tommy's scratchpad - technology, web

PHP implosion

2006-07-19T20:46:00+00:00

I've toyed with many different programming languages, development environments, application approaches and the like, and thus far I can be categorized as a REST and Perl hack. Perl is very dear to me. I used Perl for the first major project in my career and in a slew of other applications, including owsview.

In the last couple of years, I've been moving to Java (servlets, JSP, etc.) for webapps, which has been successful for the most part, but haven't budged from a scripting point of view from Perl when I needed something really lightweight and quick and dirty.
Until now. Enter PHP.

I took on a (non-geospatial; well almost, I used geocoder.ca to geocode addresses, and output the newsfeed as GeoRSS :) ) web project this year for a friend, which I initially developed as a bunch of webpages and Perl CGIs. Worked fine. As time went on, I wanted to abstract things much more, and get heavy into templating, and did I mention I needed to have this done yesterday? So I looked for Perl templating systems.

I ran into Template Toolkit, which looked like a viable solution at the time, but I found it a bit confusing as to which approach to take (tt has both offline and real-time template processing).

I then checked out Mason, which I have used sparingly in the past, and got a bit farther along. I have a slow machine, so the mod_perl include in my Apache config looked to be bogging down the server.

Finally, I looked at PHP, which I was familiar enough with from when we initially developed cwc2 (thereafter chameleon) in 2002. I already had a PHP install (to run this blog), and it seemed I needed a couple of more options built in, so a recompile/install did the trick.

From there, things went ridiculously fast. All the Perl code was migrated to PHP in a matter of a day (if I didn't use Perl strict, most of it could have went untouched). And the templating. In a day, I had templates of templates. Very turnkey. And driven by one config file.

If you're looking for a 'but', I'm afraid I don't have one. We now have an abstracted product which can be deployed with minimal configuration. All thanks to some PHP.

I'm sure I haven't even scratched the surface of what can be done, but for a simple, easy to maintain webapp, PHP has done the job. It would be interesting to hear what others use when they really want to bang out a webapp. At any rate, three cheers for PHP!

Web Services and XML: Considerations

2006-06-27T13:25:00+00:00

As a follow up to one of my earlier posts, I found a couple of relevant webpages. "The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing", which discuss issues around Web Services in terms of disparate resources across networks, and "Don't Invent XML Languages", which makes one think twice before declaring an XML vocabulary.

Happy reading!

When to use XML

2006-05-23T12:27:00+00:00

I remember, in 1998, an old boss of mine sending us a presentation on XML, and how it was going to become the next big thing in information exchange. Well, things have certainly moved along since then, and XML is all over the place.

XML is great. It's human readable, application neutral and self-describing. It's also being used by everyone and their dog for anything possible. While I'm quite the XML zealot (it has done wonders for us in the OGC and OSGEO communities), my experiences have taught me to use XML judiciously. Sometimes a plain text config file is fine. Sometimes binary encoding is needed (especially for voluminous data).

I recently reacquianted myself with a web architecture document from the W3C folks. Section 4.5.1 provides some sound suggestions of when to apply XML to your application(s). Happy reading!