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Houston, we may have a small problem. |
| by Neil Middleton 1:50 pm Thursday, 23 November 2006. |
As most of you may have worked out - Feed-Squirrel.com is provided to you lot as a free service. I don't charge for my time developing it, I do it off my own back - as many people do with their own projects elsewhere.
Trouble is, my hosting is due for renewal real soon - and I am looking forking out a couple of hundred bucks to pay for this site for another year. For me, this is a lot of money I don't have. Adsense generates some, but not nearly enough to cover the site for a year.
So what can I do about it? Well, the problem stems mainly from Coldfusion. Because of CF, I have to pay nearly double the price of a “normal” hosting account. The options I have are turn the site off (but maintain the blog elsewhere), migrate everything to something like PHP or hope for a hefty donation from someone ;-).
As much as I hate to say it, I don't see how CF can be a success if site's like this are unable to run on a tight budget. Adobe really need to reconsider their licensing model for Coldfusion. If they were to drop the price by 50% - would they sell twice as many licenses though?
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The Andy Jarrett Friday Joke™, How to deal with cold callers |
| by Neil Middleton 2:10 pm Friday, 17 November 2006. |
Borrowing one of Andy’s ideas for a week as this is so damn funny…
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Do we need to be big and clever? |
| by Neil Middleton 10:25 pm Thursday, 16 November 2006. |
Walk into any bookshop these days and in the computers section you’ll find a vast mass of books available. Filter out anything that isn’t to do with Web development and you’ll be left with a few main topics, two of which will be Java and .NET.
Now, think hard here. What have you built in the last three years that required the power of .NET or Java? 99% of you will probably be unable to think of anything, which brings me to my point.
Traditionally, people tend to see languages as a ladder. Languages like HTML sit at the bottom, CFML/PHP/ASP in the middle and Java/C#/C/C++. Developers feel (I beleive) that they need to work their way up the ladder in order to become a better developer. Now, before I go any further I will say that exposure to new tools and languages is always a good thing.
Now, back to web development. The majority of web applications I have seen are quite simple. Start loading a page, maybe do some queries and perform some actions on that data, and return a page. Your pages maybe much more complicated but I dare say that they still follow this rough pattern.
So, for such a simple pattern why do we web developers feel we need to know Java/.NET? Why do we feel we need languages that are so bloated with strict data typing and 100% object orientation etc for such a simple task as a web page? Yes, I am aware a few of you have to integrate with some vast backend systems, but you guys are more the exception. Why do we need to learn what is effectively a very complex language with a stack of functionality that we don’t need?
Well, in a couple of words, we don’t. This is why CFML, PHP, ASP exist, to make our lives simpler. If we all wrote our apps in the more complex languages, our development times would go up, pushing our costs up and so on - which is a bad thing.
Now, why am I banging on about this? Well, in short, I see this having an effect on web development in general. I see people who are building for the web (and possibly other arenas) moving away from .NET and Java to much simpler platforms that are quicker and easier to write. For instance, Ruby on Rails or Python. Both of these platforms provide much of the power of a platform such as Java but without the coding overhead. For instance, let’s compare Hello World in Java and Ruby:
Java:
public class Hello {
public static void main (String [] args) {
System.out.println(”Hello World!”);
}
}
Ruby:
"Hello World!"
Now, thats quite some difference, and if you add up how much less time that code takes to write you, then that’s quite a lot of money you can save. It because of this that Java developers are ditching Java in favour of simpler platforms such as Python or RoR.
So, next time you’re sat there thinking about learning Java/.NET just to make yourself feel better - think about learning one of the more abstract languages (of Which Coldfusion is one) - not only will you find it easy to learn, but you’ll also have more fun writing it instead of getting yourself tied up in knots worrying about syntax.
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What should a good developer know? |
| by Neil Middleton 5:33 pm Wednesday, 15 November 2006. |
We were all new web developers at one point in our lives - and many of us still are. The industry can keep quite daunting to a newcomer so I thought I would pose a question that a lot of them probably ask.
What skills (based on the current job market) should I learn and why?
I'll list the basics leaving you guys to do the juicy stuff:
HTML, CSS, Javascript…
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Why bother with Bluedragon.NET? |
| by Neil Middleton 3:07 pm Monday, 13 November 2006. |
I've been spending some time recently giving the new Bluedragon.net a once over with a view to possibly replacing some of my existing CFMX servers. A major reason for this is to eventually move to .NET proper and ditch the CFML. (I should note here the choice of .NET over Java is due to the Windows 2003 install base).
So, I've been looking at BD thinking about how much hassle there would be migrating across (guarantee it won't all work straight off no matter what New Atlanta say) and what the benefits would be. But then I though, why bother with BD.NET? Why not just start building new components in native .NET (e.g C# or similar)? I can currently run .NET on my servers due to the fact I already have IIS, I can access my .NET components via Web Services, I don't have to fork out a few thousand quid for BD licenses and I also end up in ultimately (and arguably) a better place - the .NET framework.
So the question raises itself - if you want to move to .NET - why bother with BlueDragon?
Note the the Java version of this argument isn't so strong as CFMX is already on Java so there would be no extra step in moving from CFML to Native Java/.NET.
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