January 19th, 2009
I’m currently creating a mashup site. A mashup draws its contents from other websites, and may have no original content whatsoever. If it is done correctly, a mashup can draw together information from a number of sources and combine them in a way that is more than the sum of their parts. If you can build a resource that presents regurgitated information in a new and useful way, the surfers will come.
Publishers are still deciding their stance on mashups and content rehashing. Traditionalists will seek to protect their published content, but progressive publishers see the possibility of new readers and are offering their content through mechanisms such as the Creative Commons License.
Traditionally, publishers shared their content via RSS feeds, and some of the more progressive companies offered APIs for more complete programatic control. Latterly,companies like dapper.com are making content available from any website. If the data can be viewed in a browser, dapper acts as an intelligent screen scraper, recognising repeating fields and assembling the data into a custom RSS or XML feed. The morality and legality of such technologies are hotly debated, as they allow someone to republish content on their own site without having to get the original publisher’s consent, or even credit the source.
With the huge growth in mashup websites, data is being duplicated on many, many websites. Thankfully there are still enough people out there dedicated to publishing original content, but I’m starting to get fed up of coming across the same news story, repeated word for word on different sites, without acknowledging the original source.
The iPhone has already shown us some of the most innovative mashups yet, integrating its GPS features with Google earth data and online databases to tell you about points of interest near your present location. 2009 may well be the year that the mashup comes into its own. I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with, and will be having fun with some experiments of my own.
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January 14th, 2009
I’ve been looking at PHP frameworks lately, and quickly narrowed down my selection of candidates to Cake and Zend. I ended up using Zend, for a number of reasons:
- It doesn’t force the MVC methodology on you – you can write a traditional PHP app if you wish, and instantiate classes from the library directly, although this would mean you don’t get the benefit of the framework infrastructure.
- The library is very impressive. It takes the heavy grind out of many of the tedious programming tasks such as database interaction, authentication, pagination, etc.
- There’s a lot of support for various web services from Google, Yahoo, and even Audioscrobbler.
- The documentation is pretty good. The online book examines each of the classes, and usually provides a little example code. I did find some errors in the code (syntax errors and calls to non-existent library methods). There’s also an API reference which is complete but lacking in descriptive text.
- It is made by the folks that make PHP. They make money from it, and therefore it will be around for sometime, complete with new revisions, bug fixes, and updated documentation.
I’ve found the learning curve to be relatively steep. The concepts are well explained in the online book, but it doesn’t really outline how you would go about building an application. I’ve needed to read a few build-an-app tutorials to get a holistic understanding of it.
I won’t be using it in everything – there is a significant overhead in setting up the application structure, and this would be prohibitive for small apps. It will quickly pay its way when developing larger apps though. The built in libraries will cut coding time significantly and the MVC structure makes for a well formed app that should be very maintainable.
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January 12th, 2009
With Amazon and Google getting heavily involved in cloud computing, it was inevitable that Microsoft would turn to this technology in an attempt to stop losing market share in so many areas. In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, cloud computing involves running your application on somebody else’s servers (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Amazon). It is perfect for web applications as the cloud companies have the architecture to allow you to scale your application from 1 user all the way up to the realms of Myspace and Facebook.
It’s interesting to think of Bill Gates’ formative computer experience at his high school, dialled into a remote mainframe on which the school had leased time, on a “dumb” terminal via modem. He must have found the experience unsatisfying – he devoted his professional life to ensuring that we could work on our computers locally.
Now it’s gone full circle. Apparently we don’t need powerful PCs anymore – we can use cheap netbooks as thin clients and leverage an operating system and application suite that live on the internet.
Zoho and Google apps have made great strides, and internet email – (e.g. Hotmail – the original killer cloud app from Microsoft) has shown that the concept has merit, but there are still huge problems with security, latency and bandwidth. I won’t be retiring my PC just yet, but the next couple of years will be interesting.
Ultimately, I think that general acceptance will only come if the price is right. Microsoft are currently selling a cloud-enabled version of the Office package for about the same price as the “standard” Office. The thing is, it won’t work unless you have internet connectivity, you need to pay the subscription every year, and if it is withdrawn due to lack of success you’ll be left without access to your online docs. Sounds like a retrograde step to me…
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