Sat 22 Jan 2011
I don’t know what else to call this post, I’ve been doing a little bit of everything in past few months. I’ve changed jobs and thats taken much of my freetime to ramp up and get going on new projects. SO, I will write up a little of what I’ve been doing.
Facebook — Yes, I worked on some facebook projects. Some were fan pages and some were applications. It was pretty interesting, I hadn’t done much with facebook other than get addicted to some stupid games (Yes, cafe world, i’ve quit again.. for now..). Developing on facebook can have some frustrating moments, as if you are using FBML, then facebook takes liberty to rewrite things at will and not give you much information on errors. Programming in FBML can be irritating but, when using iframe in an application canvas url… its pretty cool because then you can code in the familiar word of jquery. The new stuff coming out like the social plugins/widgets is pretty handy.
Python — Yes, I like to gripe about python and the sometimes functional and sometimes OOP nature of it. But.. I worked on a project where they already had apps in python and they weren’t interested in supporting a rails app, I am not interested in supporting a rails app (they didn’t want to use heroku) so.. python it is. And postgresql … I had more problems with postgresql then python. We had our moments but we are good now. I just needed a lightweight framework so I used web.py which is pretty similar to Sinatra for Ruby. So, that was pretty good. I didn’t find it as irritating to program in python as I thought, it didn’t bother me about the intenting/whitespace at all.. and only a few times I forgot the : at the end of a block statement.
PHP — I tried Zend Framework.. I did PHP for 6 years of my life, never really gave the MVC framework from Zend a fair shot. So I set out to give it a whirl, I started working through the tutorial on zend .. when I got to the part where I had to do all this coding to setup the database.. I was like, ack, i can’t take it. I am not going to knock it if you like it..but its not for me
Grails — Yes, I’ve always thought that other frameworks that try to mimic rails FAIL. I haven’t gotten too much into grails, but.. so far I haven’t run screaming. Hehe. One thing I noticed.. the first time you run the app, it will go ahead and install all the plugins. No need to run something like bundler or rake gems:install … it has meta-programming aspect because of Groovy, so I think that it might be successful where other frameworks zend, cakephp, etc don’t quite cut it for me (I’ve always held fast to the reason that rails is so successful is because its made with Ruby).
Groovy — This is the scripting language that Grails uses… it compiles to the JVM and i haven’t quite got it all figured out .. but i found this Koans to learn the language (I love ruby koans and go back every now and then and work through them)…I know that if I knew about groovy when I was doing java a few years ago I would have been alot happier. Java just requires so much typing, ack. Groovy (although i think it could use a better name) might make java programming fun again…
Javascript — Been doing more javascript/jquery. I’m always on the lookout for for screencasts/tutorials and I subscribed to ThinkVitamin. They have great tutorials on css/html5/javascript and a growing section of frameworks. Its 25 a month but I think its well worth it. They have a series now about making an HTML5 game .. exciting!! I’ve been looking at javascript game frameworks. Keeping a collection of options in mind for when I figure out what kind of game I want to make.
Misc — I finally got the Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Pragmatic Programmers. When I first saw it, I squealed with delight but held off buying it till I had some time to dig in. I got it, did most of the ruby which I knew most of but it was good. Now I am working on the Scala section. I was listening to the Java Posse podcast and heard the excitement and joy in Dicks voice, so I was intrigued to find what is scala? Once I tried it, I understood his excitement. Scala has clear syntax (like ruby) and one thing I like for learning an interactive console…the completest (or maybe its compulsive crazy person) in me is not wanting to try the others until I finished the Scala section.
My <3 still belongs to Ruby, but I like to try out other things from time to time...I basically strive to use the best tool for the job and sometimes that means using whatever is going to be supported (as in the case of using python for one project) or one that is already in use (the grails site I am working on) and I don't want to begrudge anyone on their choice of languages.
And Happy New Year!
Go forth and program!
