Why must you laugh at my back end? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#221

Post by jonah » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 3:56 AM UTC

pud wrote: post #41

jsdalton wrote: post #31

Some weird part of me loves this, and I don't know why. That said, I'm very confused. The post says these sites are running off of your "awesome" backend: * http://www.pud.com * http://adhdinc.com But those are just pages with links to other services? Furthermore, while some of those services (TinyLetter, FaqMe) do seem to be produced by ADHD, others (Blippy, AdBrite) do not seem to be, though it seems you claim to h…

On this stack: TinyLetter.com, FaqMe.com, and many of the other sites listed on pud.com and adhdinc.com. (and more importantly, not-yet-released stuff I'm currently working on). I co-founded both Blippy and AdBrite but did not have technical roles there, so they have nothing to do with this stack.

Congrats on selling TinyLetter to MailChimp!

[1] http://tinyletter.com/

[2] http://blog.mailchimp.com/mailchimp-acquires-tinyletter/

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#222

Post by Hisoka » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 4:12 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #129

Hisoka wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, but this is bull. If you take any information, even if it's an email and password, data security is either tops on your list or you're abusing your users (even "only a hundred"; one is too many!). There is literally zero middle ground on this: you do it or you shouldn't be building web applications. And given how utterly trivial it is to provide proof against injection attacks in any modern language and toolki…

Ok Point taken. And lesson learned. I take what I said back. Security is important.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#223

Post by snow_mac » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 5:27 AM UTC

51Cards wrote: post #197

snow_mac wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you blog about Coldfusion at all?

Not I. I have debated starting up a blog a few times but lack of time is one issue, and I'm also not sure anyone really cares to hear what I have to say :)

What resources do you read about cold fusion? (i'm new within the last 1 year to CF).

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#224

Post by snow_mac » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 5:28 AM UTC

kemiller wrote: post #219

snow_mac wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you're the guy cutting the checks.

I'm not sure what that's in response to.

Into: " If you do want to grow more, then be prepared for a rewrite." ... If you're the dude cutting the checks & you think it's well designed, you don't have to redesign just because your dev gets pissy.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#225

Post by kemo » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 10:25 AM UTC

eropple wrote: post #132

radagaisus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-axe…

Kohana isn't a CI rewrite since 3.0.0. And yeah, Kohana 3.3 will natively use 5.3 goodies.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#226

Post by beernutz » Thu, Sep 01, 2011, 9:31 PM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #124

beernutz wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CFML is NOT universally hard to understand. I have been programming over 25 years, and use/have used all kinds of languages. CFML is just another tool. If you don't like tag based language, you can use pure scripting in CFML pages. Also, nothing in CFML requires or even leads ANYONE to use table based layout. I don't know where you got that idea from. When i first looked at CFML I had distaste for what i saw. The pro…

Sorry, you do not understand the meaning of "first class". You mean "included in the standard library". First class is as in first class functions, ie you can assign them to variables. And for a second I was excited by first class transactions.

Yes, you are of course correct. I was using the term to mean "built in and part of the language"

Thanks for the correction!

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#227

Post by eropple » Fri, Sep 02, 2011, 3:01 AM UTC

kemo wrote: post #225

eropple wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-axe…

Kohana isn't a CI rewrite since 3.0.0. And yeah, Kohana 3.3 will natively use 5.3 goodies.

I've yet to see any indication that it will use PHP5.3 in an idiomatic way. It still seems like a bolt-on.

(I still wouldn't use it because frankly, I don't think the Kohana developers take security seriously enough, but it'd be a start.)

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#228

Post by webnrrd2k » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 5:33 AM UTC

speleding wrote: post #135

FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Clearl…

It's a mystery to me why the standards bodies didn't just take the code for tables and make an copy of it, just using a new name like "grid" or "layout" or something.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#229

Post by eurleif » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 5:39 AM UTC

webnrrd2k wrote: post #228

speleding wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Clearl…

It's a mystery to me why the standards bodies didn't just take the code for tables and make an copy of it, just using a new name like "grid" or "layout" or something.

Because HTML is for expressing semantics, not presentation. If you want something that displays like a table, but isn't, you can do that with CSS using display: table.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#230

Post by harel » Mon, Sep 05, 2011, 9:57 PM UTC

Hisoka wrote: post #94

nhashem wrote: 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…

That's not a bad strategy. I also believe in "Just get it out and done ASAP and brush it up like heck afterwards". Worry about injection attacks, efficiency issues, scaling after you gain some traction. You can always rewrite later when it becomes an issue.

Injection attack should not be an afterthought worry, but just a standard you follow as a matter of fact when you're coding. The funny thing about this all thread is that in ColdFusion you have built in immunity as long as you build your queries using sql parameters. As for the rest - efficiency and scaling are not hard to deal with if you just form the habit to consider them as, again, a matter of fact task to perform.