vanderwal.net

I am really looking forward to South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive as I am now a confirmed speaker. There are many other wonderful speakers on fantastic panels that will spark wonderful conversation, and share knowledge and experience.

Jim Jagielski writes about It Don't Amount to Beans, which discusses Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers. This article states what many complain about, that Java Web solution is not for everything. Knowing your needs, knowing your resources, knowing what you need to process, and knowing the speed and efficiency of scripting languages (Perl, PHP, etc) will greatly help your overal project and application. The article gets at poorly implementing JSP where it is not needed or where it performs poorly. Java can kick some serious behind when used properly and with enough resources behind it. This article helps to sharpen minds.

Finally Web Techniques posts its current issue online, at least the one I have been reading for a week and wanting to share.

If you have Windows XP and are running ClearType (if you have not given it a try you should) Microsoft has a Web tool to tune your ClearType settings. [hat tip Anil]

Matt points out a Web-based bookmarking tool b.. This can be collaborative in nature if you should so choose.

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.

The Dev Shed offers a scenario many of us gone through in their Time is Money article. It walks through a tough scenario of delivering an intricate project with few requirements. In all it is a nice over view of developing a web based application using PHP and MySQL.

Finding the source of phpMyAdmin was a chore. It is a great tool for those with MySQL databases and have PHP on the box. It is a GUI interface to ease management of the tables and properties. I have used it for quite some time on another site and now it is time to take it to work. It is free so the price is right. It does not do ERD, but it is better than command line interfaces.

Trying QuickBase

I have been playing with Intuit's QuickBase and finding it to be a really nice Web application for your database needs. It is rather straight forward to set up and has some nice features and functionality with out having to code. The sorting columns and creating your own views is very nice.