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Blogs » Archive for December, 2005
MVC and web apps: oil and water
Roll back the clock by two years. That’s before AJAX, before Web 2.0, before Rails. Where were we then? Well pondering whether MVC was really such a good idea after all. Continuing from there…
What is MVC?
For a long answer, the best I’ve seen (for web heads) is Jeff’s analysis here. There more to be found via Wikipedia and yet more on the old C2 wiki.
A short answer, for web applications (with a PHP slant), is probably - a way to organise code based around the following ideas;
- Model - those functions that wrap calls to your db
- View - the templates / scripts that output HTML
- Controller - the stuff that examines variables like $_GET and $_POST and works out what to do next
What’s important to remember is there’s no absolute definition of MVC and there are many grey areas for interpretation and yet more when it comes to using it online. That in itself means, if you’re building a framework, you just need to put the words “Model”, “View” and “Controller” in there somewhere and you’re probably as “right” as anyone else. A while back John Lim dared to ask Is MVC over-designed crap?, I suspect coming for the gut instinct of …
PHP to Java bytecode
From this post on the server side it seems Caucho have added PHP support to their Resin Java App server.
There are a number ways to integrate with Java, by which I mean PHP - the C version.
What’s interesting about what Caucho seem to have done is, rather than integrate with PHP-C, they’ve written their own parser for PHP scripts in Java, from which they generate Java byte code for execution. I say “seem” because I’ve only glanced at the source and found a convincing-looking PHP parser in there.
Otherwise not much information available right now except the source code itself and some minimal wiki entries.
Also, Keith raises the right questions about benchmarks.
New Year’s Wish For You: In 2006, work hard to be lazy
Here is a New Year’s wish for all self-employed Sitepoint readers:
Work hard in 2006 to be lazy in 2007.
What does that mean? Some of you already know. Some of you don’t have a clue.
Too many of you are working too hard to continue to work hard. You are working with clients, doing it all yourself, building nothing with lasting value, failing to put systems in place. So your life is destined to be about constantly chasing clients, working for clients, and chasing new clients. This is a recipe for a decent living, but not for achieving your most ambitious financial goals.
Instead, work hard to stop working so hard. Work on your business. Put automatic marketing systems in place. Get known as a “go to” professional in your field, a guru if you will, so clients come to you. Develop repeatable products and solutions, so you make it once and sell it thousands of times. Create income-generating websites that you own, and that you can “set and forget.” Build a network of experts/contractors/employees that you can hire onto projects for you.
Work all of next year, really hard, on doing the above. Then in 2007 you can start reaping the rewards of …
Rip it up: Worn Type using CSS
With so much recent experimental focus on DOM scripting, it feels like years since I’ve seen anything genuinely new in plain, old CSS. That was until today at least.
Khmerang.com has published a great little article explaining how they achieved the grungy, weathered look on their headings. No, it’s not sIFR and it’s not even traditional Image Replacement. It is, in fact, a clever variation on Tom Gilder and Levin Alexander’s ‘old skool’ IR technique, which advocated floating an opaque image layer over your text, rather than the much more common method of just shunting the original text right out of the viewport (i.e. ‘text-indent:-1000em’).
Khmerang’s new take on the idea is to swap the image layer with a mostly transparent, distressed pattern, leaving the underlying heading text with a scratched and worn finish.
The really nice bit is the pattern repeats, but will rarely ever align itself identically with the same letter, so every character should appear to be a one-off original.
As you may have already figured, there are a few caveats to consider.
- The text is still selectable, but it’s more …
One day, two very different inquiries
Thursday I got two very different inquiries from prospects.
Inquiry One: Someone was interested in one of my $50 books. He sent an email asking a variety of questions. Some were perfectly legitimate. Some of his other questions told me that he was not an ideal client by any means. He wanted to know if he could “trust me” in case he wanted a refund. And he asked questions that told me that he would require lots of convincing to buy the book, and then would have many more questions later on. His questions also gave the impression that $50 was a lot of money for him, and that he was more likely than most people to want his money back for minor reasons.
Inquiry Two: The CEO of a tech company called. His investors want him to triple sales next year. He liked the articles on my site and wanted to see if I could help him get similar results. We spoke for a half hour, and by the end of the call agreed to work together. He paid me right away for an initial engagement worth thousands.
I have no problem with the individual described in Inquiry #1. He has …
Attention all PPC Marketers
Business 2.0 Magazine has an in-depth article about the domainers - the people who hold thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them, and then resell their traffic to Google and Yahoo, and ultimately you - the PPC Advertiser.
Why is this important?
Simply put, of the hundreds of thousands of advertisers on Google and Yahoo, few have any clues that they are paying good money for traffic from massive domain name portfolios, held by individuals and corporations such as NameAdmin and Marchex, who are profitingly richly from their established niche:
Schwartz owns about 5,000 names, with less than a third falling into the “adult” category. He’s the industry’s biggest promoter, preaching the power of domains to anyone who will listen and bringing domainers together with moneymen and execs from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). He sports a $65,000 Rolex on his left wrist, a $32,000 diamond bracelet on his right, and is astounded that he — a community college dropout — is living like a king in a waterfront house in Boca Raton.
Read the full story here.
But hey, if you have a few spare domain names lying around, check out AdSense for Parked Domains. Maybe you too can …
Newsweek on SEO
Newsweek Magazine has a write-up in the December issue about the world of SEO (talk about mainstream coverage!). Quote:
[Search engines] deplore the so-called black-hat SEOs who use unsavory techniques, like spamming the Web with dummy pages full of links, in an effort to make their sites appear popular. But they are increasingly tolerant of ethical or “white hat” SEOs like Fishkin, who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site. … It’s good for Google and SEOs: better-organized sites increase the amount of content in Google’s index, while improving SEO rankings.
Matt Cutt’s, the Google employee interviewed for the story, has some additional information in this blog post. It seems, Google was already aware of the “black hat” SEO featured in the story, and actually used them as an example in a workshop, just days before the story appeared!
From $0 to $1 million in only a year
A colleague and friend of mine has built an IT solutions provider firm from $0 to $1 million this year. Interested in how he did it? Here is how:
1. He prepared to leave his company (where he worked in IT) for a couple of years before taking the leap. During this time, he cultivated some terrific contacts within his company — people who could help refer business his way, and potential business partners. He also stored up some financial reserves.
2. He didn’t leave until he landed his first big client.
3. He focused on people who had worked in his company but then moved on to become IT executives at other large companies.
4. He developed a big solution set, focusing on enterprise-level applications. He set his solutions apart with an extremely agile development approach, something many companies still lack.
5. He partnered up with 3 other people, all of whom brought outstanding technology expertise or a network of contacts and sales ability to his company.
6. He knows how to talk “business” instead of technical jargon. So his solutions focus on real results for companies.
7. He hustled like crazy to get work, meeting with prospects, cultivating relationships, and delivering fantastic results. I cannot …
Mozilla XForms presentation from OSDC
The following is republished from the Tech Times #128.
Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Open Source Developer Conference about Mozilla XForms. Long-time readers of the Tech Times and this blog will remember my coverage of the original spec, my analysis of why XForms adoption was moving so slowly, and more recently my look at how to write cross-browser XForms. The talk was the next stage in my exploration of XForms, pushing the limits of what can be done with the latest preview of the Mozilla extension.
If you’re interested in learning more about XForms, you can listen to the audio (MP3, 8MB) and view my slides with full notes (including a couple of bonus slides I didn’t have time for!).
The conference itself was very enlightening, especially given its distinct penchant for all things Perl and Python (languages we don’t tend to focus on here at SitePoint). Fellow SitePointer Matt Magain posted a great wrap-up of the conference in the open source blog.
Ruby on Rails: a look at the code
Ruby on Rails got its reputation based on how little code you have to write to get common Web development tasks done. But what about the code that you do have to write? Since yesterday’s post announcing Ruby on Rails 1.0, a lot of people have chimed in asking what it’s like when you get past the hype.
The following is republished from the Tech Times #128.
Ruby on Rails is the poster child for a principle of agile development frameworks: convention over configuration. What this means in practice is that, instead of having to write a bunch of configuration files and standard boilerplate code for every project you undertake, you can simply code to a set of assumptions and all that grunt work will be done for you.
As a result, the experience of examining Ruby on Rails code for the first time can be bewildering. “Where does the @posts variable come from, and how does it get filled with database records?” you might wonder. Because you have a database table called posts, and Rails hooks it all up for you.
With very few exceptions, the only time you need to write code in Rails is when your needs are different from the …
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