STM Raffle: scriptaculous effects
The High School of Saint Thomas More : Great Saber Raffle
Tuesday : September 12, 2006
Friday : March 11, 2005
Java migrations…
Ralph Churchill has a good observation about Java App Server migrations, notably Migrating from Weblogic to JBoss.
“…and saved my company tens-of-thousands of dollars in licensing and (worthless) support costs.”
Oh the lure of big name, high-dollar Java application servers. They have a long list of features and are backed by big companies with promise of big support. Unfortunately many of the features don’t work as advertised, the support is difficult to access or non-existant, and in the long run the things turn into holes in your server you throw money in. I’ve had the same experience as Ralph, taking a Websphere installation (that I recommended and spearheaded) over to Resin (which I also recommended, after a couple years of Websphere pain and suffering). The difference was night and day, reliability shot up immediately and deployments went from all day affairs (maybe it will start this time) to 15 minute finger-snaps (done). Can’t recommend Resin highly enough, imho.
Anyway, what went wrong with the large Java app server players? Why can’t they deliver reliable software, actual support, all within reasonable dollar ranges (were normally talking order-of-magnitude dollar differences, and some are processor number based)? Small companies and open-source seem able to do this quite readily.
Tuesday : March 8, 2005
Upgraded to WP1.5
Just finished the upgrade to Wordpress 1.5. Went very smoothly; backup, delete, upload, upgrade, create template from old style, upload, done. Nice.
Friday : March 4, 2005
The Meaning of Semantics
Molly Holzschlag takes on the task of explaining what is meant by “Semantic HTML”, and does very well. For such a basically simple concept I have found it difficult to describe, so thanks to Molly for laying it out so clearly.
Friday : February 11, 2005
Content is King
“Content won’t magically appear. Most “Web designers” can’t create it for you. It’s important, usually should be priority #1 on a Web project. It takes work, lots of work. It needs a plan, and a process. In many cases creating, editing and managing the content for a Web site of any size is a full time job. For a real person. A content management system won’t do anything on it’s own, and you’re better of not wasting your money if you can’t properly implement it.”
Great article from D. Keith Robinson (Asterisk) about the importance of content to a web project. Your web site can be considered a “content vehicle” (think brochure, billboard, article, etc.) with unique capabilities (incredibly timely, easily updated, free distribution, etc.). What good is a billboard without a message?
Care and Feeding of your Web Designer
Eris | Standards in Design. Standards in Life
Friday : February 4, 2005
Speaking of code complexity…
I find that, in general, much of the PHP scripts/class code (this includes Pear code) that developers make available is overly complex, requiring a large time investment to actually make it useful. Which of course actually makes their code generally less useful in real world contexts. Oh Dave, your such a critic. “What should these developers do” you say?
If you have a complex set of scripts/classes/etc. here are the things I would want to help my ‘real world ramp-up time’ with your code:
- A High-Level Diagram: nothing elaborate, but I want to see from a higher level how your code fits in with its surroundings (PHP, databases, directories, servers, etc.). If your documents dump me right in at the branches-on-trees levels it will take me days of dinking with it to see the actual forest, days I spend in frustration (why the heck is this needed here?…, etc.), or not (often the case).
- At least one real world, detailed example: So many scripts/classes/etc. come with the most God awful, trivial, only-uses-one-aspect-of-the-code examples. These are just worthless. Period. Even when they are correct (which very often they aren’t because the code base changes at a 2.5x rate compared to documentation). Just one real example can negate reams of missing documentation, really.
- If the script/class is of a framework-ish or application structure-ish type I would like to have a small (empty) reference implementation to start with. This should be structured using the ‘best practices’ for your code. This will give me something to hang test code on and will get me up to speed in very short order (even if I don’t understand what I’m doing yet). Be sure to take into account other ‘best practices’ when you set this up (normal web server layouts, code references, etc.), and document those that you don’t adhere to.
- And in my dream world, I would like to see actual documentation. That is documentation that has actual text (not just the method/function definitions and their undocumented parameters) describing the inner-workings of your exquisite, hand-crafted code base. Even sprinkle on some working example code snippets.