It’s been about a year since I last looked at Flock, the “Social Web Browser”. In that time it’s matured into a very stable and useful application, perfect if you are into social networking and blogging. Some of the sites that it integrates with are:
Thought-provoking documentary by Dutch film maker Ijsbrand van Veelen, featuring The Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen.
Interesting article from Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on how the Java world is leveraging dynamic languages such as Ruby and PHP in order to remain relevant in the web application world. The obvious question is, though, whether using JRuby has enough advantages over using Ruby or PHP in a plain Linux environment without a JVM.
Today Sun is investing in JRuby Ruby and Jython Python support for its Java EE solution; the IBM Websphere group has realized the ineffectiveness of the Java EE platform for running modern Web workloads and has invested heavily in Project Zero which aims to make big blue a Web 2.0 player and initially delivers support for Groovy and PHP; BEA has also had some incubation projects going but with the upcoming sale to Oracle it is unclear whether any of those efforts will materialize.
Andi on Web & IT: Java is losing the battle for the modern Web. Can the JVM save the vendors?
Interesting article on how Rails features can be more of a hindrance than a help in many situations. Compared here with Django, which can be cleaner and more lightweight.
Some of the bits and pieces that come bundled with Rails are just plain wrong, the Javascript helpers being one example. The abuse of HTTP by default in some of the scaffolding code being another. Oh, and the markup coming out of various helpers as well. In trying to help the application developer Rails gets in the way of the professional webstandards types.
Morethanseven » Why the webstandards world appears to be choosing Django
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, praises PHP for being adequate for “small chores”. Wow, what a compliment! Perhaps someone should suggest to Dave that Rails is okay too, as long as you don’t care about performance.