OneMind

NOLOH made its officlal world debut yesterday. Self-described as a "lightweight, on-demand, object oriented Web application development platform", this is a powerhouse of a technology that I've been using in pre-release for nearly three years! So comes to an end one of the longest beta periods in my software experience. Asher Snyder and Philip Ross are the programming geniuses behind this platform and Philip Goetz is the guiding light and business head on the team.

Even though this is NOLOH's official debut, Shafer Media (now the Shafer Walters Group) and I have built several Web apps around it, most notably our New Media Award-winning Protector Network (TPN) site for Capital Insurance Group (CIG). I personally have come to love this framework despite the fact that it's written in PHP and requires that scripting language's somewhat ugly syntax for you to create Web applications. I've written about it here before and you can expect to see a lot more about it now that the wraps are off.  You can go download a free developer's copy or use it free in a developer sandbox provided by NOLOH. I recommend you start with the latter; the sandbox comes pre-filled with a good number of progressively more complex examples that will ease your transition into this way of developing Web apps.

If you're already used to thinking and programming in objects, you'll probably take to NOLOH like a duck to water, even if PHP is a new language for you. One of the members of my TPN team was a sysadmin who decided he might like to dabble in some programming. Two months later we can hardly drag him away from coding and he started out with no background in objects or PHP.

All of the alternatives to NOLOH that I know about (other than perhaps some Java solutions; I stopped watching that space a long time ago) require you to use multiple markup and scripting languages. With NOLOH, you write a superset of PHP with as clean a syntax and CSS. That's it. No HTML (in fact, NOLOH is an acronym for Not One Line Of HTML). No JavaScript (though NOLOH will accommodate JS code if you have legacy features you need to implement in your app).

NOLOH takes your code and generates all the JavaScript necessary to generate your Web app's views in the user's browser. The generated code is generally less than 20 lines of HTML and JavaScript that no code hijacker or snoop could use to learn more about your site or steal code or other valuable information. The generated code is also fine-tuned by NOLOH on the server to display properly in all supported browsers but you don't have to do any coding to make that happen. It, like a dozen other important features that I don't want to take the time to go into now, comes along for free just for using NOLOH. (I can't resist one, though. Every single component in the NOLOH library can be AJAX-ified with, typically, one line of NOLOH code and no need to include a JS library.)

With a free developer license and a remarkably low license fee per deployed server and domain of $199, NOLOH is eminently affordable. If you're putting together an educational or open source project, the deployment license is free.

Check it out if  you're in the market for a way to greatly accelerate your Web app development efforts, avoid the mind-shattering roadblocks of cross-browser support, and just can't face another 3 a.m. HTML/JavaScript/CSS/PHP debugging session.

Posted via email from danshafer’s posterous