OneMind

Yesterday’s post about Web development and MVC was triggered by an article on Advogato by a guy who turns out to be the technical force behind an intriguing new Web app framework called Pyjamas. After I’d written the article, I spent a couple of hours with Pyjamas and was somewhat impressed with the work that’s been done on it. Not only is the framework quite interesting (it’s essentially Google Web Toolkit ported from Java to Python) but there’s even a passable introductory book and some decent documentation.

Today, ReadWriteWebhas a very brief piece on Pyjamas. That will get the new Python framework a good bit of notice since ReadWriteWeb is one of the most popular in the blogosphere. Probably not as much as Friday’s Slashdot story and discussion did, however.

It seems to me that Python has been getting more and more visibility in the Web developer community over the past several months. I’m not even looking for a new framework, having settled at least for now on the PHP framework NOLOH. But the old language junkie dies hard and my attraction to Smalltalk and Python occasionally resurfaces.

A few years back, I was working with Kevin Altis on his Pythoncard project when he decided that for his idea to gain some traction, Python itself needed better promotion and set out to help with that effort. I see Pythoncard has recently seen a resurgence of activity and with all of the online mentions of Python that I keep stumbling across, maybe the efforts of Altis and others are starting to pay off.

I don’t generally comment on the Raiders. I lost interest in them years ago primarily because Al Davis is such a nasty shmuck that I didn’t feel like it would be much fun to try to watch “his” team stumble over him week in and week out.

But this week, Ray Ratto of SF Gate has a good piece on the Silver-and-Black’s recently terminated head coach Lane Kiffin and his apparent new job as head coach at the University of Tennessee. As Ratto, who is one of the most knowledgeable sportswriters west of the Mississippi, says, the job coaching the Volunteers is unbelievably more demanding that trying to coach the Raiders even with Davis in the mix.

The Southesstern Conference is perennially one of the top two or three conferences in college football and Tennessee fans can be really ugly if their beloved Vols don’t win consistently. Kiffin appears to me to have bitten off far more than he can chew. If he lasts two seasons I’ll be surprised.

Nobody who writes Web applications would claim it’s easy. The MVC programming paradigm can help ease the burden a bit, but widely available programming languages and frameworks have made such a choice difficult at best. An essay on Advogato bemoaning the blurred lines of development between browser and server got me thinking about the tool I’m using for my Web app development these days, NOLOH. Despite the fact that it’s written in the ugly PHP language, NOLOH is an elegant and highly leverageable framework. NOLOH in Python (coming in the distant future) would be even better, but for now at least NOLOH even beats Python-based Django and Smalltalk-based Seaside.

For more details, click “Read More” below.

Writing Web applications for a living (as I do) takes a certain amount of masochism. Typically, until quite recently, writing a true Web app with server-side database aspects mandated writing in two or more languages to achieve smooth operation of the resulting product. Probably most often this resulted in HTML and JavaScript in the client, PHP in the client and the server. Database manipulation, even if done within PHP, required at least a working knowledge of SQL as well.

This morning I read with interest an analysis on Advogato of how classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) app paradigms get broken by such multi-language approaches to application design. The author (Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, known on Advogato as lkcl) makes some valid points but he also shows his programmer-as-priest mentality when he eviscerates PHP primarily, as I get it, because: (1) It can be embedded into HTML, which has nasty side effects; and (2) it’s too easy to write horrible and unsafe code using PHP. He also calls PHP’s syntax “arcane,” a charge he also levels at JavaScript.

“All in all,” he opines, “as the Unity Project shows, writing in a single programming language is a far saner approach to Web programming than the present half-way-house double-languaged nightmare that is so prevalent at the moment.” With that, I can agree. This calls for the design and deployment of Web app frameworks, he says, a position with which I also concur.

It is important to note, however, that Leighton is making an argument here for MVC as perhaps the only useful design methodology fort Web and presumably desktop) applications. I’m a big fan of MVC from my days studying and using object-oriented languages like Smalltalk and Python. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that if you don’t or can’t use MVC there’s something fundamentally flawed in your methodology.

He steps a little far afield for me when he suggests, “Unfortunately, writing good code – writing a good framework – in php is simply not practical. The structure, look and feel of the language, and its heritage, is akin to that of Javascript. Both PHP and Javascript have the means to be ‘mixed in; to HTML, and that’s not a good sign.” Hey may be right in the general sense, but NOLOH proves him dead wrong. NOLOH, as you know if you follow my tech blogging here, is my current framework of choice. I’m building no less than five Web apps using this powerful object-oriented PHP framework, one of which is an extremely complex multi-programmer effort. NOLOH is brilliant. It allows my team to write only in PHP and do amazing stuff (even AJAX-like behaviors) in stunningly few lines of code.

Now, I’m not a big fan of PHP. I agree with Leighton that the syntax is pretty ugly (often referred to as C-like, which I consider nearly the ultimate insult to a programming language’s syntax). FWIW, JavaScript suffers from similar, if somewhat less egregious, linguistic ugliness. But a well-designed, well-written framework like NOLOH can and does remove lot of the syntactical noise from the language in which it is coded. The code we have to write is, for the most part and for all practical purposes, a superset of PHP embodied and largely contained in the NOLOH kernel. (The developers, Asher Snyder and Philip Ross [see bio sketches], promise a Python version of NOLOH at some unspecified future date, at which point I may well declare Nirvana’s arrival for Web app developers.)

If NOLOH did not exist, I’d almost certainly be using either Django or Seaside for my Web app development, most likely the former. Django is written in Python, while Seaside is done in Smalltalk. NOLOH, Django and Seaside all take really different approaches to their architectures; comparing them would definitely be mixing vegetables, so I will resist that. But when I compared NOLOH to Django and Seaside two years ago when the first and largest of my current projects began, I couldn’t believe how good NOLOH was. And, of course, like the others, it keeps getting better.

But at the end of the day, I think it’s important to make the point that Leighton makes a lot of valid observations but that if he’d looked at NOLOH before writing his piece, he might have had to lighten up on PHP a bit. I know I have.

Lynne McTaggart’s blog has a report of a study on happiness whose results compare to others I’ve seen. Having 10 or more friends and being “part of a small close-knit social circle that had existed for a long time” are the two key indicators of happiness. They matter more than achievements, financial picture or any other criterion studied by the prof, who undertook the study to see how happy national lottery winners were.

Now I know why I spoke about my many friendships the way I did for Thanksgiving yesterday. I really am a very happy man!

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States. I have so much for which to be grateful this year.

• Life. I’ve probably said this for many years, but you have to come close to losing life, as I did in late August and early September, to gain a full appreciation for what life really means. This year, when I say I’m thankful for life, I really mean it!
• Family. My wife, Carolyn, continues to be my strength and my hope and my love. Our four daughters, Sheila, Mary, Heather and Krista are constant sources of joy and support. Sheila’s husband Jeff and Heather’s husband Jaime make my oldest and youngest daughters happy and safe. Grandchildren Alicia, Rachel, Caleb, Nathan, Rosie, Mattie, and Maiah remind me by their presence why we need to be thankful for this planet and to demonstrate that gratitude. (Besides, they’re all great kids and they seem to have a liking for me for some reason.)
• Spiritual Community. Unity of Monterey Bay is my home community of spirit. I am blessed to serve as their volunteer Spiritual Teacher in Residence (STIR, which is, of course, what I do) and am greatly enriched by their love and support. Their collective prayers played a big part in saving my life this fall. And Rev. Vicky Elder is not only a co-minister but a wonderful friend and fellow spiritual teacher who is a constant source of insight, uplift and love.
• Monterey. How lucky am I? When I’m on the phone with someone elsewhere in the country (and even some parts of the larger planet), and they ask where I’m calling from, I love hearing them say plaintively, “Oh, I want to live in Monterey!” Yeah, I know.
• America. Proud to be an American again. President-Elect Barack Obama brings the kind of hope and energy and youth and optimism that we have been sorely missing for the past eight years. Even in the midst of difficult financial times, it is possible to believe once again in the American Dream.
• Friends. It would be difficult to overstate the value and importance of friendship. I am so blessed to have in my life so many good friends. In fact, as I reflected on that subject this morning, I started out thinking I would just list here my best friends. How many could there be? Turns out there are a lot. So rather than trying to list some and leave others out, I’ll just say I’m grateful to all my wonderful, patient, helpful, supportive and life-loving friends. You know who you are.
• Technology. Yeah, that, too. I posted a bit of a paean yesterday to my 23-inch iMac. But it’s just the showcase of a bunch of technology that I just love using, learning about, manipulating, programming, discovering, complaining about and generally feeling enriched by. Thanks to all of you who make this stuff possible.

It’s time someone solved the problem of the Amazing Fragmenting Address Book. Unless, of course, someone already has and I just don’t know about it. Which is certainly possible.

This morning, an acquaintance sent me an email informing me of her new email address. I use gMail, so I was able quickly to update her record in my Contacts list in that program. As I edited her record, I realized that gMail would also allow me to have a full address book with addresses, phones, etc., if I wanted to use it that way. I’m not sure what value that would have, given that all I use my Google Contacts for is email, but the realization triggered a cascade of queries.

I have my Address Book from Apple which was always my main repository for such information until I started using gMail and it was easier to store peoples’ email addresses in my email program. (Yeah, I realize I could have stayed with Apple Mail and had cross-integration there, but Mail just isn’t as good as gMail in a number of ways. Besides, I do like the idea of having my contact info in the Cloud.) The Apple Address Book is where I keep mailing addresses, company information, and miscellaneous notes about people.

Then I have Skype, which I use for at least 90% of my phone conversations. Guess where peoples’ phone numbers are most likely to be current? Yep.

Finally (I think), I have IM contact identifiers in my Adium application, which is my current choice for a multi-protocol chat client. And I spend a lot of time on chat, from which I derive a great deal of value and convenience.

Now it would be interesting to contemplate a means for synchronizing all of those applications’ data together, but my guess is that’s a very messy and difficult task. But it does seem to me that it should be possible to solve the problem by:

1. Establishing a central repository of all contact info in the Cloud
2. Expecting these individual apps to obtain their contact info from that source when and as needed.

AIM, e.g., appears to store all of my AOL IM clients on a server so that when I open a new copy of the chat client on a computer I’ve never used before, the buddies list populates automatically. I assume other IM clients have similar features.

I think Skype does the same thing (though I’m less certain of that and haven’t actually asked or investigated).

What I’d really like is the ability to have all my apps draw from a central repository just the data they need to populate their subsets of contact info (emails for gMail, IM handles for Adium, phone numbers and Skype user IDs for Skype, etc.). Then I just maintain that one database and all the others draw from it as needed. They could keep a local copy, of course, and check for updates at intervals.

Of the services I know about, Plaxo seems best positioned to do this, but their technology is strictly push; if someone I know updates their contact info through Plaxo, I get a notice. But there is no API for me to connect to even if I wanted to write a program to do this, which I don’t necessarily want to do.

Pointers anyone? If you don’t want to join my blog and post a response here, you can email me: dan at danshafer dot com.

This video is part of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) one-minute shift video collection. In it, Prof. Ervin Laszlo presents the current state of the planet, what will happen if we continue as we are, and how we can reshape the future by inventing it: “live more simply so others may simply live.”

NOTE: For some technical reason I haven’t had time to look at, the actual embedded video isn’t always showing reliably here. So .

My friend Tony Seton‘s Thanksgiving message offered a delightful tidbit of advice to all of us. While recognizing that we all have much for which to be thankful this year, Tony suggests we all do something that will make other people thankful. Yield at a stop sign. Hold a door open. Heck, just smile.

Good idea, my friend.

There are days that the fact that I get to spend most of my day working on and with incredibly fascinating technology just wells up inside and I feel so grateful. Today is one of those days.

I was just arranging several open windows on my 23-inch screen when it occurred to me that I hadn’t expressed my appreciation to by 23-inch iMac lately. This is a beautiful, wonderful piece of technology — or rather, holistic collection of technologies — that makes my life not only easier but far more enjoyable just by doing what it was designed to do.

Now if we could all learn that simple truth: doing what we are designed to do (love and forgive one another) simply and elegantly brings us and others such joy!

President-Elect Barack Obama reportedly plans to have New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson become his new Secretary of Commerce. That is the first Obama appointment that has leaked that I thought was just wrong. OK, it’s actually the second; his reported plan to keep SecDef Bob Gates around is also wrong but for a whole different set of reasons.

Richardson was the better pick for Secretary of State than Hillary Clinton. Not that Sen. Clinton can’t or won’t be effective, but the extra baggage she brings to the table is going to be a constant source of friction and her and Bill’s penchant for the limelight all but demands that a lot of public washing of dirty linen will take place.

Gov. Richardson is an accomplished international negotiator, a man with a deep and studied energy background, and a wise and invaluable advisor. The Commerce Department charter, on the other hand, is limiting and focused on purely economic outcomes. Now, it’s entirely possible that Obama has in mind an entirely different role for Commerce in his administration and that Richardson is intrigued by the new vision. Commerce does, after all, have authority in the area of technology, a space where Obama has strongly signaled major advances will take place.

But I can’t help but feel that Richardson — himself a candidate for President this season — took a bit of a sop as a reward for his early and important endorsement of Obama. I hope and trust that his influence in the Obama administration will transcend his Commerce portfolio.