Last year Amazon shook up the web development world with EC2, the first Elastic Computing Cloud. Later the addition of S3 for storage and SimpleDB for data fleshed out their platform as a real alternative for web application development. Now Google has launched AppEngine, a virtualized application hosting system that combines some of the features of all the Amazon services for a new take on the hosted application development.

Still an invite-only beta, AppEngine is sure to get a lot of attention just from the Google name alone. I haven't had the opportunity to play with it but just looking through the docs reveals many interesting ideas. The first shock for many developers is that the service is Python only. There will be other languages added soon but I'm already seeing grumbling in the PHP community. Many assume that PHP will be added but I'm not so sure. Python is likely the first choice since it is widely used inside Google but I'd expect the next language to be Ruby because of its similar behind-the-scenes approach to Python. After that, while PHP is possible, I wouldn't be surprised for them to go another direction like Java, a Java scripting language subset or even server side JavaScript.

The second surprise will be the use of CGI as the interface. While most devs associate CGI with old-fashioned, slow apps; it really makes sense in this kind of environment where everything can change between every request.

The biggest shock will be the "No SQL" approach. Data in AppEngine is done through their own datastore, which acts more like an object database. App Engine's infrastructure takes care of all of the distribution, replication and load balancing of data and you use a Django style modeling API. There is also GQL which fulfills the same purpose as SQL for managing data. This is going to be the biggest stumbling block for many developers since 90% of the average developer's work is moving data in and out of SQL Server or MySQL and most people aren't used to being abstracted very far away from that.

It will be interstesting to see how many people jump into Django, the leading Python framework and end up staying there for even non-AppEngine work. This could be the turning point that where Django becomes the next Rails if not even bigger.

Over the last month I've been looking very closely at competing open source content management systems. Typo3 is my goto CMS due to its power and flexibility but no tool can be perfect for every task and Typo3 does have issues with end-user friendliness.

The main ones I've checked out so far are Drupal and Joomla. Both have large communities, local user groups and development books. This post will cover my first impressions of Joomla.

Joomla is most like Typo3 of the two but there are some strong differences too. Where the core organizational principle of Typo3 is the site tree, Joomla has a two layer heirarchy of Categories and Sections. Content is categorized that way and then pages and menus are built based on that. This is an interesting approach and would work well for certain kinds of content especially a news or magazine style site but I do feel the rigid two level approach is a weakness. If this were a more open category tree like Typo3's News category approach it would be a lot more interesting. I would see the category approach as weaker than the Typo3 sitetree approach for high pagecount sites.

One thing I did like about Joola is the interface look and feel. While the category approach isn't completely intuitive, the overall interface is bright and modern looking. Typo3's interface is fairly busy and old-fashioned looking in comparison. While the upcoming Typo3 4.2 interface makes some progress, this is still a weak spot.

As I expected after my experience with commercial CMSs, one area where Typo3 is way ahead is with advanced graphics support. Typo3 is the only CMS I've seen with support for complicated graphic based menus and headers as well as auto sizing images to fit layouts.

There is a large Joomla commmunity, both local and internet-wide. The local community is mostly entreprenuers who are using Joomla as part of another goal. My personal interest would rather see a developer centric community so this is a weak spot for me. The larger community surprised me in that many of the extensions are commercial. This makes sense in terms of a userbase who are using Joomla as a product but isn't what I want after being involved with Typo3's very open-source community.

The templating is pretty flexible and I didn't have a lot of issues with mimicing one of my typo3 sites layout. This wasn't a site using any advanced Typo3 features like Fexible Content Elements but most of my Typo3 sites haven't needed those either. I didn't try to write any extensions for it but from what I saw so far I don't see following up further with Joomla. While it appears to be a capable product, I'm looking for something more different than Typo3 so Joomla isn't offering enough advantages to switch or enough differences to use where Typo3 isn't a good fit.

When the Eclipse PDT project went 1.0 I started experimenting with using it as a PHP development environment and I think I'm ready to commit to it as my standard development environment.

The other piece of the equation is moving to a local php/mysql setup. I'm used to having a development linux box and stuck with that for a while to avoid subtle issues moving work from my local mac to a live linux server. I always custom compile my php on our live servers mostly to optimize them for our projects, especially to fully support Typo3's imaging abilities but I've found it awkward to compile php on Mac OS X. There are several all-in-one Apache/PHP/MySql installers for Mac but I never really liked how they were set up.

Recently I had been looking into the Zend Core package for installing PHP behind IIS with FastCGI and noticed they have a Mac version too. Unlike MAMP and XAMPP, Zend Core is really designed for production use and the MySql install is optional. I tried it out and found it much more like how I like to set up servers and worked fine with my standard MySql install. Even better it comes setup with Zend debugger and was easy to integrate into PDT's debugging mode.

There were two things I needed to do to get it fully operational. First was to run the update script right after install. This is a command line script at /usr/local/Zend/Core/setup/setup. Before I did that I had a problem with the mail function throwing an undefined function error. The second change I did was change it to run apache under my default name and group on OS X so it would be easy to use the htdocs folder as my PDT projects folder.

I've had no trouble developing within complicated apps like Typo3 and Drupal in this setup and am really happy with it. I see people recommend MAMP and XAMPP all the time for Mac PHP developers and I'm surprised I don't see Zend Core come up more.

Yahoo and the Front End Developer.

I've been a big fan of Yahoo's developer site (http://developer.yahoo.com/) Beyond their excellent javascript library, they also have lots of good video content ranging from deep javascript tips to advice on developing for screen readers.

It's really interesting to see how important front end technologies have become again. I started out as a front end developer in the 90s. I was coming from a print background and my skills with Photoshop were more important than coding in a time when sites tended to be static html pages. As the technology improved and site became more sophisticated I began doing more and more backend coding, first with php then later with java and .NET.

In the last couple of years, Ajax and Flash have brought the frontend back into the spotlight. Yahoo dev posted a blog entry about how frontend development has become complicated enough and important enough that they have developed a whole large-scale training process to make sure they have the talent they need. I find it really interesting both because I really like front end development and because it reflects the growing importance of user experience and interface design.

Went to a Joomla User Group yesterday to check it out. I've been aware of Joomla for a while as a leading open source PHP CMS but haven't had a chance to see how it compares with Typo3 or other CMSs I'm familiar with. I thought the user group would be a good chance to get a quick overview.

My first impression was that the interface was friendlier and more modern looking than Typo3's but as I saw more of the system I feel like its approach to managing content is less intuitive. I really like Typo3's strong sense of a page hierarchy. Joomla's user management was less flexible as well.

Most of the people at the user group weren't php developers and I can see the appeal of Joomla for someone who wants to avoid code. In comparison, Typo3 is much more of a developer toolkit. I think this gives it more power and flexibility at the high end though obviously at the cost of complexity and learning curve up front.

Since none of the people were deep php developers I didn't get to see the extension development side. I never build a typo3 site without custom extension work so that will be an important part of any CMS that I add to our toolkit. I was surprised to see that many extensions were commercial, I assumed that most would be GPL like typo3 extensions are.

I'll look at Joomla some more but I think if I want a system with less of a page approach than Typo3 that Drupal might be a better fit for the kind of sites I build.

A lot of people feel like the ASP.NET Postback model is awkward and hard to work with. If you've also been using non-.NET frameworks like Rails or CakePHP then you are probably even more frustrated with it. The closest option so far has been Castle, which appears to be a nice framework but for many MS oriented shops is too big of a leap, not just politically but because of its almost complete replacement of the rendering model.

Fortunately, MS has recognized the growing momentum and interest in the MVC approach for web apps and is releasing their own take on it. MS's tendency to always release their own version of popular open-source tools is usually irritating but in this case I think the approach is a big enough change that only MS can get the typical .NET-only shop to try it out. Additionaly, they are adding better support for using existing ASP.NET pieces and controls than Castle could.

Jeffrey Palermo, on of the leaders of the ALT.NET movement that has popularized the use MVC and TDD in ASP.NET has a positive overview of the new Framework in an article at CoDe Magazine. Check out "Use the ASP.NET MVC Framework to Write Web Apps without Viewstate or Postbacks" here.

Microsoft's leader of Developer tools, Scott Guthrie, also has this overview or even better, this video.

Actionscript 3 Frameworks

Saw an interesting overview of the current Flex/AS3 framework scene at https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a200985228/p12266504/. This is a Connect presentation by a couple of Flex experts, the developers of ASUnit, who looked through all the open source AS3 Frameworks they can find and give their opinions on them.

I've been using the ARP AS2 framework on a couple of large video portals and have been pretty happy with it. ARP has never been transitioned to AS3 though and Aral, the developer on the project, appears to be focused on his new SWX project.

Cairngorm is the natural leader of the space being from Adobe consulting and is still probably a must-learn just because it so likely to come up when working with other teams. The surprise favorite they had was PureMVC. I'd heard of it before but didn't have a clear impression of how it compared to any other options. One of the most important things a framework can have is a good community and that is one thing I don't see PureMVC having developed yet. It does have much better documentation than many of the other options out there.

But seeing their comments on PureMVC and specifically why they liked it over Cairngorm makes me very interested in it. It seems like like a good fit for the kind of projects I work on. I also like the fact that it is not so tightly linked to Flex and can be used in Flash and potentially even javascript apps.