PM meets dev: a bigger picture look at the web – Part 2

This is a continuation from Part 1. If you have not read that, I encourage you to read it first.

In my last post, we were looking at a large picture perspective of web applications. I first must apologize for a misuse of terminology. I used the terms “PM” and “Project Manager” when referring to the role being described in my last post. Strictly speaking that would be incorrect as just setting up premade software would not concern a PM in all likelihood. I should have just used the term “manager”.

As we continue, we are going to look at usability and maintainability. We are going to continue to approach these problems from the perspective of effort/time and decisions rather than technical aspects except where very useful.
Read the rest of this entry »

PM meets dev: a bigger picture look at the web – Part 1

I feel like it might be a good time to step back. This blog has existed for only a few years (going on 4), but it really has been enough time to see quite a bit change in the world of the internet. I maybe a dev in general, but I think a PM perspective is valuable especially from this perspective

I am by no means an expert on many topics including the ones I want to look at. I do argue that to be a feature in the regard that most of the world is not experts. Because of that, I can present a user’s perspective to a lot of topics.

I have wanted to see a wonderful and accessible web for a long time. From the client side, we have achieved that to a great degree. Browsers are actually overall acceptable products. I will not call them perfect by any means, but I do not think that a large concern of the web needs to be focused on the client. Instead I want to focus on the server side.
Read the rest of this entry »

Running Custom

Well, I have to say, my interests in running the latest and greatest software comes at a price.

I’ve taken to running svn releases of Wordpress. I don’t exactly have a good reason, but it does seem to make themes not work right. (I tried to use two different themes because i’ve been doing a lot with dark backgrounds and light text recently. it went poorly). On the bright side, the new interfaces seem slick and the updates are easier using straight svn access.

For development, I’ve come to find that I’m either in vim or Visual Studio 2008. That’s pretty much the two ends of the spectrum of light and generic program to highly customized and heavy for development. I’ve been doing some development with C#.net and really have to say it’s fun. I love programming in it probably more than any other language. I’m enjoying the environment too. I admit, I kind of miss my vim key bindings and jumping into normal mode to move around, but it’s not all bad. The code completion and intellisense is great in VS2008. The debugger for applications in extremely nice to step through whatever has gone wrong. I really must say that I miss those capabilities when I’m writing something else.

Also, since I mentioned running light text on a dark background, I would suggest altering your theme (if your window manager supports that) to light-on-dark. It’s very nice on my eyes and you can find great places where only backgrounds or foregrounds were specified, making them unreadable! Well, at least it encourages you to think about what happens when someone does try to use high contrast light-on-dark settings with your program/web site. Accessibility forever.

Webtrends rant

Well, after abandoning my post for updating this for a while, I figure I might want to try Steve Yegge’s suggestion of being more opinionated in my blog. If nothing more, it might generate a bit of hate mail.

I’m going to be honest. I enjoy writing web apps. I really enjoy the back end code and the product at the end. I have done pretty much everything of significance in PHP also. This shouldn’t offend anyone yet, but some people might see PHP and think less of me. And the real question becomes why?

Now I’ve asked a lot of my friends this question. The general answer usually comes down to PHP yielding bad code or being unmaintainable. Um… I don’t think that’s PHP’s fault that the last person who worked on this project kinda hacked it together into somewhat working but terrible shape. Most if not all programming languages allow you to write bad or unmaintainable code (purely functional languages might be the exception, but my experience with them is far too limited to be able to comment). To be quite honest, I don’t have a problem maintaining my php code. Larger projects always have a framework (one I made usually) to power them and small scripts can easily be navigated by using find in the file or scrolling.

Well Rails and Django are amazing frameworks. This may or may not be true. Rails does have a lot of cool features. It is even cooler when you start giving it extra gems. I’ll give it that, but even that isn’t good enough for me. If you actually want to start using more complicated conditions, you end up writing the SQL you were looking to avoid. Something like Symfony provides most if not all of the commonly requested features for php. There are many other frameworks available too. So if one isn’t good enough, you can always try another.

PHP is slow. To be honest, PHP is usually not where scripts end up being slow. I frequently see one of the following: 1) Are you having PHP do calculations that your database could easily do? Why would you do that? 2) Are you having PHP parse pages that are static or virtually static? Why not use server side includes and not even use the php parse? 3) Did you make a huge data structure that you are recreating on every call? Look into functional programming or restful programming (both are stateless) and consider revising your code.

And in the end, PHP has a lot of well known ways to speed it up. Why not try out a caching solution? memcache is nice and well supported. You could even implement your own.

Are there any reasons to use PHP, not just defend it? YES! Plenty. Integrating kerberos authentication is extremely easy. There is a wealth of information about any common task. the PEAR/PECL code is common and usually easy to use. The wealth of code already available makes it a simple choice.

Back to fun

Ok. I finally am coming to have some free time and have already started making things for the public.

I noticed that there aren’t many (if any) good cURL tutorials that show you some of the power of cURL like manipulating cookies and such. Such a tutorial could be used for good (such as unit testing your work) or evil (trying to program a bot to do something that requires a login). After I get my contrived examples created and can demonstrate them, I’ll write up the tutorial that looks at cURL in more detail. This is supposed to both show users how to use cURL better as well as for site administrators to get an idea what could cause vulnerabilities. I will also discuss ways to create login systems to defeat cURL.

To be posted soon…

Web Shame!

I was browsing the BBC news as I frequently will and found a very depressing article for all web designers. Most people who know me and have ever asked about web development have heard me preach about standards and accessibility. I realize my site itself is pretty plain, but it is very functional for screen readers among other things. I even verify it works on mobile devices (though I can’t post with my blackberry. That failed horribly). I know that most people don’t like to think about it, but it is really not that hard to keep things accessible. All of the people who need them will love you for it. If you have a really accessible site, I would love to even show it off. For a nice example, take a look at Molly Holzschlag’s homepage. Molly is an advocate of web standards and a good designer to boot. She is a good author and excellent speaker on the topic of web standards and accessibility. Her site is a good example.

So what is most of the web like according to Nomensa (referenced in the BBC article)? Almost all major sites do not even provide basic access to those needing assistance such as screen readers or magnifying tools. That is not acceptable. We as web developers need to think about more than just how pretty things are. Standards are your friends! Follow them and all of these problems will virtually go away. The article is a good read. Even if you do follow standards. The article is ‘Most Websites’ failing disabled.

Oh and if I remember, I have some music news to post as well.

Released new browsers!

So I’m a web junkie, right? Is it any wonder that I was waiting for the release time of Firefox 2 as it was posted on the BBC earlier that day? Well it shouldn’t be. That’s actually the second new browser release. The first was Internet Explorer 7 (Windows only).

Let’s look at IE 7 first. If you’re like me, you’ve been playing with IE7 since beta 1 and know that it’s appearance has changed drastically even through the beta stages. It’s look now is actually extremely slick in my opinion with some nice new features. The big three are RSS feeds, tabs, and PNG support. The RSS feeds are strangely modeled after the Safari’s RSS feed reader. This is actually a very nice way of reading through a feed. The searching on the right will prove to be more useful than you might think at first glance if you read feeds like the BBC where they get updated 50+ times per day and you still want to find something (or digg which is worse). It is a nice reader all around for actually reading the topics of the feeds instead of firefox’s where you can only see the titles (which I only see useful for things where the title can tell you everything or you want to read every entry). Tabs have been officially supported in IE with IE7 now and I think that this is a great improvement. I use tabs almost all of the time so this was a requirement. A lot of people turned to IE-based browsers like Avant or slimbrowser as an alternative or used the Yahoo toolbar for tab support. Now they are native and easy to use. People who use Avant and are used to Ctrl-n being a new tab (I still don’t understand why someone would pick n which everyone else calls new window…), you cannot remap the keys natively and will have to get used to every other browser in the world’s use of ctrl-t (or just keep using avant). The png support might not seem like much in comparison to the security updates, but I realize most people won’t ever realize the security updates are there and will probably see the png transparency support. Yes, this means things like google maps will actually look right now.

My opinion is that IE is better now, but it still offers little than another browser doesn’t already have. The biggest advantage in my opinion is still the security zones that Opera kind of has on a per-site basis, but none but IE have done quite as well. Past that, there are still a lot of add-ons for IE to get the features that extensions will get you in Firefox, but IE doesn’t add anything wonderful to draw me back.

Firefox 2 is another big launch just this week. Unfortunately in my opinion, it doesn’t change much. The tab support has been greatly improved to have a drop down for all of the tabs listed, a close button on every tab, and dragable tabs. Spellcheck is also nice now that it has been added to every textarea that you type in including webmail boxes, etc. The anti-phishing filter (probably stolen from IE7 which probably stole it from spoof-stick) probably is good to have, but I haven’t had the fortune to get to see something that it deemed as phishing. The updated interface is nicer than before, but themes are still probably what anyone who really cares about UI will turn to. The SVG support apparently was also improved, but I doubt that anyone will actually start to use SVG for quite a while.

In the end, these releases didn’t redefine anything. Most firefox extensions still work, are integrated, or there is an equivalent that exists. IE hasn’t pulled above anywhere, but it is closer as a contender.

Quick Peek at a talented designer

I’ve always really respected those who can make extremely attractive web sites. I cannot… well, more of chose not to put the effort into the appearance and focus much more on the functionality. Anyway, I stumbled across JP33’s portfolio and was pretty impressed. It’s a very nice use of dreamweaver design (with the generator tag cut out since no one actually likes to admit they use that) and apaarently programming know how. I can’t say this is the best, but it’s really nice looking (and oh so not compliant). Be warned, it has 60 large-ish pictures on that screen alone