I’ve had some less than pleasant experiences over the past week with my web site. First my blog got temporarily trashed by a service error on the MySQL instance on the server. I tried their email support but that didn’t get a response in a reasonable amount of time so I decided to hang on their 888 number until I finally got a real person. Fortunately, within 3 minutes of getting a real person, it was resolved.

Next, all mail started to bounce. The bad part was that outbound mail worked but inbound messages got rejected so people trying to reach any of the mail users on my site got the impression we had closed up shop.

It turns out my ISP actually knew this was happening to “some number of their customers” as an “unfortunate situation as they migrated to new hardware and software”. Rather than warn customers, they chose to stay quiet and avoid “unnecessary concern”. Not good. Not good at all.

I’m currently stuck in the first year of a 2yr contract but these two problems are not the first I’ve ever had. So, I am considering jumping ship and eating the loss. My requirements are pretty simple, MySQL, PHP, email, FTP, etc. These are the basics when hosting on Linux.

Who should I switch to ?

I’ve been pondering the idea of desktop applications authored as mashups. the question becomes – what is the development environment ? You can run PHP, Perl, and other languages on a local machine but they really were not meant for that.  You could install Apache and Tomcat and have an HTML and applet environment but that seems more like making your personal computer an Internet server. While either of these may become the norm, I think it might be something else. In reality, it will likely be something like widgets and gadgets running in a browser.

Adobe has another idea, the Adobe Integrated Runtime or AIR. Adobe says,

Adobe? AIR?, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

There are, of course, a number of other cross-platform runtimes including Java and Microsoft has announced it’s cross language runtime will become cross platform as well.

What is interesting about AIR is that it is attempting to use the web developer skills rather than those of the typical programmer. It might work, then again, it might not.

The more I think about it, the more I’d like to see a packaged install of Apache + Tomcat + MySQL + PHP + some helpful libraries. Oh, Wait …. that would be XAMPP !

I finally got around to upgrading this blog to the latest WordPress. the straw the broke the camel’s back – so to speak – was that Windows Live Writer now supports more XMLRPC interfaces included creating categories (in addition to just selecting from existing ones). There are also more complete interactions thru the XMLRPC interface.

I still have a couple of “enhancements” (or “hacks” depending on your point of view). These I must manually edit back into the code stream each time I update. These include the ability to turn off the implicit output from wp_list_categories() function. I need to get back the output for further markup so I don’t want the function to stream the output automatically. I also still tweak the “more” behavior. WLW includes a new-line when I insert the break for excerpt and I usually want the “more” tag to fall right at the end of the line.

 I stand fast with my technological point of view that no solution will succeed without having an established interface. I tend to leave some of Bill Gate’s creations out of the mix because monopolies don’t play by the same rules as the rest of the world. I’ll also eliminate very small niche software. These tend to do a very specific task and have a very specific audience. The down side of a niche product is it it can easily be replaced. For that reason, I’ll leave these out as well.

The interfaces can take on any number of implementations. Lotus 123 supports macros. Photoshop supports plugins. Google Maps has its a JavaScript API. MySQL can be accessed using PHP interfaces. IBM Lotus Connections uses REST. Other products leverage RSS, Atom, and publish AJAX and REST mechanisms. Continue reading ‘Software interfaces are sexy’ »

I was reading Stephen O’Grady’s blog and started link hopping. My jumping off point was? the announcement of IBM supporting MySQL. Then I trolled around where I found IBM’s growing support for PHP through Zend Core. I had read previously about WebSphere support for PHP.

I’ve confessed previously that I skipped the Java development tract in my career development. I went from C/C++ thru a bunch of “other stuff” and ended up in the world of script developers with PHP.

IBM’s announcements and support for broadly used technologies and interfaces is a good sign. It’s not all roses and champagne. I think IBM still needs to simplify the deployment side of the equation, ala XAMMP. Developers need low thresholds to entry.