Confessions of a cat

Magpie means szarka for my hungarian readers. You know the one that likes to collect shiny new things.

This is exactly the case with new frameworks, languages popping up every day. It’s a thing that software developers have to live with constant change (for the better usually) but that’s just how this profession works - and you should like it. However if you can’t focus long enough on one thing - the same will happen with the next one and you’ll never gain enough proficiency in anything. This post describes it in more detail. I like what the guy’s doing - despite being a M$ guy he knows what he’s talking about - and no flaming can be found on his site.

So today I officially announce my focus on exactly these 3 things in the (open source) web-developer world:

• Ruby on rails
• Drupal 5.x and up
• Code Igniter 1.5 / Kohana 2.x (its latest reincarnation) framework (PHP)

I know a lot others, and used them more or less, but I like these the most. There are countless other and equally good baseline frameworks (zend framework, symfony, cakephp, etc.) but you need to draw a line somewhere. I might get a few things from Zend though - it’s modular architecture allows you to use only parts of it. And we have not even talked about javascript frameworks (jquery, extjs, yui, prototype rule it at the moment) - you need to grok to be able to get along.

I like ruby/rails because it gives a fresh way of looking at things - and now it has gained enough wind that even the java / .net guys are started to copy the architectural ideas from rails.

Drupal has a vast array of extensions in the form of modules - yet the core is simple enough for anyone who wants to understand how it works. Once you figure out how the different pieces fit together it’s basically like playing LEGO. Sometimes writing some glue code and trying to figure out why some piece does not work the way you thought it should. I have just heard about a 12 year old (russian, of course…) little guy, called dmitry who will go to the next drupalcon in the states together with our longtime drupal hacker friend, chx (Karcsi bacsi de Negyesi) - the interesting thing in it is that the drupal community has thrown together something like 600 USD in 1.5 days for the guy. How cool is that?

And in the end: Code Igniter / Kohana because of its excellent documentation (way better than anything else I have seen so far. Simple, easy to find things, almost complete and the API is one of the more intuitive ones). Now the founder’s focus is on his commercial endeavours and stopped developing it, but as it was simple, fast and yet powerful - a community started forming around it - and they basically continue evolving this framework under the name Kohana. They switched to support only PHP5 + - which is also a welcome move (finally).

That’s it. I also would like to experiment with the Cocoa API on Mac OS X (there’s even a Phocoa framework in PHP that copies it to the web world), and have played with Java - but you know computers are not the only thing in this world. I’ll leave the rest for others to play with and explore, learn and evolve.