Meng Wong in this post Internet Governance: An Antispam Perspective raises some thought provoking reasons for operating a whitelist-only policy for all open communications, including email (i.e. refuse unless permission has been granted is the default).
zZine Magazine - Your Magazine, Your Voice.
Comment on PHP vs Ruby on Rails: Quoderat » Rails vs. PHP: MVC or view-centric? (Reference: CakePHP)
cakephp vs. ruby on rails -> GOOD!
PHP vs. ruby on rails -> BAD!
A Brief Django/TurboGears Comparison - may be of interest to students doing my assignment :-)
This is a pointer to my MSc (taught) students who are looking for ways into the debates around REST for an assignment I have just set Middleware Matters: Interfaces and interop (now I wait see if any of them spot it :-).
It's not just those US dudes who can mashup: euromashup Frappr!
I like the idea of using an annotated Flickr image as a design document: moinmoin django=python.org ? on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
A good overview of telecommunications terminology for people with an Internet background: O'Reilly Network -- Telecom Terms and Concepts. This sort of open exchange of information could help the so-called "Bell-heads" (telecoms guys) and "net heads" (Internet guys) get along (c.f. Frieden 2001). They kind of have to if everythings is going to be over TCP/IP (and as I would argue IPv6).
I'm building a simple enough web app, to manage some project related data. Without claiming the ability to see around corners, I'm quite sure this app will grow over time because the data it's working against is nebulous and that will push for more and more views. The main decision so far has been to keep data in XML+RDFAnd then went on to argue why choosing a suitable framework was so hard (e.g. not wishing to enter the Zope "parallel world"). Revisiting the situation now he finds more hope with 4 stacks being front runners: In neither case does he mention any Perl-based frameworks. Fair enough, I suppose, though he could have mentioned Catalyst if only to dismiss it. I like the way that "... using FastCGI, the same Catalyst application will run under IIS, Zeus, Apache or lighttpd. If you use Apache you can also run your application with any version of mod_perl". It's real power comes from the mature alternatives in CPAN, but you probably need to be familiar with these to dive in here.
I have recently given a series of lectures on our taught MSc Communications Software course on "The Rebel Platforms", a term used by Richard Monson-Haefel, an analyst with the Burton Group, in that group's regular conference (c.f. the IT Conversations Podcast. In this he includes both LAMP and its derivatives, and alternatives to monolithic J2EE in Java such as structs, Spring and Hibernate. This he identifies at least 4 major platforms: Java/J2EE, .NET, Java/rebels, and LAMP/derivatives.
Interesting to see some active debate on what the impact of dynamic languages on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as a platform is ongoing LAMP and Java (ongoing, Tim Bray's blog)) that references Sun Analyst Conference: Good News/Bad News (tecosystems - Stephen O'Grady's blog). This includes those who use specific version of those dynamic languages that target the JVM: "Jython and JRuby and Caucho (as in, PHP on the JVM) and so on".
Tim argues:
So the first thing we have to do is to stop mixing up the Java Language and the Java Platform, and make it clear to the world that other languages - in particular dynamic languages - work fine on the platform, and that there's nothing wrong with using them. Then we have to do some engineering work to help this happen. The good news is, we're getting started on that; see Gilad Bracha's article and slides on the JVM-level progress. But that's way down in the engine room; I think we need to help out all the way up and down the stack; the profilers and debuggers and IDEs and, well everything. But still (call me a marketing droid if you want to) I think the message is the important thing: It's time to grow and share the Java platform; everybody wins.
The impact of JVM as a virtual machine for dynamic languages is balanced by the potential impact of an emerging new virtual machine designed for dynamic languages, Parrot, a spin-off of Perl 6 activity, that felt the next version of Perl needed its own VM, though the idea is now to optimise Parrot for dynamic languages in general.
The latest Netcraft Web Server Survey Netcraft: February 2006 Web Server Survey reveals 76,184,000 responding web sites (68% Apache), and 33,197,512 active web sites (66.5% Apache).
I have long promoted the web as a platform, and the use of lightweight technologies to create low cost loosely coupled solutions. Of course I was merely absorbing and reflecting a general understanding of how this developed from the mid 1990s until now. Recently the term "Web 2.0" has been used to cover a wide range of next generation Internet technologies, that could give rise to a new impetus to the development and deployment of innovative new web-based services.
This article from Ed Sim's blog, actually posted September 2005, is an interesting contribution to the debate. It is focused on the business models for new companies launching into the "Web 2.0" space. Food for thought.
"So as you can see, there are more sophisticated users, it costs significantly less to launch a new service/product, and many of the business models are proven to reach profitability. In other words, these business models are quite capital efficient. It is no wonder why VCs are quite excited about next generation web companies. All that being said, I, like others, worry about believing all of our own hype, and moving ourselves to another bubble. As you see from Tim's map and my table above, if it costs less to build and launch a company, then the barriers to entry must be lower as well. What this really means is that building a sustainable competitive advantage in this new open world means leveraging network effects to foster loyalty, community, and collaboration. In most cases this will be enough to create lots of value. In other cases like Friendster vs.MySpace it shows that this network effect can also be fleeting."
