I've decided that I really should start "diarising". I'm
sure it will be a good form of self-motivation, if nothing
else... (ie even if noone actually reads what I say here)
Been working recently on a "product comparison engine", for
want of a better term... I had been thinking of doing it for
a while, based on a little business idea thing I've got, and
I had written out some db schemas etc, but only when Cam
Barrett (I don't think he's on Advogato?) started asking for
help on the cms-list did I start
writing code.
Unfortunately, Cam wanted the code written in PHP, so I had to throw away my
utopian ideas of a real J2EE-compliant MVC-based
architecture, and hack up something ugly in a language I was
teaching myself on the fly.
Some thoughts on PHP
Personally, and selfishly, I don't see the point in a
language like PHP.
What I mean is this: all the docs out on the Net that
proselytize PHP keep on talking about "how easy it is to
learn, even for non-programmers". Sure, so is BASIC. And it
teaches you lots of bad habits, unless you are very
careful about what you do. And, like BASIC, some things just
can't be done cleanly (like separating display logic
from the display itself). They even talk about how bad Perl
is for new programmers, and how nice PHP is compared to Perl
because it doesn't look like line noise, but then they boast
that PHP is compatible with Perl regular expressions!? Go
figure.
Anyway, I got most of it finished in PHP and was going to
hand it over, when I had an interesting conversation last
week with some people that might be interested to help me
maintain the system myself. As I've just started up a
content-management consulting company, it would make tons of
sense for me to do it myself, and frankly I think it would
be better for the CMS community if I had direct access to my
code so I could roll out new features without having to go
via Cam (and without having to use a crappy scripting
language)
The upshot of all this is that I'm currently thinking of
rewriting it all in Java servlets/JSP/Velocity
(true MVC, or as close as you can get right now), hosting it
myself somewhere, and promoting it like crazy. This would
also give me the opportunity to create other
product-comparison type sites using the same code base, and
possibly release the code as open-source.
We'll see.
So now that I've committed (at least to a Web site?!) let's
see how far I can go.