vanderwal.net

The current term the neighbor from the Graduate would say is "Web Services". If you have Mac OS X, then O'Reilly Net's "AppleScript Primer for Mac OS X" is your passage to understanding how to do Web Services today. This means you don't have to wait for the expensive .Net Framework as you have the the technology now.

Needs When Running a Service

Matt makes observations of the state of severs and scripting deployments. I agree with nearly all of what Matt point out. Some of the reasoning behind the varying set-ups is for security reason's, others are to mirror configurations on other servers that had slightly different purposes. In all, what this needs is a solid documentation tool. PHP provides some of this with a function that prints out the build of the server that script resides on, this is usually the first task many of us perform on a machine. This however, is just the tip of the iceberg of the information we need.

This is part of the second and fourth element of the cornerstones of information application development (info apps need to be usable, maintainable, reliable, and repeatable). If a task is difficult to maintain and even harder to repeat there is some work that needs to be done to change the environment or the application.

Grokdotcom provides a good overview of the methodologies of Web application development. The modular approach is provided as the best methodology, go figure with an open methodology that is based on published/documented standard set of processes. The article ends up discussing Fusebox, which is new to me, but seems to be a rather straightforward approach to modular software development.

I am so happy as I have a system at home that is stable enough to build the Active State components: Komodo, ActivePerl, and ActivePyton. It is nice to have an option to the command line and to be able to test with out FTPing scripts up to a server.

Web-Building provides website development resources. Don't be afraid of the initial presentation, this is a one-stop-shopping resource for HTML, scripting, application development, and everything in between.

ASP2PHP does a solid job handling converting ASP (active server pages) to PHP. The report that Sun sponsored to hopefully show JSP (java server pages) taking over the site scripting market, not only showed JSP had shrunk in market share, but ASP had dropped drastically. The big winner in this survey was Perl with about 40 percent of the market and PHP was ahead of ASP.

Microsoft has given itself problems with ASP this past year or so as the next generation of ASP requires complete rewrites of your ASP code to work on the next version of server. The code is different enough that it will not port, it must be rewritten. This stopped ASP development to a large degree. Some folks have tried running ASP on UNIX with ChiliSoft, but that is only advisable as a patch until you can recode the application, as it is quite resource intensive and you adding another layer of interpretation, which never helps.