I gave a presentation recently at Web414 that promoted the idea that frameworks were the future of web development. The presentation didn’t go well (It started its slide downhill when I realized too late there would be no way to show my slides. I switched to a more interactive, discussion-oriented presentation, which of course I hadn’t properly prepared for, which in turn only contributed to a further slide.) Still, it served to clarify a little more my thinking on the subject. (Half the reason to make presentations at your local user’s group is to help you view a subject from a different perspective; think of them as “code reviews for your mind.”)
The fundamental point I was making, that the future of web development lies with web application frameworks and not in traditional CMS’s, relies on two rather finely drawn (I cheerfully admit) lines.
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How far can you reach when someone’s behavior becomes offensive? Is guilt by association ever permissable?
Robert Vining, newly minted chief spokesman and admin for All Together As A Whole is finding that out, right now. He writes about it in this blog post.
I’ve been there, Robert. You made the right choice.
In a nutshell, he was told he was going to be removed from helping with the joomla.org forums unless, now that he’s in charge, he bans an individual from an unaffiliated website. (It says “independent” in the tagline, in case you’re easily confused.)
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Lee Brimelow made this wonderful post ridiculing the iPad’s lack of flash. Only one problem with it.
It’s a lie.
And that’s a problem. Apparently, he made those wonderful claims of his without ever once checking the reality of them. Most of those sites that supposedly don’t show anything, actually do. As this set of screen captures shows.
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I’ve heard from some more developers on the subject of testing, who claim they aren’t allowed to do unit testing because there isn’t time. I’m not blaming the developers here, but their management for being just plain stupid. An elementary analysis of the question proves just how wrongheaded they are.
The first question to ask is do they test the software at all before they supply it to the customer. It’s possible they don’t, in which case they have a point that testing will take more time, and my only advice, to both the developers there and to their customers, is “Run Away!” It’s irresponsible and unprofessional to make people pay for untested software.
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I’ve been dipping my toes into the Radiant CMS lately (a side-effect of my love affair with Ruby on Rails) and have run into several interesting moments. On the assumption I’m not alone in that, I thought I’d share some of my favorite recipes for deploying a Radiant app to an Apache-Phusion Passenger combination.
As I look at my deploy.rb file I’m reminded of the old Tom Lehrer ditty, “Lobachevsky”:
I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics:
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize,
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.
So here is the result of my ‘research’ (where I remember where I got the code from, I will also quote the source; where I don’t remember, I apologize in advance):
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