specializing in digital media technologies

Through an Amazon service, this blog is now available for reading on Amazon’s Kindle. It’s a subscription service, priced at $1.99/month (for what it’s worth Amazon sets the price and keeps most of the money). I don’t know what kind of interest there is in this, but I thought I’d make it an option. This does mean I’ll need to work harder to make the blog content meaningful, though, if people will be paying good money for it! If there’s anything you’d like to see in this blog, or see more or less of, please let me know.

There won’t be any new posts for the next week as I’m planning on taking some time off to enjoy the holidays. I will post some more before the end of the year, though, and I have already started some very rough drafts. The topics to be covered over the next month or so include better error reporting, choosing development tools (IDE’s and text editors), and some notes on the 2008 Adobe MAX conference and my first foray into Flex and Flex Builder. Thanks for your interest in what I have to say and happy holidays to those that celebrate holidays around this time of year.

I began my computer consulting career in 1999 as a PHP programmer. For several years, all of the Web sites I created were written in PHP. (I have done a couple of ASP.NET sites, and although I find the technology and the development tools to be impressive, the requirements that you develop and run ASP.NET on Windows is a non-starter for me.) In 2005, while at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, I first played with the Ruby on Rails framework, released a couple of months earlier. So, like many people, I came to Ruby after seeing how brilliant the Rails framework was. At that time, there really were no PHP frameworks that were comparable, although perhaps the Zend Framework, among others, are close enough today. I wanted to talk a bit about how I see PHP and Ruby, but first, a discussion of frameworks… (continue reading…)