random ramblings and various other shenanigans

› Welcome people

Hello and welcome to my blog!

I created this blog mainly to play around in Django and see how quickly and efficiently a descent web application could be created using the Django framework.

It really is that easy, you spend most of your time realising that what you want to do is actually already built into the framework and will take only a matter of minutes to implement into your application, then you realise that some of your code could have been done much quicker and you end up with hardly any code left!

Now I've made a blog in Django I'm going to have a few goes at building something else, something a little more challenging, this blog imports my Google Reader shared items so if you subscribe to one of my rss feeds you should find something interesting to read while I'm trying to think of something else to blog about!

Cheers!

by Ben on 19:00, August 9, 2007 | 0 comments | leave comment | permalink
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› Rails Envy videos

I really like these Rails Envy Videos.

Similar to the Mac Guy vs PC Guy videos, but it's ruby on rails vs Java, PHP, .NET and Django (or DJ Ango), most amusing.

They're up to #7 at the time of posting, but according to this there are some more to come so stay tuned!

by Ben on 23:50, September 10, 2007 | 0 comments | leave comment | permalink
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› 2008: The end of PHP?

Happy New Year people, welcome to 2008.

2008 is the year when PHP 4 stops getting supported, August 8th 2008 (or 08-08-08) is d-day for the end of security fixes on the PHP 4 branch, the final bug fixes have already been released.

PHP has great advantages and disadvantages. It's easy to learn, it's fast, and it's used to run some of the biggest web applications on the internet such as Facebook and MediaWiki (Wikipedia), however in my opinion PHP nativly encourages people to program in a sloppy way, which can quickly become a maintainability headache. This is before taking into account the transition from PHP4 to PHP5 and the timescale available before a security hole is found after 08-08-08.

There are of course new kids on the block, namely Ruby on Rails and my personal favorite Django, OK so these are "frameworks" and not languages like PHP is, but from the outset of a new project working with these tools, you're sent in the right direction.

I used to be a pretty big PHP "fanboy", always recomending it to people, especially those on the ASP train, however i couldn't imagine recommending it to anyone anymore. I'd recommend either Rails or Django, they're both written to create web applications, and to create them in a maintainable way, from the start. They both have great communities of support and high class documentation, so my question is, Would you still recommend someone to use PHP to build a web application?

by Ben on 18:05, January 6, 2008 | 4 comments | leave comment | permalink
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