Several months back, there was somewhat of an uproar in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails communities when it was revealed that after two years of effort, the CD Baby Web site was abandoning their Ruby on Rails rewrite. The CD Baby site was reimplemented in mere months after returning to the use of PHP. This past week, I have been working with another company that is in a very similar situation.
If more and more software developers are going to be developing browser-based applications using technologies such as JavaScript, Flash, and AJAX, we will need to see the Web browser become a much more capable platform. In short, the browser will need to duplicate much of the work that has been done over the years in the operating systems field.
A few days back a colleague forwarded me a link to an article entitled Attacking PHP. It goes through a list of the problems associated with PHP. And based on my past experiences dealing with PHP in corporate environments, the analysis in that article is spot on.
In short, PHP is just not a suitable language for serious Web application development. I’ve seen it used for a wide variety of Web apps at numerous companies, but the results have always been negative.
JavaScript has been around for over a decade now. During that time, we’ve seen it implemented by every major browser vendor, and thus we’ve seen it become widely used by many Web sites. We’ve even seen JavaScript used in non-Web applications and uses.
But JavaScript has some pretty serious drawbacks. The performance of the various JavaScript interpreters embedded in the popular Web browsers has always been less than ideal. And being interpreted, it often becomes more difficult to detect syntax errors and other common mistakes. Worse yet, being weakly typed opens JavaScript scripts up to a whole host of type-related problems.
When you mention the Ada programming language to most developers, they tend to think of embedded software development, typically in mission-critical environments such as aircraft and electric power plant control systems. But we shouldn’t think that such environments are the only place where Ada can be of use. For the past several weeks, I have been working with a shipping company that makes extensive use of Ada for their in-house software.
When it comes to purchasing consumer-grade PCs these days, it’s rare to find a system with a CPU that only has a single core. Most laptops even offer a dual-core CPU. So as software developers, we’re entering a unique era where we can start to employ parallelism in ways that would not have been practical before. In some cases, we will need to exploit this parallelism if we hope to increase the performance of our software.
As most people involved with Web development know, Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released on December 7. There was some discussion about the release on Slashdot, where I noticed some interesting comments regarding scalability in the age of Ruby on Rails.
During the early 1990s, a number of developers had the opportunity to use a NeXT system. Of those people, some were lucky enough to get to actually develop applications for such systems. NeXT brought us what was essentially a revolution at the time. Objective-C began to truly make Smalltalk-style OO accessible and practical. Their well-architectured class libraries were a real masterpiece, especially compared to the cobbled-together utility libraries used in many existing C libraries. And their UI was, of course, superb.
I read today a blog article about the greatly-increased complexity of ECMAScript 4, relative to earlier versions. Indeed, the number of features is quite staggering. And the first thing it made me think of was C++.
C is a relatively small language. That’s understandable, considering it was initially developed for system-level programming on computers with rather minimal resources. Soon enough, Stroustrup and others developed C++, adding a variety of higher-level constructs to C. Over time, C++ has grown to be a rather complex beast.
GIMP 2.4 was recently released. Although I do very little image manipulation, GIMP is one of the more widely used open source applications, thus I like to keep up to date with its developments.
One of the first things I went to check out after reading of the release was the screenshots section of their web page. I have to say, it was a very disappointing experience.