Very recently I have been given a facebook like project to develop for a client of mine.
Most of the time when i comes to web development I use php since the solution PHP, apache, MySql which are all freely availble solutions, I have been thinking about using Silverlight to develop the web application, and I would like to hear some pros and cons with develping a web application in silverlight.
what do you use to host the application? its costs and so on compared a LAMP solution.
Thanks,
Eric.
Having not a clue of the type of app you're building, I need to ask: why do you think you need Silverlight? The main problem with walled-garden solutions like Flash and Silverlight is that they do not play very well with the users model of their browser. Things like bookmarks and back button tend to do the wrong thing. You can't easily navigate away and come back to what you were doing. Jeff and Joel have ranted about this in their podcasts.
Nearly everything you can imagine needing Silverlight / Flash for these days can probably be handled by a javascript/jQuery UI kit / plugin of some sort ..
Silverlight especially still has a pretty low penetration rate even with MS holding it up for you to accept during updates.
I do think there are types of applications for which these technologies make sense. Especially if they are very heavily graphically or interactively intensive. I would look at Flex sooner than Silverlight in that case.
I'd say the decision starts off with who needs to access this application. If it's got to run on a wide range of browsers and platforms, you're safer sticking with HTML, CSS & JavaScript as the technologies. If you're happy with PHP as the server side technology, then stick with it. You'll find the learning curve for .NET applications pretty steep.
That said, for larger projects, the slightly better practises that .NET tends to push you towards helps. Some PHP projects start small and then need to scale exposing flaws in the original architecture. The same thing obviously can happen with .NET but less so IMHO as the programmers using it tend to have slightly more disiplined training. There are of course, exceptions to all rules.
The attraction of Silverlight though is big - the ability to develop client side code in familar .NET languages and not JavaScript is appealing. Personally, the whole HTML, CSS and JavaScript (with Ajax) set-up is offensive from an asthetic point of view :-)
Rob.
PS. It will be more expensive for the development environment and back-end compared to LAMP. Only you can decide whether the investment is worthwhile.
Creating a website in SilverLight is as bad of an idea as using Flash:
Users cant print
Users can't bookmark
Search engines can't index specific
"pages"
Silverlight exists for the reason of making apps that aren't possible with traditional HTML/JS and a Facebook like app is not one of them.
If facebook itself uses PHP, why not develop it in PHP?
Related
For a while now, I've been thinking about the question of user interface, with regard to ease of implementation and cross-platform compatibility. I'm primarily interested in developing desktop applications, for things that don't have a server-side storage model, or situations where internet connectivity is intermittent, etc. However, I've started doing some work on my employer's website, and found in that time that web site interfaces are very easy to develop, especially in comparison with the cross-platform UI tools I've used in the past.
With that in mind, I want to know: what are the tools/libraries available that can be integrated into a desktop application to render web content? Could be HTML, PHP, JavaScript, with/without CSS, etc. How easy/difficult are they to use?
You might actually want to check out Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation. It takes a lot from how the web works and applies it to desktop application development. It's not exactly HTML/CSS/PHP/JS, but it's not far off, either. It does have a bit of a learning curve, but the markup is XML based, so it's largely just a matter of learning its quirks, and of course, the .Net languages and framework (though, theoretically, you could use PHP on the .Net framework).
You might also be interested in Appcelerator Titanium, which allows you to use HTML/CSS/JS to build desktop applications. I don't know what it's desktop development is like, but I've used it for iPhone development, and it has promise.
If you want to play around with plugin/extension writing, the latest Gnome desktop environment (Gnome 3 - http://www.gnome.org/) actually runs completely off of HTML/CSS/JS and could use people to help build their extension library. It is, literally, writing desktop apps! :) (You would, of course, have to run Linux to play with it, but Fedora 15 uses Gnome 3 by default, and Linux in general comes with a number of powerful text editors, and the community has done a great job writing tutorials and documentations for getting started.)
If I understand the question right, to my knowledge there is nothing truly cross platform for doing this, you would always have to write a different version for each target platform.
Most windows apps that render web content sub the task out to IE, but I don't know how *nix app would handle this.
To use PHP to do anything on the local machine, it would have to be installed on the local machine. You can supposedly build full Windows GUIs in PHP with Winbinder although I have never messed around with it myself.
For windows-only apps, you might find HTA interesting - these are (sort of) self-contained HTML/Jscript apps and you can use links and Jscript to fetch content from remote servers.
I think your best bet would be Java though - the Java mantra is 'Write once, run anywhere' and Java GUIs are extremely portable. I'm sure I remember coming across something whereby you could use HTML to build bits of a Swing GUI as well...
What about Adobe Air? I'm not caught up on its capabilities, but I run Pandora Desktop on my Mac, which goes through Adobe Air - My impression was that it fulfills what the OP is asking.
You should have a look at Adobe AIR:
Adobe AIR with PHP/MySql or SQLite
http://www.vtc.com/products/Adobe-AIR-PHP-Development-Tutorials.htm
Never used it though so I can't really give you details but maybe somebody who has can... hope this helps
I'm deciding on a web framework for an upcoming project, and I'd appreciate any advice. We've decided to use jQuery for the JavaScript, and are heavily leaning toward Python or PHP (more Python) for our server-side logic. I'm especially interested in web2py because of its jQuery integration.
About our project
Our project is to develop a security console for a complex
cybersecurity system operating within an organization's internal
network.
This console will be largely server-driven, as messages come in from the network and must be pushed by the server to the user.
The user will also be able to initiate security actions, the implementation for which will likely be in C++.
The interface we've planned will be relatively rich, and I want to leverage jQuery's power as much as possible.
We have some control over the browser environment we'll be running in (e.g., we don't have to worry about clients with JavaScript disabled).
Our site is likely to have only a few, long-lived client connections.
We are looking for software components with permissive licenses, though we're using some copyleft components (I see that web2py is LGPL while Django is BSD, so +1 to Django)
We have about a month to create a functional demo of our system, of which this interface is a small (but visible) part.
About us
We are two developers with about 5 years of programming experience, but little web development experience. I have several years of Python experience and a summers' worth of experience messing around with PHP. My coworker has some Python experience and has never touched PHP.
I used Django once back in 2008, and was frustrated by the file and code structure, which I found highly unintuitive. Perhaps this structure is inherent to the MVC model (I've had similar experiences with Django and CakePHP since), and I just need to bite the bullet and memorize it.
My Question
Given the information above, what are the relative advantages of the various Python/PHP web frameworks for our project? As mentioned above, I'm especially interested in web2py because of its jQuery integration, though Django's dominance is (once again) hard to ignore.
Thank you very much for your time!
Before deciding on a framework, you should first decide if you want to commit to a language you are unfamiliar with.
You said you've both got minimal PHP experience, so you have to weigh up the advantages here; Will the pros for going PHP (if any) out weigh the amount of time the developers will need to spend to retrain?
(Although depending on your background experience, PHP should be very easy to pick up.)
If you frame it like that, PHP would have to have a pretty convincing offering to give you. From what I'm seeing, specifically Django vs web2py, they both seem very close in functionality - which is good, but doesn't provide the "you must use x!" scenario you may be after.
However, If you will be bringing more people in later and feel finding people to work with web2py will be difficult, it may tip it to PHP. You said your self, Django's popularity (and BSD license) is hard to ignore, and it should make it easier to find people for later expansion.
If it were me, in your shoes, I would go with web2py. Assuming the development team will continue to be Python focused for the foreseeable future.
Python vs PHP: Python
With python, you can always write wrappers for C code so you won't have to mess with starting other processes and passing args to them. That might be useful for your security functions.
Web2py will allow you to easily write a webservice for this too, to more easily integrate the C portions with the web-site infrastructure.
If you already prefer python, I would go with that. If you need to bring on web-developers later that are trained in PHP, teach them Python. It won't take long, and I'm sure they'll appreciate it in the long run. Plus, moving from a PHP MVC framework to web2py or even django would make things easier. I've used CodeIgniter for PHP and find that web2py was so much simpler and easy to understand.
Also as for the directory structure, django is not actually true MVC -- it's MTV (model, template, view).
I find web2py's organization a little more straight-forward. But yes, either way it can seem strange at first. I would say YES, you should bite the bullet and use MVC.
In web2py, the "view" is html markup with the ability to write raw python code. The controller extracts data from the model (database), attaches any needed files (css/js etc) and the model of course simply defines the structure of the data and allows you to access it in an OO way.
Lastly, I wouldn't tip my hat in favor of web2py just because of jQuery integration. It does use it, and a some of the built-in framework stuff (like response.flash/session.flash, the LOAD function that loads a page or data from another controller) rely on jQuery, but using it in another framework only means you have to write an include statement (e.g. ).
But, the way it allows/forces you to focus on development is what takes the cake for me.
I've been using Django as part of my work for a couple years now and truly enjoy it when I can make it work. Unfortunately, and maybe it's just me, but I end up spending hours working on configuration every time I start a new server, or try to make it work in a development IDE.
It's relatively simple to start a new project and start coding. But there are all sorts of little catches that keep things from working if you deviate from the norm. Things like if you want your django project to serve from a subdirectory like example.com/django. The information is out there to make it work. But it's hard to find.
I can't tell you if web2py has those same problems or not. I only just learned about it from your question. It does look slick and simple though. I can tell you that after the hassles of getting the applications to serve properly from whatever server configuration I'm using, django is way more fun to program with than plain php. PHP frameworks may differ.
From my understanding the project not usual web application, you must need event driven program, web server in python.
Django won't help you here.You should look into Flask, Flask has inbuilt console too.http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/, you might need to use twisted, gevent,Flask jquery.
I would recommend asking about web2py on its mailing list -- you'll get lots of help and advice there. Regarding the LGPL license, note that it only applies to the framework, not your application -- you can license your application however you like, including closed source/commercial.
It sounds like you'll need some server push functionality, but if you'll really only need a few long-lived connections at a time, you might not need to bother with solutions like Twisted or gevent. If necessary, though, web2py does include this (requires Tornado, and works using WebSockets, though can be adapted to use other methods).
I've recently started a new web development project for an embedded device and wanted to solicit some recommendations for technologies to use. The device will serve HTML pages which include AJAX code to retrieve data from a JSON server. We're tentatively using Cherokee as the web server, though we're not tied to it.
Currently, I'm considering the following technologies:
Write it all in PHP. I know it's big, slow, and bloated, but I've got about 10MB available for the web interface (a lot for an embedded system), and we won't be seeing a lot of traffic on any of these devices. It does need to seem responsive for the users, however (pages should load in less than a second).
FastCGI + a C program - We're using an in-memory database, so the C program could interact with the database directly through the API. This would have much better performance than PHP, but development time and reliability is a concern since C isn't very well-suited for web development.
Lua + Kepler - This seems like a nice middle ground between performance and development time. However, I've never worked with Lua, so I'm not really sure how to implement it in an embedded web project. I'm also uncertain as to how well it integrates with the Cherokee web server.
So any opinions or past experiences with the above stated technologies? Any others I should include in the list?
Thanks,
Alex
When I was in this area, I used Lua and a simple FastCGI runner (Luaetta [for I'm sure the latest source would be available if you asked the guy] , though I'm also sure that's not the only one, and there's Kepler of course), spawned by lighttpd.
It performed quite well on an embedded media player, and was used for remotely accessing content and controlling the device. Though I don't maintain it anymore, you can find more about it at http://matthewwild.co.uk/projects/wooble . If you think the source would help just poke me for it, it's currently only available via a package manager but I can fix that given the motivation.
Another (again Lua) project in this area is LuCI. These guys are dedicated to making a web interface for embedded devices (routers specifically), and have produced a nice framework with lots of supporting libraries geared towards that kind of system.
I wouldn't be concerned with not knowing Lua. If you know any language then you can pick up Lua in a day or two, the manual documents the whole language and is quite short.
How about looking at HipHop, Facebook's PHP compiler?
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki
That way you can write your code in PHP and effectively compile it to C++.
ASP.NET. Assuming that you wouldn't be interested in Embedded Windows Server 2008, you could still leverage ASP.NET by incorporating Mono into Cherokee. You could leverage Visual Studio as your RAD development environment and use things like ASP.NET MVC 2. A lot of third party user controls will also 'just work' with Mono (Telerik Announces Support for their ASP.NET controls on Mono!).
I've been on and off intrested in making a text based browser game.
I have been turned off by the idea because of the daunting amount of things to learn.
PHP (or another sever side scripting language)
Javascript
HTML
MySql
And the fact of severs and apache..
Can I just pay for web hosting and by-pass having to set-up apache?
Also how long will it take me to learn all thoose things well enough to start work on my game?
Should I just stick with Flash and then C# for XNA?
Just install XAMPP, which is basically the lazy man's Apache/PHP/MySQL setup in 1 click. You just install it and it does all the work, nothing for you to setup nor config.
Don't let the complexity of PHP/HTML/Javascript set you off, we all hard to start somewhere. Just start with the parts you know how to make, then look around for each individual problem. Being motivated is key to learning anything, and if you have something you enjoy working on, you won't have a problem learning what you need to pull this off.
Do you have a specific game in mind?
Does it need to be multiplayer?
In the initial stages, does it require server interaction at all?
Conversely,
Are you interested in the possibility of building a working game first, and adding in features like saving high scores, multiplayer, or other server-interactions later?
Is a self-contained game like nethack or Hitchhikers a good starting place for you?
If your initial game does not require server interaction, you can build quite complex games using only HTML and JavaScript. This will reduce the number of concepts and languages you need to learn up front.
Once you have had some practice building non-trivial games in HTML and JavaScript, you can then add in features like server-integration, and learn a server-side language like PHP, Python, Perl, ASP.NET, or Ruby...
You can definitely pay for hosting, and eliminate the effort of setting up and maintaining a server yourself. A quick search will find you a number of web hosting sites to choose from.
I believe sticking with flash would make things easier, as syncing multiplayer with javascript and PHP isnt going to be easy.
It depends how complex the game you want to make is. You can easily learn some basic PHP and javascript inside of a month (like pretty much any other language), but it'll take a lifetime to master (like any other language).
I would recommend you start out small - plan to implement just a subset of your features, and take them on one at a time.
I would plan to use libraries / frameworks. For Javascript I would currently recommend JQuery because I find it easy to use, it has a large community and it's well documented. Using a library like JQuery allows you to easily ignore a lot of the browser specific details, since they deal with all that nonsense for you.
For PHP I personally use Zend Framework - this is a massive beast that isn't always the best documented, but if you start with the "Quick Start" tutorial and then only look at features as you need them, you shouldn't get overwhelmed too easily. One of the great things about Zend is that you can pick and choose what features you want to use without hassle.
With regards to servers, yes you can use a web host and bypass setting up a full server yourself very easily and cheaply. You can find local installations (eg. XAMPP) that will allow you to quickly set up a local install of Apache, PHP and MySQL to get started with.
First of all, if you're developing an MMO or want to offer multiplayer support, you're going to need to learn PHP and mySQL. In theory, you could go ASP.NET instead, but I would strongly advise against it, since Microsoft servers cost more to rent, and since PHP/mySQL is much better documented and easier for beginners to learn. If you're building a single-player game, Javascript and HTML could technically be adequate, but knowing PHP will still make your life easier, in the long run.
Although you should probably set up a LAMP stack (Linux Apache mySQL PHP) on a local network so you understand how it works, hosting your own server almost never makes sense for a production environment. You could, however, save yourself some money by developing the game on your own LAMP stack. Alternately, most shared hosts (around $80 / year) provide support for PHP and mySQL, and this would be perfectly adequate for building your game. Eventually, once you're ready to launch -- and assuming it becomes even marginally popular -- you're going to need at least a VPS, and possibly a dedicated server.
Finally, a note on Flash:
In the last few years, the popularity of mobile devices has skyrocketed, and this presents a risk for Flash games, since Apple refuses to support the plugin. If you need advanced graphics support, a more timely alternative would be HTML5. Unfortunately, this carries its own set of drawbacks: namely, since it's a long way off from official release, it's not yet universally supported, and features that are supported will vary from one browser to another. So basically, HTML5 is the future, and Flash is the past. The best option for right now? Probably Javascript; you might be surprised what JS can achieve, when properly combined with CSS, and you'll need it for AJAX functions anyway. Best of all, it's supported by virtually every device and browser.
So, in conclusion, I'm recommending that you learn HTML, CSS, PHP, mySQL and Javascript, and don't be intimidated by that variety of languages; the more you learn, the more easily you learn the rest.
I've been doing html, css and javascript for quite a long time, mostly for my very own enjoyment. I would say I know fairly much, I've created many simple games and apps and experiments with javascript. However there is only so much that is possible to do in the browser, for any more "complete" websites I am constantly confronted with my ignorance on server side programming.
So, what do I need. I need to get my head around how to use databases and how to use some server side programming language, I guess. What is the right choice? What should I avoid?
Thanks.
PHP and MySQL have a pretty low barrier to entry (they're both free and ubiquitous). I'd start with those, since most hosts provide them for you. As an added bonus, they work really well together (and PHP isn't very hard to learn coming from a web development background).
Head First SQL is a great book for learning MySQL. All of the examples in the book are done on MySQL. The book even explains where to get it and how to install it. As for PHP, the introductory tutorial at official website is the best place to learn it.
Update: Head First PHP & MySQL is now available. I haven't read this one yet, but other books in the series and by the same author are great for learning new languages from scratch.
Download Python. Learn the Python language. Learn Object-Oriented programming.
Python includes SQLite, this makes it easier to Learn the SQL language.
Download the Django framework. This makes it easy to write server-side applications that work simply and reliably.
I would suggest PHP. Not because it's the best, most modern or cleanest language out there, but because it is easy to learn for someone coming from pure HTML.
You begin by just adding tiny bits of PHP to your regular HTML and magic happens :)
Ruby is a fantastic language and the frameworks for web stuff generally teach you some good practices. Try it. The Learn to program book uses Ruby, maybe you'd like to check it out.
I noticed in your question you mention that you've been using javascript. If you're comfortable progamming javascript, I've recently begun working with server side javascript in the form of EJScript on linux and using jscript on windows. It's been fairly painless, and the documentation has been pretty good so far on both.
If you're more interested in learning this with another technology then Django & Python or ASP.NET & C# (or IronPython) are both fairly low barrier to entry platforms available on windows, *nix, etc...
I would say that if you're comfortable working in Linux, then go for PHP and MySQL. If you aren't comfortable working in Linux, then download the free Visual Web Developer version of Visual Studio Express, and get started using that. This lets you program in VB.Net or C#, and use the .Net web development framework. It's really miles ahead of anything PHP in terms of how nice a platform it is to work on. There's also a free developer edition of SQL Server that lets you store up to 4 GB of data.
There's plenty of .Net hosts out there now too. Although, due to increased license costs, Windows hosting plans will usually cost more and give you less space/bandwidth than Linux hosting plans, you can still get enough room to play around with and deploy some apps on the web. If you develop something really cool, and outgrow what your hosting account provides, it's probably time to upgrade to a VPS, and post ads on your site to start paying the bills
I'd recommend PHP for folks who are familiar with HTML but are newish to programming. Here's why:
I'm currently an ASP.Net developer, and I think that ASP.Net abstracts waaaaay to much to make it a good first programming environment. I say learn how to generate and manipulate straight HTML with a language like PHP instead of trying to understand GridViews, etc., which have no bearing or relevance to programming in the broader sense.
I wouldn't say ASP.Net is "the Dark Path" or anything, but if you start out by learning it, you'll tend to favor the warm and insulating arms of the framework. ASP.Net is pretty much a code-generator when compared to more explicit (some would say reckless, messy, and tedious, but I'm not one of them) methods like PHP.
With PHP you'll see the effect your code has on the actual HTML when you view source. With an ASP.Net page, you'll be baffled by the amount and complexity of the HTML it spits out.
After you get your hands dirty in PHP, you can explore the pros and cons of frameworks like ASP.Net that "do a lot of the work for you".
I was exactly in your situation 3 to 4 years ago and, like some of the commentators suggest, I tried PHP because of its low barrier of entry.
That was a mistake! Oh sure I was able to achieve some things here and there, including using a contact form from a book which was so flawed that it was later hijacked by big time spammers and got my domain banned from most email servers out there.
Later on I tried to learn how to create dotabase driven sites with object oriented programming following the guidance of the excellent books, blog posts, and forums from Sitepoint and other sources. It was just too hard for my little brain. I just could not do it.
So what happened? 2 1/2 years ago I decided to learn Rails, which had just turned v. 1.1. It has been fun since the beginning and extremely rewarding. Working with Ruby is a pleasure, much easier to learn than PHP, and the Rails framework is so well put together that you can, with little effort, produce some very elaborate web sites with advanced features all while learning how to do proper object oriented web programming.
I used my new knowledge to recreate from scratch the site of my non-profit organization (with a new domain ;-) and, with a friend who is a talented designer, created a web development firm.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that easy, if you want to learn programming you need to put a lot of effort into it but in my own experience Rails can bring you some instant results while letting you get deeper and deeper over time.
I recommend two main sources of knowledge:
The excellent, official Rails
guides.
The free screencasts
from Railscasts.
Whatever your choice will be I wish you the best and a fun and fulfilling experience
I recently came upon this question myself. I really liked the way PHP integrates with HTML making designing a site more natural in my opinion. Design your site as you would with static content and then switch the static with the dynamic. However, I wanted to choose a "good" language. I looked at PHP, Ruby, Perl, and Python, as they are the most popular, open source options. I didn't need any powerhorses, if you will, like Ruby on Rails or Django, since I just wanted to mess around with server side stuff and some SQL—nothing serious. I don't remember why nor do I care to remember why, but I chose Python. But I still wanted that integration with HTML. I came across Karrigell. It's a neat piece of Python that essentially handles the integration. It comes with a little web server which you can use on its own or use something like mod_proxy with lighttpd. The devs don't limit you to only Python inside HTML, though. Their server parses: Python inside HTML, HTML inside Python, plain ol' Python scripts, and Karrigell services. It may not integrate as well as PHP does, but it's pretty damn good.