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!
Ok, its a couple of weeks late, but rather late than never they always say! With every new year comes change. This blog is no different. A new theme was overdue. Besides, with my latest gigs I’m sort of required to get my design skills up to date. What better place to start than right here.
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Still, it is lightweight and clean. Kohana is a Code Igniter fork that is completely open source and community driven. If you are used to Code Igniter, then Kohana would be a walk in the park. The one major difference is that Kohana is exclusively for PHP 5 while Code Igniter supports from PHP 4 and up. Kohana is strinctly OOP with benefits like visibility protection, automatic class loading, overloading, interfaces, abstracts, and singletons. Cool!
Whats more is that while Code Igniter supports only $POST arrays and no GET, Kohana lets POST and GET arrays live together in harmony with the same tight security of Code Igniter.
Another trivial thing thats always kind of bugged me of Code Igniter is the directory structure. Kohana’s directory structure makes a lot more sense. See, Code Igniter has one directory at the root called System. In this directory is a bunch of subdirectories of which your application directory is a part of. Kohana went and put the application directory with the system directory on the root path. I know, I know, it really is pedantic of me, but it just makes so much more sense to do something so insignificant. Well, actually, on second thought, its not as trivial as it might seem. Come upgrade time, you only need to upgrade the system folder and your application folder would be untouched. Code Igniter stores a bunch of system related files in their app folder which could get overwritten when upgrading, but need to be upgrade every once in a while as they do make changes to those files occasionally.
Another thing is that changes and fixes happens a lot faster in Kohana as it is a community project. Code Igniter is brilliant, but it was kind of slowish in releasing fixes and improvements as Ellis Labs first do Expression Engine (it seems) then Code Igniter. Kohana living in a community allows for rapid expansion and fixes.
All in all, I think Kohana is a great fork on an already great framework. Keep up the good work. If you are worried about it only working on PHP 5, well, PHP 4’s end of life was the 31st of December 2007 already! Convert! At least bugs will be fixed till 2008-08-08. Cool date they chose!
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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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The people at Sitepoint has released their Ruby on Rails book for free for a limited period of time! The offer expires in 40 days at the time of writing this and if you are interested in learning RoR you should go and get it. Hop on over and download your free copy.
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Sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like running into a wall. Head first. If only I was not so unfit. I made a stupid bloody Prototype Ajax mistake. Get so damn irritated with myself! Don’t make the same bloody mistake! My head is clearly at the rugby. That will teach me.
So what I did was the following:
function callAjax() {
...
var myAjaxCall = Ajax.Updater('thediv', '/the/url', {onComplete: function(){ new Effect.Highlight('thediv');}});
...
}
Firebug gave me the following error:
this.initialize has no properties
[Break on this error] this.initialize.apply(this, arguments);
This means (translated into the “YouStupidGeek” dialect):
“You stupid dumbass! How the hell can you forget the new keyword before the Ajax.Updater !”
So, don’t forget that… and now its time to see New Zealand get knocked out the World Cup by France!
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I saw that Youtube has a Miss Horrorfest competition for the month of September! Quite interesting, I must admit. The only problem is they do not route their URL’s all that cool… If you enter http://youtube.com/horrorfest you get to the competition page, but if you add a slash at the end ( http://youtube.com/horrorfest/ ), you get a 404 Not Found error. Prolly will fix it soon.
Any way, its not the end of the world! The horror fest does look interesting I must say! Amature horrorfest 90 seconds videos for cash if you are good and a girl. US$50 000. Not too shabby! So guess what my wife is doing the rest of September!
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!
