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Why must you laugh at my back end?

blog.pud.com

131–140 of 230 posts

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#131
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like arguing about what colour is the best. It's pointless. I have a theory that people act this way because of evolution. -------------------- Imagine you live in a tribe of 10 people, and there are 5 different ways the entire tribe can use to hunt animals for food. All 10 people must hunt together, and each of the 5 ways are equally successful. After an animal is killed, the tribe determines who was most respo…

I don't see how evolution has anything to do with your theory. Furthermore I doubt that the motivation behind arguing about 'pointless' topics is to sway the population to your side so that you can benefit. Unfortunately, however, I do not have an explanation as to why people may argue over such topics though I suspect that it may be related/due to cognitive dissonance. There is a conflict between what they have conc…

Talking fluff is easy. How many will participate in a Graphs vs. Trees discussion? and Ruby vs. Python?

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd really, really, really advise you at least check out a framework :) Spend 10 minutes reading the documentation behind CodeIgniter ( http://codeigniter.com/ ) and you'll see that you can have more time to spend developing, e.g., features, as the framework has taken care of the routine and mundane stuff. As a note, I would recommend Kohana ( http://kohanaframework.org/ ) over CodeIgniter, but if you're pushed for t…

I've worked with Kohana a lot and I really don't like it, besides how skinny it is (oh, and the H in HMVC). Weird thing is the best programmer I know recommended it to me.

Kohana is a little brain-damaged. Good intentions, but it's essentially a PHP5 version of CodeIgniter in most ways that matter. The problem with this is that a PHP5 version of CodeIgniter doesn't leverage the constructs and concepts that make PHP5.3 (which in 2011 is the lowest version of PHP you should be considering) much more pleasant to work with than previous iterations. Kohana, and CI2, are both rather meat-axey frameworks, where the trend is toward elegance.

I'd consider Symfony2 for most applications, or Silex (which is the Symfony2 app kernel, stripped of the majority of the Symfony2 framework) if you like writing the plumbing yourself. Yii is pretty nice, too.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#133
post #77
post #9

This is great. Seriously. I cut my teeth in the early 2000s writing the type of PHP code that would make your eyes bleed. Global variables everywhere. HTML/PHP/MySQL in the same file. Career-wise I ended up going down a backend/database developer path, so if I do anything with consumer-facing web applications, it's on my free time. I'm working on such an app now, and right now the fastest way I can get anything done…

"I'm working on such an app now, and right now the fastest way I can get anything done is writing similar code to what I wrote in 2003. It's not quite as bad, but I continually succumb to doubt." The biggest objective problem this style has is that it affords everything-injection; cross-site scripting attacks, SQL injection, command injection if you're using shell commands, etc. Every time you bash one string togethe…

What I find interesting about PHP (among many laughably bad things about it) is that one of its key strengths for beginners is the easy mode-switch between scripted and verbatim mode (i.e. ), but all the large software projects whose code I've read used some kind of templating.

I agree with the sentiments around here, though. If the goal is to write software that works and hopefully makes money, do what you know and ignore this year's hot new framework/language. Write readable code in case you need to refactor it later.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#134
post #123
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please list out the applications you've created? I'd like to add them to my "never ever register on these sites" list. If you're only worrying about injection attacks "...after you gain some traction" or "...when it becomes an issue" you're already too late, and I don't ever want to trust any of my private data with you, ever. This is the 21st century. Scrubbing and validating user input is _trivial_ now, fra…

Oh please. I'm not building anything that requires a credit card, or anything sophisticated. When you have literally just a hundred users, YES I will skip paying lots of attention on injection attacks because the chances of that happening is very low. To you techies, it sounds like a huge deal, but the priority in any business to make profit first.

Sure. But if you've built a crap back-end for a content site (that doesn't even ask for emails) and someone manages to inject some alware taht attempts to download crap to your users computer -- then you realise that crappy unprotected php is a really really bad idea. (In my defence - I was very young)

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#135
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right. Is there are good replacement for HTML tables yet that works well in all browsers? I'm talking about for things that actually need to be laid out in a grid, which, in my experience, is many things. Grids are fairly fundamental to layout and design.

Tables are for tabular data. You wouldn't use a spreadsheet to design a web page so by the same token a table is just as unsuitable. CSS support is a lot better and more consistent across browsers now than it was even just a year ago, and there are CSS 'frameworks' that make grid based design a trivial task without cluttering your page with table markup where it's not required. There are even plenty HTML5 'frameworks…

There are situations when a table based layout just works better. Have you ever designed a site that needs to work with right-to-left text (Arabic / Hebrew) as well as English? If you use tables for your layout a simple 'html {direction:rtl}' fixes everything. If you are doing it the "right" way then you have to reverse every float and margin settings from right to left and vice versa. A nightmare to maintain. Clearly the CSS designers did not have that use case in mind.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#136
I didn't even know CFML was an open standard. Check out cfwheels.org before you comment. It's a RoR like framework, and from 15 minutes of tutorials - it's actually pretty good. It handles APIs better than Django and deals with AJAX in a smart way.

CFML verbosity and the entangled html is a downer though.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#137

I've built my product on CFML as well and I can't understand why it doesn't get more love from the developer community. It's a solid, productive language and the only language available in both commercial and open source (free) versions with tremendous support forums on both fronts. I personally use Railo for the CFML engine. Again, very productive and it enables me to get products to an MVP stage quickly.

Bob,

If you're not on 'CFML entrepreneurs' on Facebook you should be.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#138
I'm not laughing, I run several sites on a similar stack and it all runs very well. I do run Railo though just because it runs circles around the native CF server (and I don't use any of the "high level" stuff Railo doesn't include), and I use mySQL 5.5, but all under Win 2k8 Server. I have dabbled in several other frameworks as well but I simply keep coming back to CF to get things done. Be it personal familiarity or platform flexibility or a combination of both, it's never come up short or failed to perform very well and that's how I judge something to be an acceptable platform.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#139
post #127
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why did the OP take an entire blog post to say what could have been posted to Twitter ("you darn kids and your twittin'!")? How many blog posts couldn't be boiled down into a twitter post? The fact that something can be transformed into a 140-character blurb for teenagers with short attention spans does not mean that it should be. > The whole post boils down to what appears to be proud, willful ignorance. You whole…

You'll notice I didn't make a specific suggestion regarding technology. I merely suggested that what he is strongly advocating is archaic.

Your comment still comes off as needlessly arrogant. You compared Cold Fusion to leech therapy and stated that CF developers have simply never learned any new technologies. You mentioned the business value of newer tools, but you seem to miss the business value of leveraging existing knowledge and getting stuff done.

C is a lot more archaic than CF, but sometimes it's the right tool for the job. Archaic doesn't mean wrong. I certainly don't want to program in CF, but if someone else does and it works for them, then more power to them. As others mentioned, this is at least a nice counterpoint to the Latest-AwesomeYetUnproven-NoSQL-SemiFunctional-Framework/Language stuff that flies about so much.

Oh, and they still do leech therapy. The humor theory was bunk, but leech therapy can indeed have benefits.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#140

Customers don't care what you code in. Or what your backend is like as long as it works. They just want their lives to be easier. Use what you know, use it well, and make a difference. --- Most techies who have a negative opinion about any technology do it with hearsay and not first hand experience. For examples, all web languages pretty much do the same stuff, and you'll rarely come across a web app that uses a lang…

"Most techies who have a negative opinion about any technology do it with hearsay and not first hand experience." You'll find that even when you have first hand experience, you'll often be met with "well, you didn't do it right". Or "you need to do XYZ first - no one ever does foobar with XYZ first - are you stupid?". And so on. Even first hand experience isn't enough for some fanboys when you choose to reject their…

Lol, good point. It's kind of ironic that geeks who were picked/excluded/ostracized in school turn on each other in their adult lives and become snob/hipsters, instead of breaking the cycle.

Love and power to anyone doing anything good out there with the tools that enable to do them.

As for the fanatics who can't change the topic (to keep bashing) or change their mind.. I hope you can see the forest for the trees one day.

Imagine what it would feel to be supported by a developer of any language and doing the same for others. We should cheer accomplishments, not berate, belittle and attack others without a track record of our own.

When it comes to getting opinions, I learn a little more every day to ignore anyone who is a perfectionist and hasn't accomplished/launched/profited. It's the enemy.

Scaling/rebuilding/whatever you're afraid of is okay when you're growing and profitable. No business built itself in one version.

Remember, In 10 years you might have forgotten about the tools you're so passionate about today.

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