I’m a PHP developer, and I am going to out myself as a naïve n00b by saying I’ve never had a problem with writing applications for it. Yes, I may even enjoy programming in PHP. This is why I’m linking to an article Jeff at Coding Horror wrote on why PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter.
The TIOBE community index I linked above? It’s written in PHP. Wikipedia, which is likely to be on the first page of anything you search for these days? Written in PHP. Digg, the social bookmarking service so wildly popular that a front page link can crush the beefiest of webservers? Written in PHP. WordPress, arguably the most popular blogging solution available at the moment? Written in PHP. YouTube, the most widely known video sharing site on the internet? Written in PHP. Facebook, the current billion-dollar zombie-poking social networking darling of venture capitalists everywhere? Written in PHP.
Notice a pattern here?
Architecture astronauts may have a problem with the language, but the fact is PHP is getting the job done. Now Javascript on the other hand — scattered documentation, poor debugging support, the OO-over designing pitfalls. I don’t see how anyone can get anything done with it. Some people can, but not me.
I, um, blame the tools.
Much has been made of Apple’s lack of support for Flash on the iPhone, with Apple passing on it in favor of open standards, using AJAX, canvas and the HTML 5 spec to achieve the same slick interfaces that have until now only been seen within Adobe’s Flash player.
Apple has famously proclaimed that the web on the iPhone isn’t the mobile internet; not the “watered down internet” — and yet, it’s not quite “the” internet either.
On Apple’s iTunes page, you get a very cool interactive slider listing all of the company’s hot iTunes-related products, all presented using CSS and Ajax. All done in the browser, all done using open technology. Yeah, holy shit is right.
Now take a look at the same page on the iPhone. It’s similar, but it ain’t the same.
Since Javascript can detect which browser you’re using, Apple seems to be slightly modifying its web interface to account for the iPhone. But how many web designers are going to get caught up in Apple’s iPhone-led redesign of the web, only to find out that their spiffy new interfaces won’t work on the very device they’re redesigning their websites around?
An internet built on open standards, pioneered by Apple would be pretty spectacular, but Apple is going to have to work out these ‘gotchas’ first. Otherwise, I feel this open initiative will go the way of many of Apple’s previous efforts: Cocoa (the other one, but that’s a whole other article), OpenDoc, interactive QuickTime movies, the Pippin game console and other promising technology that Apple left to rot on the vine.
I for one will support Apple’s initiative because I like open standards and I like the idea that when publishing my videos I can “encode once, run anywhere” — on the internet, iTunes, the iPod or an iPhone… pretty much anything starting with a lower-case i.
And in a perfect world, I wouldn’t be the only one. But I don’t see Jobs’s idea of the standards-based open internet catching on. For better or worse, the web is a heterogeneous place, so any kind of consistency is rare indeed. And for all his shrewd maneuvering, Jobs still has a very pie-in-the-sky idea about human nature. Would you expect anything else from an aging hippie? He should already be able to tell that consumers don’t always choose the best products, and quite understandably, people will make choices that immediately benefit themselves.
It made sense for YouTube to re-convert all their videos into the open H.264 codec to get an exclusive spot on Apple’s hottest new product, but would every Tom, Dick and Harry go out of their way to re-encode their entire collection of failed motorcycle stunts, backyard wresting clips and lip-syncing videos, just in support of open standards? My guess is no.
It would be great if we lived in a world where everyone drove a Prius, roommates would wash their dishes, and everything on the internet was open and free for anybody with a good idea, but as a poet once said, “We live in a world where good men are murdered and mediocre hacks thrive.”
It’ll take some very real incentives for Apple to lure web developers away from closed, propriety systems and into an open and free internet, not just because it’s the right thing to do. If I were to offer my two cents, it would be to make the tools for realizing your vision more available, and make them easier to use. Make it easy for people using your software to get results. (I think you used to have an OS that did this back in the mid-’80s.)
Finally, for those of you at home who want to see the web the way the iPhone does, just modify your browser’s user-agent to this string:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
…just resist the temptation to touch the screen.
According to this article on Yahoo! News, Researchers are exploring scrapping the internet.
Because the one we have now isn’t working out? I wasn’t really sure what brought on a need for a new internet, but some researchers think that we need a new internet because the one we have now barely works. But it isn’t too long before the article gets to the more cynical reason:
The first time around, researchers were able to toil away in their labs quietly. Industry is playing a bigger role this time, and law enforcement is bound to make its needs for wiretapping known.
This is exactly why a new internet is a bad idea. Just like including DRM in digital music at the behest of the RIAA, and the MPAA enforcing region codes on DVDs, the telecoms and wiretap-happy FBI are pushing for new features without any regard as to whether the end user actually wants them. And why should the average internet user trust the government and telecoms to have their best interests in mind? Anyone remember Net Neutrality?
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Who says I didn’t do anything worthwhile in school? As a downright spectacular internet programmer, I had to get a start somewhere and — though this isn’t it — this is a project for my Programming in Computing class that always brings a smile to my face. I figured if that Spice Girls thing didn’t work out, Melanie Chisholm could always become an atomic wholesaler. I mean that’s what Girl Power was all about, right?
Click the image above for the best website 1998 has to offer!
When I was at UCLA, probably the most significant thing I did was partake in a student-run television show some friends and I aired on campus TV. Sad, I know. Well, several years down the road, those of us left have endeavored to capture lightning in a bottle a second time, and the result is called Weak Nights:
I have to say that, much to my chagrin, my user profile on the site is a family tree that does not branch. Instead of making videos, I’ve been spending my time programming the site you’re waiting to look at in that new browser tab. So go there, click around and see the totally amazing videos my friends have produced. And if you’re going to comment-spam, just remember the person who made it all possible.
This is a surprisingly less-than-dated look at the future of computers from a 1981 news piece and, unsurprisingly, it gives me a big nerd-boner thinking about the home computer as “the world’s biggest backyard fence to talk over.” Of special note is millionaire Steven P. Jobs discussing how computers will “seduce you.” Done and done!
Just the idea is enough of an ipecac for me, but some clever jokers posted on YouTube a parody of Microsoft’s answer to the iPod’s subtle package design…
“It’s not broken, it just doesn’t do anything.” That’s the lesson I’ve learned writing software at my current job. Plus, I like that the brevity of this observation doesn’t leave room for software that actually works.
Speaking of things that break, I’ve been working with the Mambo content management system lately and I’ve found that the more things a particular piece of software is supposed to do, the more things there are that can go haywire. My solution? Write software that will do zero things, duh.
So far the one plug-in I’ve gotten to work for it is the ever-popular “Hello world” app. Hello World is a great piece of code to get started on because it only does one thing — print out “Hello world” — so there’s only one thing can go wrong.
Is there a web site where I can find all the “Hello World” code I’ll ever need? For some reason, yes: helloworld.org. Even if you can’t count on anything else in this world, seems you can always count on “Hello World”.
This is what I did for six months, and all I got to show for it was carpal tunnel.
I scanned 10,000 pieces of sheet music for www.metzlerviolins.com.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I also built their online store, first using FileMaker (why!?!) and again using PHP. So totally worth it. Yay.
