Category: Software

Comet and the opportunity for FMS/RTMP

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Most of the challenges they are discussing in this article could be addressed through a real-time communication system/protocal such as FMS/RTMP. Heavier than a simple Apache web server, but scalable to meet large web deployments using real-time technologies… hmmmm…

web hosting – management tools are generally terrible

With the exception of my current hosting provider, MediaTemple (www.mediatemple.net), most management tools out there are painfully terrible. Add to that the pathetic interfaces used to manage your database tools, and you’ve got a terrible experience. It’s too bad no one can make money on these application areas, because the world’s pseudo-geeks like myself are totally lost attempting to use them. Perhaps that’s just a “barrier-to-entry,” but it shouldn’t be.

A web 2.0 sideliner

I’m a certified web2.0 sideliner. I visit techcrunch.com, del.icio.us, slashdot, digg, and many other sites each day watching as the worlds most simple ideas are magically translated into three form-fields and some pastel color schemes.

If you don’t have at least two reactions per page of “doh!, why didn’t I think of that…” while reading about these companies, then you might want to stop there. If you are like me, all this does is encourage you to throw away any inspirations of building complex workflow or business process-related applications in favor of these rounded-corner-never-refresh experiences.

I’ve set out to write a number of these web services over the past few months to see what it was all about. The first started in Cold Fusion (since I knew it and I work for Adobe (formerly Macromedia). I got a basic page going with some fields, a database, and some basic tagging of the content. That wasn’t very fun though (I’ve worked with CF since 3.1 days), so I decided I’d try my hands at LAMP. However, in the abscence of a linux box, this project became WAMP. Learning PHP has proven to be quite easy, and the endless source-code examples out there help to show you the way. I decided to get “really crazy” and add the prototpye.js file to my scripts, so I’ve put an end to the “reload” button. I even removed the submit button to make sure I complied with the three-form-element mantra.

What’s next? Well, I still have to pick my pastel-pallet for my web2.0 site, come up with a cool logo and some css, and oh yeah, think of something so simple I can’t possibly believe I can make money on it. As soon as I’ve got that idea, I then need to go back to one of the sites above and note that someone else did it two months ago. Then back to the web2.0 sidelines…