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I have been developing web apps (primarily) using php and a bit of python, mysql, etc for many years now. I have a reasonably good grasp of objective-based development, and use objects as much as possible in my projects, although I certainly don't take full advantage of them. I am comfortable enough to be dangerous with C++,C, and have even touched a bit on ruby.
All that said, Objective C is giving me a very hard time. Not sure if it's the syntax, the file structure, etc, but i'm just not grasping how to properly put together the different components of an app, despite having gone through a few tutorials and explanations online. I have xcode, and have tried doing some basic stuff, but get lost quickly in real implementation.
My question: Can anyone recommend me a really solid book/books with some good examples that I can walk through to help me understand this language better? I am primarily interested in database interaction (or xml parsing) and audio streaming/delivery capabilities.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated! Thanks!
3 items:
The syntax isn't going to be a problem for long. Just keep reading Objective C code, and pretty soon the brackets will start seeming as familiar as the dots (or other forms of punctuation abuse) in other OO languages.
If you are a procedural language coder, you will have to get your head around event driven application design. The basic idea is you can't always tell the OS what to do, when you want to do it, and then do the next thing. You have to learn to chop up your procedural code into callbacks, and then let the OS call your code when the OS is good and ready. You might have to learn how to save appropriate state between callbacks (e.g. You can't use a "loop index" between callbacks without saving it somewhere.)
You might also have to get used to the object oriented MVC design pattern. It's like figuring out the difference between writing procedures for a one-man store, and setting up operations for a larger business with divisions in separate buildings. The guy talking to the customer isn't the guy closing the books. Same with MVC, the view presenting the UI to the user isn't necessarily the same object that does the storing or updating of the data representing what the user sees or does. Once you learn the logic of the separation, figuring out which file to look in for something will get a little easier.
I found Aaron Hillegass' book really helpful in learning Objective-C
iPhone Programming Big Nerd Ranch Guide
There are a bunch of good chapters that walk you through creating your own apps you can deploy right to your iPhone/iPad or run in the simulator. He explains some of the heavier concepts i.e. Core Data really well.
Other than that the Apple Developer docs are a great and invaluable resource.
I cannot recommend any books (I have learned it by doing a lot of experiments), but if you want to get started with Objective-C, I would recommend knowing what pointers are and how to use them. They form the most basic part of Objective-C and once you understand these (and NSObject), you understand 50% of the language itself.
You could, of course, read Apple's documentation at http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#referencelibrary/GettingStarted/Learning_Objective-C_A_Primer/
I would recommend:
iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide
It is a very nice getting started guide for both Objective-C and iOS programming.
The official documentation is great: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#navigation/
This is a great book. You need to understand Objective-C before you start jumping into creating apps (Cocoa Touch): http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Objective-C-2-0-Developers-Library/dp/0321711394/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296848502&sr=1-2
This is a great intermediate book: http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Design-Patterns-Erik-Buck/dp/0321535022/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1292262048&sr=8-1
This is a great forum to learn stuff, in addition, obviously, to here: http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/
The Apple developer videos are also great, and you can download them with iTunes if you want, to have them on the go: http://developer.apple.com/videos/
Also, check out the Stanford iPhone Programming Class videos on iTunes.
EDIT:
Here is the docs on Apple's XML class, NSXML: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSXMLDocument_Class/Reference/Reference.html
And if you're going to be using databases, they'll probably be SQLite, and you'll definitely want to check out this wrapper for SQLite: https://github.com/ccgus/fmdb
I and my partner are trying to develop a website, and we are arguing which language to use to build a website. We both have some experienced with PHP with Codeigniter 1.6++ as well as RoR, although my partner used rails when it was in RoR1, which now is RoR3.
He wants to use PHP with CodeIgniter because he knows whats going around more explicitly, while RoR does not seem to satisfy him.
I want to use RoR 3, because it takes less time, and there are many gems which I can use (devise for example).
He is kind of worrying that Ruby on Rails won't be easy to change some configuration in db or codes once the websites gets bigger and bigger.
I just hate to think about writing lines and lines of codes from the scratch with Codeigniter within 2 months.. although I think it was not easy to manage db tables, once things got settled in rails..
So, I have been wondering.. is there any big advantage one from the other?
As an avid user of both I would not say that this is a question of which framework is better or worse as they are apples and oranges.
CodeIgniter has not changed all that much since 1.6.x both of your experience is still valid and you will be able to code right from the get-go.
Rails 3 is wonderful but quite a lot has changed since Rails 1 (not that I was using it back then). I think your partner would have too much time scratching his head unless you are going to be there for him to constantly answer the WTF's that will inevitably come up.
To explain, I am a CodeIgniter man and have been for years. There is not much to it, no conventions and what code is there is simple, easy to extend and easy to ignore if you don't like it.
Recently starting working with Rails has been a great series of highs and lows but it's not always quicker. I spent 2 hours implementing a fully functional user system with fb, twitter, etc and had most of my controllers built, but since then I have spent hours trying to get various date formats to play nicely with the ActiveRecord, or trying to override create_at, manually set id's and all the other stuff that nobody ever mentions you are not allowed to do.
If you need to pump out some code fast then Rails might be an option. If you want fine grained control over everything and have a really lightweight base to build your application on then CodeIgniter really would be a better choice.
Or, look at FuelPHP which is a framework me and a few others are working on to combine the two into one Configuration over Convention framework with a command line utility to bring in some of Rails best features. Saves a fair bit of code and you'll feel right at home.
You can make most languages do most things at the end of the day, just a matter of how long it'll take you.
Hopefully you know your project well enough to know what the major stumbling blocks are liable to be and then match them against your combined knowledge to solve them within both languages. Which ever you both feel more comfortable with overall should win. You will be able to do it in either, just a matter of familiarity and confidence with the language (as well as availability of libraries for complex tasks).
Incidentally, this question would be better on https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
From a management perspective, I can tell you that if you plan on growing in the future, you will pay twice as much and have to look twice as long for RoR programmers. PHP programmers on the other hand are easy to find and hire since the language is ubiquitous. I have known of companies that were bought and their product completely folded just to recruit the Ruby talent because it is so hard to find.
Preamble
To build dynamic web-sites, we have to master at least four languages:
HTML for the structure of web pages
CSS for layout and design
JavaScript for interactivity
A language for business rules or dynamic driven data
In addition, there's SQL for persistent storage, Memcache for sessions and caching, APIs for the many different content management systems. We should also consider interacting with OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial in building a web application, for it to be interesting.
All in all, it's an utter mess!
If you take into account two objectives:
Teaching web development to kids
Staying productive as a team
Question
What high level systems exist that unify HTML + CSS + Javascript + (Insert High Level Language here, PHP preferred)?
Background
I am a software engineer with 15+ years of experience as project lead and developer with technologies like Broadvision, Autonomy, Enterprise Java, and Oracle.
During recent years, I have focused on the developing community websites, using Drupal or PHP frameworks such as CakePHP. I like web development and enjoy the impedance mismatch between the technologies involved. Still the inevitable conclusion I come to is there must be a better way.
I am the father of two sons (13 and 9), and while I don't want them to become programmers I would like them to comprehend computers as more than gaming machines. I like to motivate them to tinker a bit with web development to express themselves.
Whenever I show them bits and pieces, I would love for them to have a toolset that allows them to create "interesting" results in an hour or two on a Sunday afternoon.
GWT goes someway towards being a high level toolkit, letting you write Java to produce Javascript.
"Links is a new programming language designed to make web programming easier. . . Links eases the impedance mismatch problem by providing a single language for all three tiers. The system generates code for each tier; for instance, translating some code into Javascript for the browser, some into a bytecode for the server, and some into SQL for the database."
At first I wasn't going to post this, since it's a research project, not a production system; but all these answers saying "that's how it is, deal with it" begged for a counterexample.
Web programming is an inherently multi-discipline craft.
The primary reason for this is because of seperation of concerns...the reason that HTML and CSS and JavaScript, SQL, etc, are not mashed together in one language is because they each have seperate goals, caveats, pitfalls, and strengths.
Can you imagine trying to debug a site that has SQL, CSS, JavaScript and PHP code mixed together in the same source files? You may have already had the misfortune of doing so. Sadly, there are literally thousands of sites written like this, and it is a complete nightmare trying to debug or add to such messy amalgamations of presentation, data, and structure.
All in all, an utter mess! How is one
supposed to teach web development to
kids?
I think the most important thing is teaching the fundamentals of programming and making them stick. Variables, logic, pointers, memory management, algorithms, data structures, etc.
When you have the fundamentals of programming, it's easy to work in multipe languages, pick up new ones, and easy to change with the times. This is an invaluable skill for something as constantly-evolving and trend-based as web programming.
In my opinion people new to programming should be started at lower level languages, like C for example. People should be tought the intrinsic, fundamental concepts of programming and should gain knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes before even being shown a higher level language like PHP or Python.
I think that this attitude towards teaching programming will have the effect of breeding better web developers as well as providing a barrier of entry that will weed out people that don't have the interest or intelligence. I think the result of this type of attitude will be better developers, better software, and ultimately more powerful languages and tools.
How is one supposed to teach web development to kids?
An army of kids in web development is what has degraded our profession since now just about anyone calls himself a programmer while it's getting harder and harder for us to get distanced from them and get decent pay.
Many languages and technologies to master? It's a good thing. Let there be some entry barrier to join the ranks of developers.
ADDED: By following comments I can see I have not made myself entirely clear. I say nothing about the age, be it 10, 30, 50 or 80. It's all about attitude. Whether a person understands and accepts the fact that there is much more to the profession than moving controls with a mouse in some designer or CMS. There is a lot of knowledge to be gained, including basics of CS, algorithms, data structures, databases, architecture, extensibility, maintenance, performance, scalability, usability, marketing and much more that belong to the workshop of a professional software developer. I a person is ignorant of those and doesn't make a move to educate themselves and strive to become more and more proficient, they do not belong to the profession. And let this opinion be biased.
The closest I think you'll get is .NET. There are many frameworks for many languages, but none that I know of that handle absolutely everything. Beside that you must not attempt to convince children that programming is a walk in the park. It's a difficult career, that requires a lot of study and keeping-up. We work with technologies that are here today, and gone tomorrow.
If you think about it, programming isn't any different than carpentry, or aeronautics. Just about any profession you chose will require you to learn a lot of different things to be better at what you do.
How are you supposed to teach web development to kids? Wow, that's a thorny one. How does one go about teaching them surgery, or intellectual property law, or civil engineering? Or for that matter auto mechanics, or plumbing, or general contracting?
Have you thought about popping in a Sesame Street tape?
Elmo doesn't like it when you trivialize his profession.
Software industry is suffering from unqualified individuals doing nothing but creating poor quality products and at the same time distancing this profession from becoming a true engineering discipline. This isn't something to get certified on. For the love of god, don't 'teach' anyone software development. Explain to them that making great software only comes out as a result of years of experience and wealth of knowledge of past and current technologies. The worst you can do is introduce yet another half-baked developer creating work for others working with them. Tell them to get educated. I know this isn't the answer you probably wanted to hear, but I wanted this to be read.
I think the problem with web development is that it was not originally designed for what it is used today. We build rich client applications inside a browser with HTML+CSS+JavaScript plus whatever serverside technology generates it. Yes, it works, but it's a pain, especially with those annoying browser incompatibilites. The existence of Flash and Silverlight proves this. They let you build your app with one single technology, still inside the browser. The downsides of needing a plugin for your content is obvious though.
The languages are the least of your worries. It's the problem domain that they work with that is complex. Using different languages actually makes things more manageable because a) It makes the boundaries explicit and b) the languages can be optimised for the domain.
Programming (PHP/JS) and document format (HTML/CSS) are 2 different things.
Learning to program in PHP and JS at the same time will also be difficult.
You should focus on HTML and JS on the client at start. You could then let them program javascript on the server as well. This will make it only one programming language, and focus on HTML over CSS to start with.
Once they've learned the basics of JS and HTML, you can teach them a more widely used server side programming language (like PHP, Ruby, etc) and CSS.
Django can take you part of the way through its cleanness. It is focused around productivity. Teaching is not easier than any other language/framework, but look at it this way: when taught this tool, your students are well equipped in their knowledge of how easy it should be. They will never accept Java servelets or similar nightmares after having learnt Django.
Check out Opa: http://opalang.org/
This is an up and coming web development technology. It looks quite promising. I have done a lot of web development over the past couple years and if I had to make a prediction which up and new framework/language/technology is going to be the primary way websites are developed in ~5-10 years I would say it will be Opa.
The documentation is great, the community is great, the tutorials and responsiveness to questions asked of the team working on the project is excellent. Overall they seem to have an attention to detail in regards to developing this new framework that seems to be unmatched.
Many technologies to master is not a good thing. We need a Visual Basic for the web, no matter what the elitists say.
You need different languages for different purposes. In most web applications there's actually quite a bit going on, so you need the different languages and solutions.
If the goal is to unify on a single language, you can do that. You can use Javascript on the server, and then build the pages using document.createElement() and apply styles to them directly to the styles property. And on the server, store your data directly in files with Javascript.
Obviously this wouldn't work out that well. HTML is not perfect, but there is a reason it is so ubiquitous-- it does what it does simply and well. CSS is both convoluted and too simplistic, but the underlying idea of defining overrideable rules to express your design is sound. And SQL may be a pain to understand at times, but expressing database queries this way is expressive and actually works pretty well.
That being said, I'm not saying there is or should be one architecture. There shouldn't be. Each project should use an architecture in line with its requirements.
On your next project try to simplify: do you really need a database? Can you combine the view layers to simplify, either using something like GWT, Applets, Flash or .NET? Do you really need to serve up your content in a browser (which introduces CSS, HTML and Javascript complexities), or can you just write an application?
I think your approach might need to be rethought. Take this for what it is, my opinion, but I would think this ordering might work better.
Top Priorities: (no particular order)
Develop problem solving skills
Be productive as a team
Next:
Basic Programming skills (PHP, Python, etc)
After they know how to solve problems as individuals and as a team they can move onto specifics such as:
Client/Server model
Markup (HTML, XHTML, XML, etc)
Styling (CSS)
Client-side scripting (JavaScript / jQuery)
Server-side scripting (PHP, Ruby, etc)
Build up their knowledge of what's involved piece by piece rather than jumping into the deep end off the bat - they'll be quickly overwhelmed.
At this point you can start to introduce things like file I/O and databases.
This will give them a fairly comprehensive skill-set. From here they can really start learning.
In addition, one may have to deal with SQL for persistent storage, Memcache for sessions and caching, APIs of content management systems, OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, OpenSocial etc. to build anything interesting.
These are whole topics unto themselves, you can't bite them off all in one chunk. Especially if you're taking these people from 0. Before you can build something interesting you have to learn to build something mundane.
HTML5 will probably be more in the vein of what you're looking rather than Flash or Silverlight but it's not quite here yet...Though support is building.
Baby steps, Olav - if this were The Matrix you could download all that info in one shot but we're not there...yet ;-)
For the moment, and near future, web development is the synergy of many different technologies working together to deliver an interesting user experience.
Well, that's my 2 cents
The multi disciplinary nature of web development is one of the things that makes it a joy to work in, especially in a team environment.
To work well as a team, you naturally come together with a group of people with a range of expertise, from UI/graphics people down to DBAs and sys admins. Even within a single layer of the group (for example back end programmers) each person generally specialises in a different set, for example some people may have more experience up towards UI, others down towards data.
I would take this variety any day, compared to working in a room of 10 java programmers all working on some middleware application.
If you simply want to teach them to write dynamic websites, set them going through the HTML tutorial on w3schools.com and once they're done, find yourself a decent looking stylesheet that they can include and set them going with PHP. That'll get them up and running as a hobby, and if they want to do more, they can start piecing together extra knowledge, like CSS and JavaScript.
Ruby on Rails goes quite a way towards unifying all of those, but for CSS it leaves you out in the cold (though there are probably a few frameworks for RoR that make CSS obsolete, but then you have another markup language, I think), and you still need Javascript (though it does write a lot of Javascript for you, and all DB code).
On the other hand, about your kids: programming is for programmers. On a Sunday afternoon to put something together in a few hours, you would need to know a framework, and buy some plugins, and get everything up and moving without much work. Something like Drupal or Joomla, where they sell templates (for Joomla you can buy packs of hundreds) and plugins to do all kinds of things. And when that fails, your kids should probably know how to go on ODesk and drop $100 to get something done on your framework. Learning to programming is good if you want to be a programmer. Otherwise, it's best to learn what you need to hire good programmers or buy good predone components, and have the cash to do it.
Last point about the kids: let them play video games. That is the best training that they can get for whatever the future holds in store on the computer side. Video games let you investigate, play, and relax with the computer. Once you have that, learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and some application stack is cake.
angularjs could be an option. it is inteded for single-page-applications and runs on a nodejs-stack and does some template-javascript "magic".
example (template/code):
It binds(via auto-generated-client-side-js) the value from the input-field to the the heading(h1).
If you type something to the input field, the text in the heading gets updated.
And you don't have to write the frontend-js.
<input type="text" ng-model="yourName" placeholder="Enter a name here">
<h1>Hello {{yourName}}!</h1>
There are a ton of PHP frameworks out there (i.e. Zend, Seagull, Symfony, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Yii, Prado) that do a great job of implementing important pieces of a scalable/maintainable website, and I almost always pick one to start building client websites.
As of recently, I've started getting tired of providing constant development services to clients, and I'm looking at the possibility of writing more full-featured commercial scripts that can be resold over and over again in the hopes of finding that magical "recurring revenue stream" that you always hear about in fairy tales. Please note that I'm not talking about building extensions/plugins to CMS systems like Drupal or Joomla, but full blown website scripts.
So here's my multi-part question:
Is there any reason why I couldn't resell a script built on one of these frameworks as a full-blown turn-key solution (especially if the framework's licensing is something very flexible, like the BSD license)?
If not, why aren't others doing the same thing?
Have you ever seen a commercial PHP script that is based on a well-known open source framework?
I've wondered this for years, and no one I ask has ever really come up with a good explanation. It just seems like it is taboo to do so, and no one really knows why? I've seen commercial scripts that use third party libraries (i.e. jQuery, PHPmailer, etc), but never have I seen one built entirely on an application framework.
It really seems that a lot of people have missed the true nature of the question and even taken it as far as language debates (those never end well).
Is there any reason why I couldn't resell a script built on one of these frameworks as a full-blown turn-key solution (especially if the framework's licensing is something very flexible, like the BSD license)?
Assuming the framework license permits it then there's no reason you couldn't do this. You had mentioned Zend Framework so you may be interested in looking at Magento. While they offer a free community edition they also have a paid edition that works with the Zend Framework as well.
I recently worked with a file upload script that was offered commercially and it happened to be built on codeigniter (name escapes me at the moment).
If not, why aren't others doing the same thing?
My personal opinion is that it's a mix of quite a few factors really. The web based market for on premise applications (as apposed to SaaS) is already flooded with options and is starting to shrink in size. This makes less demand for an application that you would actually see the framework behind (with SaaS you most likely will never know what framework if any is being used).
A lot of the existing large players in the PHP market have been around for a while and already have their own code base that they have created and are familiar with. When you've spent years building your own libraries it's hard to justify moving to another framework.
A lot of the smaller players rarely educate themselves in proper application design and usually stick to procedural code. The big OOP features that exist in PHP today didn't come along until the 5.0 release. Mind you that was around 5 years ago but a lot of your programmers had started on their PHP tutorials and learning adventures before PHP5 was widely available and accepted on standard hosting accounts. As such most of our modern frameworks were not available CakePHP as an example didn't start until 2005. Zend framework wasn't around until 2007. These are all relatively new dates and I wouldn't expect to see a lot of commercial applications moving to them until the current generation of programmers that can write quality commercial applications age a bit (again just my opinion).
I have to heartily disagree with back2dos..
PHP's a solid, incredibly well used programming language for developing web apps. It can, of course, be used for commercial development and millions of people (me included) do just that. I'm not sure PHP bashing is really relevant here.
True, PHP is not compiled but if you really care about this you can use Zend Guard which can encrypt code. Personally I've always found open source code a plus point. Clients like to know they can get at the code if they really need to, it offers some reassurance.
There are lots of OS PHP apps, some great, some awful. Find a niche (like any business), something that has real demand, and develop for that.
So I think you're fine to develop commercial apps/scripts. Just make sure you give them decent support and documentation. You'll find people appreciate that and are willing to pay for it.
Finally on the point of your question, I agree they stand a much better chance of being used if they are based on an open source framework since you'll be opening yourself up to wider market. Zend Framework, as you may know, has a pretty open license which says you can sell anything you develop with it.
I think your most important question is point 2, why aren't others doing the same thing?
Well some people are. Vbulletin have been quite successful selling forum software, even though there's no end of free forum software available. I think their success can be attributed to a paid product, in part. As they're earning money, it's easy to fund further development. Open source, free projects usually require a dedicated team to keep development moving, as there's no money for motivation.
There's no shortage of turnkey solutions available on the web. eBay will have no end of $5 scripts available - they're usually rubbish and unsupported.
Where I work, we develop bespoke 'one-off' applications for our clients, but we're looking at selling the same applications to other clients as an opportunity to scale our business. In this case we're talking about large projects worth tens of thousands, but they're only sold to a handful of customers.
There's no reason why you can't sell a product for 50 or 100 dollars and make money - you'd just need to sell to 10, 100 or 1000 customers to start making a living from it.
And to succeed over the free open software? Produce something that isn't already available, or do something much better than what's available for free.
Finally, another model you may want to consider is software as a service. Take a look at Basecamp (37 signals) for example. Their product is not open source, you can't download it, but you register online and pay something like $10 for their lowest end offering per month.
They don't have to give out source code, and they have a solid recurring revenue stream. They have tens of thousands of accounts.
Yes of course you can sell it.
Most people don't just sell the scripts as normal people and businesses don't know what to do with them and so require a developer to install and configure the script. Developers won't then buy the script if there is an open source/free alternative. If the script performs a valuable task that is often done, then somebody is likely to copy it and create an open source version.
Your key to selling PHP code is to sell it as a service. This could either be the installation and configuration of it (like most web design/development agencies) or an on-demand version of it (think of any online business app).
My company writes and builds a lot of PHP software for businesses and as we get new clients and solve new problems we write our code in re-usable classes which we can then package up and sell to other clients without any further coding - which I assume is what you are trying to do. It's all possible, it just takes time and planning to write the software to make it re-usable for other projects.
Well in this case I think that codeigniter will be the best option because:
Don't need console access to configure
You just have to configure Database Connections
Fast, MVC, Cache, Logs, Good Documentation
Runs in PHP4, must of the people that buy this scripts have server restrictions to Upgrade PHP
Best Regards,
Pedro
As a PHP developer for over 5 years and selling scripts I never tried to developed a commercial script with a framework.It is just because Im not a good fan of any PHP framework.
Someone can say if you don't use framework you are a amateur as a developer.But I think its the a way any developer has rights to choose.
I think some companies don't use frameworks just because they just dont like to say this script based on 'ABC' to the customers.They want to boast about their scripts and only they can developed something like that.
I event seen any commercial web script that used any frameworks so far.
I can think of one reason against it: piracy. If your script is something a bunch of framework guys want, it will be pirated. If it is only for a rich niche, you can avoid this, but then you aint going to get any fairy-tale income.
It's not in the open source spirit of PHP. The trend is to give it away and then bill for the service. You might be better at marketing your script as such, and just charge people after they consult you and you hand them a script download and a manual.
i think, these are the key reasons, why it is not done:
the point of PHP was never building commercial applications (the original acronym means "Personal HomePage") ... it is an insecure, inconsistent language ... there are quite some good PHP frameworks ... nevertheless, the language is ... poor ... other server languages are cleaner, stricter, more secure, more powerfull, give access to a larger codebase and to better developement tools (notably java and the whole .NET stuff) ... i'd never use PHP if i had to built something really reliable ... (my favourite is this "overflow vulnerability fix" of chunk_split (line 1966)) ...
PHP is always open source ... ok, there are obfuscators, or even ways to distribute PHP in a binary form ... but the first is likely to break the code, if you do a lot of reflection/introspection, and the second usually requires some PHP extensions to be run, which is not really sexy ...
there are too many open source PHP projects around for any commercial software to succeed ... this was different before, but nowadays, you can simply get ANYTHING in PHP ... Typo3, Joomla, Mambo, osCommerce, PHPBB etc. ... frameworks as Flow3, symfony, CakePHP ... etc. ...
there are commercial sites running on PHP, but there is no good PHP software/framework i heard about, that i would pay for ... there's always a free alternative, and usually it is better ...
you will be having a hard time creating something, that is really worth buying ... and if you succeed, you will be having a huge community that will copy it, if it is worth buying ... either for personal commercial profit, or simply to provide a free solution ...
well, that's what i think ... :)
edit:
let me clarify my points
seems, i upset some PHP folks here ... that was not my intention (however i am quite disappointed, how biased you seem to be, given the fact that everyone contradicting me is a PHP developer and i seriously ask myself, what other languages you ever used) ... i myself started out with PHP on server side too and after moving through other languages, i came to see PHP in a different light ... explanation is provided ... whoever just does not want to read it, move on to point 2 ...i am not saying, PHP prohibits you from implementing a specific solution ... but it is being used to implement solutions it was never designed for ... it started out as >this< ... and it was constantly extended by many people, which produced:
an inconsistent API ... or does anyone else know a language, having a naming convention, where array_search, count and implode are all array routines? look at ruby, ecmascript or Haxe if you wanna see how beautiful core language APIs can be ... i'd say it's awfully designed ... but it's not designed at all ... it has simply been thrown together by numerous PHP contributors ... that's cool in the sense that you have a function for everything ... the point is, you probably won't find it ... ok, after a while, you will know it all ... probably ... but in other languages, for example, where arrays are objects, it does not take you long to know all core array routines ...
no real philosophy ... look at the languages mentioned above, look at Objective-C or functional languages, if you want, to see how consistent a languages semantics and philosophy can be, compared to PHP's "oh well, we'll just throw in another function, that'll solve the problem" ... also PHP arrays are the strangest data structure, i have ever seen ... something like a hyperpotent hash with internal order for keys and values ... and yet, it's not even an object ...
a lot of unsafe code (a lot of functions exposing overflow vulnerability or not being binary safe, or not escaping is documented, which could be used for XSS attacks) ... when i read an API reference, and it tells me what a function does, but the truth is, i have to take in account a lot of possibilities (long strings could crash my complete system or even inject ANY code, nullbytes could make escaping routines not work, but when printing out the string again, they disappear (this was a strip_tags vulnerability until not too long ago)), then that is what i call unreliable and dangerous ...
slow execution ... eaccelerator and similar extensions can reduce booting time signifficantly, but execution it self will still be slow ... the actual problem is, the language is far to permissive, which causes a lot of overhead ...
PHP was designed as a scripting language tying together a bunch of C functions ... it is often extended with further C functions, due to the fact that it is not the fastest language around ... this gives a nice speed up ... but how the hell do i know, whether a function is safe? who can tell me? i don't want to read through lines and lines of C to know ... so my two main points:
the API is a mess
what is behind that API can be a serious vulnerability for your application!!
in consequence, PHP is hard to trust ... i mean, i personally dislike both Java and ASP.NET, but i have to admit, they are trusted plattforms and trusted for a reason ... now problems arousing from the messy API are being solved by some frameworks ... but if a language requires a framework to wrap the core API in order to have something usable, that is a base for good, maintainable code, then something is wrong ...
how exactly do i use zend guard or ioncube on an arbitrary shared webspace?
really, best thing you can do, is write commmercial plugins for widely spread PHP software, but it seems this is exactly the opposite of what Lusid wants to do ... but hoping to find a niche, that is big enough that you don't need signifficant marketing efforts to reach you customers, that is small enough that you don't get crushed by copycats, simple enough to build as a standalone app and fits a number of other criteria that are prequisites for a commercial success, seems a little naive to me ...
Just want to know what is better way to get start developing faccebook app?Any tutorial recommnedation?And which is better to start up -php or rails?
From my experience, there is a much better support focus on PHP than on anything else. That said, there'd be no point learning PHP just to take advantage of the superior support.
Two other general points:
The official support community is really awful. The community has no expert voices and the FB staff only interject when their reputation is at stake. Your best friend is Google and your ability to extrapolate from tutorials.
The FB style of interaction doesn't really lend itself to an MVC framework. One might still save you time, but I find they get under my feet. If you need convincing on this point, may I refer you to the many cases where JSON responses are required or where FBML needs to be 'set' for the profile.
The Facebook platform isn't a whole lot of fun and your users won't thank you for your work. But it's a massive audience and a very useful learning experience.
Good luck!
Btw, you can also use ASP.NET, in which case here is how to get started:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/wiki/Facebook%20application%20development%20in%20ASP.NET.ashx
The link includes a VS.NET starter kit which makes it very easy to get started quickly.
Start with their docs: http://developer.facebook.com/get_started.php?tab=tutorial
There are libraries floating around for lots of different languages and frameworks so I say: whatever you're happiest with is where you should start.
I've seen pretty complete FB wrapper libraries for both PHP and Ruby. Which one you should choose really depends on which language/framework you're more comfortable with.
I will say that when I was evaluating Ruby libraries recently, Facebooker seemed to be superior in terms of active development and tutorial content on the web. (Be sure to use the Facebooker project on GitHub, not the deprecated one on RubyForge.)
Can I put a shout out for Ruby On Rails with the Koala gem?
I have built a Facebook app in the last two months learning Ruby On Rails from scratch (the last programming of any kind I did was mathematical modeling for my Physics degree project in 1995 in Fortran!).
Ruby On Rails was very simple to pick up and there is a ton of help out there. There are also lots of work already done for you in the way of Ruby Gems. For Facebook I looked through them all and I found Koala the easiest to use, personally.
http://github.com/arsduo/koala/
Re: Ruby on Rails vs. PHP - whichever you're currently competent in. If neither, whichever you'd like to become competent in. Both can do what you want.
Use the Get Started tutorial on developers.facebook.com. This will suggest you use the sample code button which will give you some PHP to list your friends.
Then you can start playing with the PHP using the wiki for reference to the FQL and FBML.
PHP will be easier to start with as there are lots of samples in PHP. Rails may have advantages in the long term though.