abstractwankery.com
taking it to the next level
Releasing Products
Posted by Nick at 8:20 PM
It's such a rush to finally release a long-running project.

My primary full time work involves contracting to a large company in the healthcare field. After nearly twenty months of stop and start work, and then a few months of 100% work, we finally released a fully rewritten site this evening. Is it everything we wanted? No. Are there large pieces that I don't like about it? Sure.

Did we finally do it?

Yes.

Sweet.

(Yes, of course the site is written in Perl. We're using DBIx::Class, Template Toolkit and a custom mod_perl framework over Apache2 and MySQL.)
1 comment
Development on Maemo
Posted by Nick at 12:29 PM
Is it just me, or is development on Maemo/Gnome 10x more annoying and difficult than Android or iPhone development? Seems you're stuck with C and GObject, and the scaffolding is terrible. I would like to think I can use Vala, but the bindings seem to be missing for Maemo 5, and there is always QT, but then you're just increasing the pain to C++.

Maybe I'm just turning into a lazy programmer, and feel that life is too short for C.

Maybe I just need to write some Objective-C bindings for Hildon.
1 comment
Web Application Design Patterns
Posted by Nick at 8:34 AM
I was speaking to a PHP developer recently on the architecture of their web applications, out of morbid curiosity. We were discussing templating systems, and found out that they created theirs in house. It was a coded document, with classes defined for each entity, and they'd load up an object with the proper properties, stream it out to the processor, and it would generate the page. They would then have the designers just write CSS to make the markup do what they wanted it to do.

I had never heard of this before, and to me, that sounds horrible. You have a huge cost for all of that object creation, and then you have to find a web developer who is willing to only use CSS.

Anyone else do something similar?
1 comment