In a couple days I leave for Portland, Oregon and the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. In the tutorial sessions I’ll be mainly on the Python track (including one session with Alex Martelli, uber tech lead at Google and author of Python In a Nutshell). I’ve heard good things about the conference, and the list of people who will be there is impressive. I’ll try to post regular reports here.
Ruby on Rails has inspired a lot of admiring imitators. In theory you can keep on using Python, Perl, PHP, Java, or C# while reaping the benefits of the Rails model. Ruby fanatics will tell you that the language’s intrisic qualities are part of the bargain, which may be true, but all this activity is not just faddishness – Rails is essentially doing evangelism for a structured style of rapid development that is unfamiliar to many people.
Over on the Well there’s an ongoing discussion about the factors that will determine Linux’s success (or lack thereof) in the desktop market. Especially the non-geek desktop market. I’ve been touting Ubuntu Linux as one of the most hopeful signs.
One of the things I like about Ubuntu for new users is that they’ve boiled things down to one app in each category, so the user doesn’t have to evaluate multiple unfamiliar applications and criteria they don’t understand just to, say, view a web page. That’s an important first level to get people in the door. Then later, when they’re curious, you show them how easy it is to add new apps (with a good package system like Debian’s, it’s easier than in Windows or OS X, which I think is an undersold point).
I’ve been on Web Application Framework Safari for the past couple weeks. The new hotness is Ruby on Rails, which has inspired lots of imitators. Not necessarily a bad thing. Because I do so much PHP work I was curious what kind of work had been done to bring this style of development to PHP. I found CakePHP.
I’ll say this for them, they write good enough documentation that I actually had a working mini-site at the end of the first tutorial I tried. Pretty good compared to some of the projects I’ve seen with more high-minded architecture and no usable documentation at all.
It was a busy week in the world of Python web frameworks.
The CherryPy project released its 2.1 beta.
Subway, a Ruby-on-Rails-style stack that builds on CherryPy, released its first milestone.
But the biggest news has been the release of the Django framework. Like Rails, Django grew out of real, production web apps and is going public with a lot of momentum. It seems to strike a nice balance between power and simplicity. Doesn’t hurt that the website looks pretty, either…
TiddlyWiki is one of the most impressive Javascript apps I’ve ever seen. It’s a pure client-side wiki. You can edit navigation, do live searching, and save to disk. There are some rough edges, mostly due to the awkwardness of using a browser as a document editor. But wow.