviews per day
how much traffic in total
the daily average
You will find it by clicking on the Blog Trends button in the main menu. Go check it out!
Found this over at Justin’s. Who knew that Paint was such a brilliant piece of software?! What a huge development team and who knew there went so much into Paint?! I’m quite frankly quite flabbergasted that there is no lawsuits flying! Microsoft should definitely sue Adobe due to all the features Adobe stole from them and implemented without royalties in Photoshop…
All geeks love gadgets. Every geek I know has drooled over the 
