Technorati claim

I hereby claim this blog in my Technorati profile by uttering the magic incantation CJBYFQF8BJTM and Q6HZGSYQ4W27.

Adventures in visualisation

Traditionally, Business Intelligence (BI) has delivered simple and workmanlike information formats. The bread and butter of these are tables, pivot tables (crosstabs) and charts. Since the 1990s, these have been collected into portals & dashboards to provide an individualised “one-stop shop” for business information needs. For the more data adept, analytic capabilities have been added as part of the GUI experience.

While perfectly adapted to day-to-day activities, these approaches are usually in a separate environment to an information consumer’s main workspace.

Choosing a web application framework

A long time ago, when Java was just a little way on from being an acorn, I started learning it as an alternative to hand coded web forms and CGI scripts. The concept was to build web apps using the existing framework. Then I hit AWT’s core issues: form design in code and event loops. Ugh!

After experiencing both Mac and Windows event loop ugliness, I had escaped into the Paradox and Delphi haven, where the core libraries handled default behaviours, and all I had to do was extend the base with my specific functionality. Linked GUI and database elements made it easy for data entry and display in Borland’s offerings. However, the technology was limited to application development for Windows.

Now, Java is a behemoth, and would take a substantial investment of time to come back up to speed, and a large number of framework choices to make.

I took up Perl in the late 90s, and found a fast data manipulation & automation language that spoke my language. There were some exciting things happening in the web space (apart from the ever present CGI.pm).

PHP, Python, and Ruby sprung from the dark and shone out as scripting beacons. Perl had Catalyst, Maypole and .*App.* varieties; Ruby had Rails.

Each framework had a good start, but still relied on tedious coordination of database, object and presentation layers.

So after a long hiatus, I returned to an overwhelming array of choices in the web application framework space. Given that it is easy for analysis paralysis to set in, I decided to make a quick assessment, rather than a thorough one. Why? (It should be obvious….I wanted to develop something, and not contribute to the hue, cry and inevitable flame wars a full evaluation article would raise.)

So after a number of likely candidates, I chose PHP as the language, and Symfony as the framework. I selected PHP to learn a new language, and for the ubiquity of PHP module development for existing solid web applications. I selected Symfony for the design once/generate many philosophy used for database and object structures, and the ability to reverse engineer an existing schema into the ORM.

Resources

The resources below are not comprehensive, but represent the breadcrumb trail I took in my evaluation.

General Framework/MVC:

• Planet MVC
• Wikipedia:Web application framework
• The performance test of 6 leading frameworks

PHP:

• PHPFreaks – Application Frameworks
• 5 Next Generation PHP Frameworks
• PHP framework comparison benchmarks
• PHP on Trax
• CakePHP
• Rasmus Lerdorf: PHP Frameworks? Think Again.

Perl:

• Mojo framework for Perl
• Perl Web Frameworks
• Squatting – A Camping-inspired Web Microframework for Perl

Java:

• Application Frameworks

A belated (re)entry into blogging

It’s been a while…. a long while.

After mucking about with static html, roll-your-own, bloxsom and Movable Type, I parked the blogging aspects. I can blame all sorts of things – lack of time, family priorities, lots of other shiny things; it comes down to will & desire.

Why now?

Simply, I need a web presence. I need a portfolio/showcase. I want to contribute back to the web community. (And yes, I want to add my voice to the maelstrom of push monologuing… .)

There is no central theme, aside from my observations of life as I know it.

Enjoy the ride!