I have been playing with several different technologies lately (lucky me) in looking for the right language/framework/technology to build our next project. Now as you know (or do not know) we are currently working in an all Java (J2EE) development environment on our own flavor of an application server. The original version of our software was built by me in Coldfusion over 7 years ago. At the time I needed to design and develop a CRM solution for a niche industry quickly and alone! I was doing some light work for Macromedia as a sub-contractor and they wanted me working in Coldfusion, so I thought it would be easier to work in one environment for all of my jobs. As soon as the gig with Macromedia went away, so did Coldfusion.
Java is not the quickest web development environment (for a two man team?), but it is not often that you find something you cannot do with Java or a web API that you cannot access. We played with Ruby on Rails for a bit and really liked the quick web development environment that Rails offers. The forethought and design that has gone into components like ActiveRecord and ActiveResource is quite impressive. The additions and plug-ins being added daily only make Rails that much more attractive for quick web development. If I were just getting started in website development, then no doubt that Rails would be the platform of choice for me.
Unfortunately, Ruby is not even close to the language of choice for Gregg or I. So the little time we had with RoR was filled with a combination of complaining about debugging in Ruby (and the lack of good debugging tools) tempered with the quick gratification of webpage development. I would say that the recent release of Rails 2.0 and the several good changes that were made caused a problem. There is just so much documentation for Rails 1.2 and the changes to 2.0 are severe enough that it caused a problem for us (and judging by the volume of web posts) and others too.
In trying to determine why things were not moving forward as fast as we would like, I am not quite sure. It could be that we kept finding a way to do what we wanted much faster in Java, or the API was not offered in REST (and thus easily accessible to RoR). Outside of ActiveRecord and the nice AJAX (via prototype & scriptaculous), RoR just slowed us down or did not offer a viable solution. Problems came when we wanted to do much more than just push and pull data from the database. We wanted to build some cool software with a web interface and that was a big difference.
So we came back to Java as our language/environment of choice for our web development. Even though we did not stay with RoR, I feel like we learned quite a bit about setting up your server environment for faster production and easier deployment (and thus management) from Rails! So all was not a waste.
I have jokingly wrote that we need Java on Rails and all would be perfect. It sounds easy and quick and there are several groups out there trying to do just that. There is the JRuby team at Sun (now), Groovy on Grails & even RnR (Rhino on Rails) project. But they all seem to be like the SNL Players...not ready for primetime.
So that puts us back on the trail of developing our own quick web solutions in Java. After using RoR for the brief period of time we did and putting together some of the small apps we did, the first thing that I wanted was to tone down the configuration files and boost up the standards in our configurations. Gregg is focusing on trying to replicate more of the deeper features of ActiveRecord and ActiveResource, while I look at prototype and scriptaculous as possible additions.
Development continues on our internal Application/Framework along side the development of our clients websites. Although the idea that there is a canned solution that we can simply extend is nice, we just have not found it. I will keep my eyes and ears open, but with each passing day (and 200 lines of code) the window to move platforms is closing rapidly.
Technology held back several business models from developing properly on the world wide web. In 2008 that is almost entirely gone. Technologies for delivering several different products and services are quite mature. Regardless of whether you are a one man show and posting videos on Youtube.com or a large video producer looking to sell subscriptions to a large consumer base, the proper tools exist.
I try and spend as much of my budget on the internet, as I can. If I can confidently purchase a product or service through the Internet then I do. When I was in college I certainly used Napster to download songs, but now that I have an actual income, I like to pay for what I consume.
If I pay though, I expect to get my product or service. In 2008 I should not have to deal with inadequate technologies (especially on the producer side) or horrible customer service/support. So when I joined UFC on demand and paid $9.99 for one month ($9.99 per month or $59.99 for six months? Uhhh let's see cheaper to pay month to month then for six months at once??? I guess the business mind behind that one was the same mind behind using a really crappy technology) of unlimited usage of the vast UFC and PrideFC video library, I expected to receive my product.
From the word go, there was nothing but problems. From the video player that crashed constantly, to the awful emails that customer support would respond with, I felt like I had really thrown $9.99 away. I never watched one video from start to finish.
That said, I can go to Google Video and do a search for various UFC fights and several of the bigger ones have been removed, but there is a still a great selection of videos to watch for free.
So how can a bunch of consumers with no money produce a better content delivery system than a multi-million dollar company like the UFC? Well obviously the consumers did not have to build the system for delivery, but they sure use what is out there better!
So Dana White, if you happen to read my blog (yeah right), throw some money to a porn video distributor and get a decent system together for delivering your vast video library. You may look at the revenues and say it is simply not worth it, but I would say that is more a reflection of your current delivery system pissing your target market (me) off to the point we will not use your system.
Do not use any solution that requires a certain operating system or for the user to download a player or anything like that. Go with a solution that allows any browser (mobile is big for your type of content, iPhone now, but it will grow) to view your videos. With the way you drop f-bombs, I am quite sure you know someone in the adult video delivery industry (second time I have said that), so call one of your boys and get ufc on demand in a better state.
Okay, so I got back into technology, which had an immediate impact (not saying good or bad) on my reading habits. I just finished Agile Web Development with Rails. Nice intro book! Great for non-programmers to pick up a book and learn their first coding environment. It made me go out and buy the Ruby Cookbook and Rails Cookbook (used on Amazon for pennies!) and dig a little further.
I was very impressed with the platform! Rails is done very well and once you get the hang of it, you can develop very quickly. That said, as you anyone who knows me or reads my blog (I signed my daughter up so I would not be the only one) knows that Ruby is a long shot from the languages I use. I have never given Perl, Python or any other P language a chance. Not saying I would not, but it never happened for me. I found myself always being the "business" guy in the technology room and when I did do some after hours RAD development for a prototype, I used pre-built environments like CFMX, so that I could get my ideas out there quick.
If I would have had RoR back when I was coding then I would have gotten into Ruby and Perl and the such, but alas it was not to happen. Well now it is happening. I have been developing our latest Prototype (no pun intended) application with RoR and there are hurdles and some struggles, but overall I am very pleased.
Looking forward to deploying our app to the world and I will post the URL here firtst, so all of my readers (me and Hannah) can be sure and get a glimpse of the greatness.
See you in about a month.
Now I find myself and friends saying "Who let this IRA-**** in my bar? Just kidding, hows your mother? On her way out, arent we all, act accordingly" or "You wantta cigarette, you wantta cigarette? What are you one of those fitness freaks? Go **** yourself!". To name but a few.
Nicholson and Dicaprio (a little over acted in my humble opinion, but still very good) have the huge roles in this movie, but Damon (remember to pronounce his name like the puppet in Team America) is an excellent antagonist (true antagonist in the movie not Nicholson in my opinion) and Alec Baldwin (gritty version of his 30 rock character) brings a huge comical insert into this hard line drama. He might give the best performance of the movie all things considered. Marky Mark & Martin Sheen round out an excellent cast, with great writing and fantastic direction.
I had never heard of this guy and was in Costco browsing for mayonaise in a 5 gallon jug (how lucky for me!) and I saw this book. It has a solid black cover with just the main title "Chuck Klosterman IV". I read the reviews on it and wanted to expand my reading choices, so I took it home. I burned this through book pretty quickly, primarily b/c of the design with the short stories, they act like short chapters (which I guess technically they are) and that makes for wanting to finish a chapter/story in the same night you finish one (for me anyway). I really enjoyed this collection of interviews, which ranged from Val Kilmer to Britney Spears to Bono and a few other musicians I never heard of to boot.
The second portion of the book were short stories printed in various magazines during Chuck's career that really showed a range of interests and ability by Chuck. Some of the articles were a little too light to re-read, but all were entertaining and showed a really clever and wiity mind at work.
The third section of the book was the beginning of a fictional piece that started with so much promise and then just simply quit. Not sure if it will be expanded upon, but I wish I had not read that section only to be left with questions or no finalization in the piece. Oh well that is probably good practice for my imagination.
Overall I would suggest this book to a certain number of my friends, in fact I have lent it out already and plan on passing it through a few when/if it returns. It was a nice change of pace for me from the technical manuals/articles I normally read and it felt like it flexed a different part of my brain than I am not used to using. I have wanted to expand my reading repitoire and this hit the spot. I think Chuck is a very witty, inciteful and sarcastic person bundled into an excellent writer! I look forward to more of his work.
Well once again I have gotten caught up in life and forgotten to blog about it. I am currently sitting in a corporate hotel/training room in the Hamilton Park hotel in Florham Park, NJ, training for Novartis. I have just recently taken a full time position as a Pharmaceutical Sales Representative for Novartis and this is my first formal training session. The training is pretty good and definitely needed to be able to interact with all of the tools they provide, and to receive the legal guidance that working in the pharma industry requires.
It is absolutely hell being away from my family though!!! Three weeks is entirely too long to tear apart families. I am very grateful for the position and excited to be working for the company, BUT this could be done a lot better in my opinion. I said my peace and will move on...
I am currently playing with Flex 2 from Adobe in the evenings. Very nice having one environment to code to for the client! The objects are well defined and the ActionScript language is solid. I did quite a bit of homework on AJAX-esque solutions prior to going with Flex, but there were just too many hurdles.
Dojotoolkit.org is one of the biggest contenders out there, but I am afraid that their direction is going away from what I am looking for, not to mention how long it currently takes for their apps to load when getting started. Looking around I find that they are one of the best open source solutions I could find and if they are not doing what I need at the speed I need it, then I had to give in and go with Flex.
When I was looking for a viable solution there were a few things that I needed:
- Minimal code changes to run on different platforms. The obvious thing here is the operating system, but honestly I would have committed to Windows (as 99% of my clients use this for their business computing), but it went way beyond that. IE 5.5 vs. 6.0 vs. 7.0 vs. Firefox 1.5 vs. 2.0 vs. Opera, etc.
- Robust client side coding interface. I need to be able to extend my MVC to the client (for portions of it), as I want to build robust client applications NOT just websites and webpages. I am shooting for Web 2.0 here!
- I need to be able to debug these applications in a manner that allows me to actually find bugs and squash them.
- Cost. I could not afford Jackbe or Tibco type products (or IBM either).
The above criteria sent me to Flex2 with Charting. We will use Web Services with a Java Server side to develop our applications from here on out. I will keep you posted on projects as they come to market.
Keeping true to a prior post I am playing with new technologies and trying to find something that will allow ME to quickly prototype software ideas. I am constantly barraged (by myself and friends) with business solutions that revolve around using the Internet, but I am unable to prototype (or proof of concept) them they way I would like. Coldfusion MX was my platform of choice, but I find myself looking at PHP now. I should probably use CFMX b/c of my familiarity with it, but I have wantd to capitalize upon all of the cool open source projects out. So many of them are in PHP. So I have been futtzing (real word?) around with PHP and came across the PEAR project. This is simply a codebase that has been developed in PHP and is open source. Great collection of pre-built commonly needed components like Auth (for authenticating users) and Mail (for sending emails). The reviews on most of the PEAR books at Amazon.com are not lengthy and descriptive enough (or there are not enough of them) for me to feel comfortable purchasing one, so I went to my local B&N (which sucks for tech books) and they had nothing, so I drove 71 miles to Chico and found this one. It is basically a large listing of the API, with a short (very short) example of how to use the particular package or function combined with three example projects at the end of the book. I am going to hold off on this one, but not sure what else someone could do with this topic and a book??? I think that PEAR is the type of subject that can really only be offered up in this way. You either know PHP or you do not. So if you do not know PHP do not buy the book. If you do know PHP then you want the API (free on the internet) and you want to see examples on how to use it. So what PEAR really needs IMHO is a cookbook! I love the cookbooks, always have! Let's see some real stuff! Back in the day one of the best tech books I ever purchased was Beginning Active Server Pages 2.0 by Wrox (what happened to this publisher, they were so good, then...blah). The formula these guys put together was a really good one for learning a new technology and giving examples on how to build really cool apps (for the time and the user level).
Just finished this one and it is a rather easy read (big text, plenty of spacing, reminded me of the formatting I used in high school to meet my page minimum requirements, anyway). Kind of depressing (no pun intended) as this book outlines how America is ready for a depression that will dwarf the Great Depression of the 1920-30s era.
I have to say that I agree with several of the assessments in this book regarding our National Debt, Foreign owned U.S. assets (read the entire article to learn which "American Companies" are not owned by Americans) and the over inflated stock and real estate markets. The authors touch upon facts like the Japanese government has stopped purchasing our debt, which leaves the bulk of crediting for us on the Chinese, who simply cannot continue to purchase our debt at the current rate (they do not have the money to pull it off if they wanted to). They point out the increase in the real estate market versus the increase (over the same time period) of wages and the disparity between the two. They also reference the stock market bubble (using the P/E (price to earnings) ratio) as a contributing factor to our economic demise.
The bottom line (I use that line way too much) is that our spending has to become lower than our income so that we can stop borrowing money and begin to pay off our debt. As a nation it would have been nice if we would have taken on this task ourselves by reducing spending and increasing taxes, but we have done the opposite and now we will be forced to do it when we can no longer borrow the money.
So what can we do? Well the average American simply does not have the assets (negative savings in America now read both articles) to take advantage of these moving markets and make money in bad times. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have gobbled up gold and converted their dollars into Euros.
This problem is not a partisan one at all, regardless of whether or not we have a Democrat or Republican (problem with parties in politics - especially a two party system) in the White House, Congress or Senate, this problem requires someone who wants to save America and not simply get an appointed office, glory and lifetime payment for term of service.
Does America still have the population to do great things? Can we reduce our spending and increase our savings, turn the Trade Deficit around and purchase more American products? Well we got ourselves into this situation b/c we could not control those things, so we probably will not fix them on our own.
Well I have been out of the loop of writing for quite some time. Changing gears in this real estate market. Trying to focus a little more on my technical skillset and working with Gregg on some cool software. We are expanding our ecommerce/CRM software suite we affectionately call Busybee.
I have asked Beau Smith to come aboard on the GUI (and UI too) redesign. I would call what we are doing an extensive overhaul. Not only are we offering several new features (including a different pricing matrix), we are also changing the database we currently use. So all in all we will have a practically brand new product when we are completed (which is a funny statement, as we will never be completed (kaizen baby!)).
I have been playing with some buzz technologies like AJAX and Ruby on Rails. This means lots of late nights onlien and at the local Barnes & Noble drinking lattes! Funny how I find myself rediscovering Javascript after all of these years (I was big into it in 98). It honestly doesn't feel like anything new though. Same old stuff, cross browser compatibility is still a pain in the butt! The big difference to me lies in all of the really cool projects out there. Dojo is a very nice package with nightmare documentation (I know they are working on it and I am very appreciative, but the docs suck right now). I look forward to playing with it more! Yahoo has a very nicely documented Javascript library, without all of the sweet CSS and images Dojo has built. I would love to combine the two camps and get the best of both worlds!
Ruby on Rails just is not my thing. I can totally respect the language (Ruby) and the framework (Rails), and still know that it is just not for me. I can see it's target market and I think it is a great project. We played around with it a little and contemplated opening up our business logic via Web Services (SOA) so we could do all of our presentation in RoR, but I do not think it would benefit us. I would love to find a solution like CFMX on J2EE. Something that would allow quick View layer development and still keep the Controller developers happy. I am sure somebody out there (Sun perhaps? Maybe IBM) has a great setup, but we do not have $100k+ to flirt with those guys.
I will keep you posted on our progress..
This was the first of the many "poker" books that I purchased. I did not really know who was who among the various Poker authors, but this one had great reviews on Amazon.com.
When I first read this book it didn't do me much good. The book is focused on reading other players and keeping mental notes of how other players play by classifying them. Once the player is put in a category then you can re-act to their play appropriately.
There are several concepts and ideas in here that are good, but require that the reader have certain skills acquired only from playing poker. Without those skills this book will be over the reader's head. With those skills the book will be redundant and useless.
The author, Phil Helmuth, is known as the poker brat and he most certainly has earned the nickname with table side displays that rival John McEnroe's tennis tantrums. However, he is one of the best tournament poker players in the world as attested by his nine World Series of Poker bracelets (given to the winner of a World Series Poker event). His cash game is supposed to be pretty good but you wouldn't know that from watching him on High Stakes Poker!
Overall I would save my money on this one and look to one of the many other books (Doyle Brunson's Super System or Super System 2) published on the topic.
I give it 2 out of 5 stars.
