FUNside

After spending some time with AS3 (almost a year) I can now make that (weird) statement. For those that have no idea what I’m talking about, let me make a brief introduction:

Flash, the major player in online rich-media, started as an animation-drawing tool and not a platform for full-blown apps. It took years of effort from the software developers to get rid of its ancestry - and all those years actionscript sat on top of the drawing platform, more in an assisting role rather than a proper scripting language. But now it’s a reality. It has a learning curve over the previous actionscript 2 and that is frustrating at first but it’s all for the best.

Experienced programmers appreciate the new syntax and object oriented structure, bringing the platform up to date with other “proper” scripting environments. But for the non-coders the new structure just seems more logical. And although you can do most of the things you want with AS2, noone can deny the fact that AS3 is waaay faster.

That fact made (finally) possible the implementation of 3D graphics in flash. A series of engines have been created for flash, nowhere near software 3D engines but it’s a start…

Here comes the show off part so feast your eyes with some 3D goodness:

More resources on Flash 3D:

• http://drawlogic.com/category/3d-engines/
• http://blog.papervision3d.org/
• http://blog.alternativaplatform.com/en/
• http://papervision2.com/
• http://www.cs54.com/blog/?cat=15

I envy the new developers that start learning AS3 straight away. They don’t have the baggage of the previous experience of the more limited previous versions of Flash. But it’s a state of mind I guess to simply discard the past and embrace the possibilities of the future.

Portable web servers have been around for years. And since installing Apache on Windows hasn’t always been a smooth procedure, many developers have tried to find ways to setup Apache for Windows in a self-contained environment, one could port into any windows system and use as a sandbox for his/her projects.

I personally was stuck with an old installation of phpdev for some time but I felt bad using it as it seemed too quirky and uncontrollable.

Then I used a Linux virtual machine, an Ubuntu installation with the popular LAMP setup being a breeze to install, but that dragged my system resources and I always got annoyed by the latency.

Recently I rediscovered XAMPP - I knew it as part of the portable apps line-up but never really got my hands dirty with it. I suppose it wasn’t as fine polished then to notice…

Visit the homepage: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

If server management isn’t your thing but you like server-side (~PHP) programming, this is the tool for you. You can really work like on a proper server with PHP, MySQL installed and experiment with your web applications. Run your code, create databases… Crash everything, burn it to the ground and simply delete the server folder and start all over again

It also has some extra features, a FileZilla FTP server and a Mercury mail transport system for whoever wants to make use of those kinds of services. I remind you that we are talking about portable software - that means all this can run from a folder on your computer with no installation. It looks like a regular program, it runs like a regular program but it acts like a server. Great!

Of course XAMPP isn’t without competition. Other alternatives you might want to look at are:
Wamp, Server2Go and Sambar. To be honest I haven’t gone as far as testing those so I can’t elaborate on their features.

XAMPP is so lightweight and well-featured I don’t even consider an alternative at the moment.

This website used Joomla. I installed it because I thought it fitted the purpose of the website. The reality of things taught me though that I had outgrown the open source CMSs - or even worse that the expectations users have these days for online applications are beyond the capabilities of these old development frameworks.

The only reason I installed it in the first place was to have a Joomla familiarity and to keep an eye on it’s development as it is portrayed as the next best thing in open source content management systems (CMS). I even put in the effort of downloading and installing the latest version before so that I’m not dismissing this CMS unjustifiably.

When I first installed Joomla, I noticed the easy to use control panel (CP) and at the same how restrictive it was in letting you modify things not available in the CP. In other words, if it’s not in the CP as an option, you can’t modify it.

For example, it didn’t have an option to change the location of the favicon in the CP and that meant I had to look for it in the labyrinth of directories and functions the CMS has semi-organized.

And that was the tip of the iceberg in regards to the tweaks I had to do to the core files. Actually I was forced to do so many modifications to make a standards-compliant website that I’m reluctant in upgrading Joomla to future versions. And if you add the incompatibilities of the plugins that an upgrade may bring - well, this is not web designing - this is web torturing.

The truth is simple:

Having HTML inside the PHP code is something unjustifiably wrong. It doesn’t help the templating of the system and it makes the upgrading a risky process.

In the end it became a personal obsession, that I could actually do it (make my CSS design run on Joomla that is). It took me far more time than I planned to bring up to the point that I wanted and it still needs more work to get all the areas perfect. And it will never be perfect… The site feels like an enormous amount of ugliness carefully hidden with elegant markup in the front-end, only waiting to burst in the users face uncontrollably.

Not to be a fan boy of the competition but I could’ve done the same things with MODx or Wordpress and it would be lot cleaner both in the front-end and back. Note: FUNside now uses Wordpress…

Sorry for all this negativity - it’s just that I had to record my discouragement of using this CMS system for the site. All this reminds me the rise and fall of another (once) popular CMS - PHP-Nuke. As they say, history tends to repeat itself…