The web has come a long way since it’s inception. No longer is it a mismash of ugly looking static pages, posted by scientists. Ecommerce has gone nuts, allowing people to perform online banking and shopping. The advent of blogging has allowed anyone with a net connection to become an author and post their opinions on stuff. Web 2.0 social websites have brought the net back to the people - all in all a pretty exciting time.
However! There are some technologies that seem to be gaining steam because that is what everyone expected the web to do two years ago. The reason that these technologies will fail is because they are trying to force a paradigm where it doesn’t fit. This technique was fine a couple of years ago, but now that the web has started to find it’s feet, the incompatibility is becoming clearer.
One that immediately comes to mind is video-blogging (vblogs). Ever since people realised you could download a video off the net, on-demand video has been touted as the next big thing. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will happen. Why? It is an old medium. It is still one-way. You can’t interact with the video - you are forced to sit and watch and listen to the story. You can’t skim view it, nor can you do other stuff while watching it (You can almost get away with listening to it and doing something else, in which case, it would make more sense to listen to an audio podcast). Not to mention the speed issues - broadband still hasn’t gotten fast enough to really make it work. We young and part of the now generation - we don’t want to wait for for a video download only to find out it is crap.
Another is online newspapers. Sure, these have been around for a while but they have really missed the mark on the web. What is the point of setting up a newspaper to look and feel like it’s real-world counterpart? If I wanted to read my news like that, I would go and buy the paper. The way slashdot distributes it’s news is much closer to the mark. Give me tidbits from every story. That way I can make up my mind straight away if I want to continue reading. Trying to “flick” through a paper online in a traditional sense is too much effort.
What other technologies can you think that are being pushed, but don’t really belong?
Apologies for those wanting to read my blog yesterday - my service provider managed to kill most of their users connection for about 12 hours 
But I’m back online now which is the main thing…
Now that that MadPilot Productions site is live, I wanted to run FastCGI. Even though the site is relatively low traffic, I was intrigued to see whether the speedup would be noticable. It is. Unfortunately, the literature I have seen hasn’t really made it clear how to set this up on a server that runs virtualhosts, so here is how it works.
To make a ruby on rails site run in production mode you need to add the following line to the apache.conf file:
FastCgiServer /path/to/site/public/dispatch.fcgi -initial-env RAILS_ENV=production -processes 15 -idle-timeout 60
However, putting this between VirtualHost tags fails. The solution is simple really - put it OUTSIDE the VirtualHost tag. You can have multiple entries in the config file. Since I split my virtual hosts into seperate files (ala Debian, even though I run a Gentoo server) I just drop it in bottom on the file below the closing VirtaulHost tag.
As an aside - Gentoo has a slight problem in that there may throw an error about User/Groups when starting. To fix, put the lines
User apache
Group apache
before the FastCgiIpcDir /tmp/fcgi_ipc directive in the [number]_mod_fastcgi.conf file that is located in /etc/apache/modules.d/ directory.
The MadPilot Productions website now has a new look and a new scripting engine driving it - Ruby on Rails!
Leave your comments and tell me what you think :)Â
Over at Port 80, we recently added a Ruby on Rails forum. This was met with both excitement and doubt from forum members. There were those that were excited about a new framework that promises to reduce development time by taking the tedium out of development. There were those who were doubtful about a system that has had a lot of hype, but hasn’t had the market infiltration to match it. Many people think that anyting that rises so quickly will only fall just as quickly. Will this happen to rails? No idea - only time can give us the answer.
However, I think there is an underlying factor here that has been over looked. The idea of frameworks designed specifically to speed up web development is what we should be getting excited about.
Web development, and to a degree, software development has changed. Customers are more than ever expecting cheap software that is good. It doesn’t make sense for us as developers to waste our precious time re-implementing the same parts of a system for different jobs. Introduction of frameworks that do this simply can only be a good thing.
One hurdle for many professional coders is the lead-time required for learning a new framework. Be the very definition, frameworks expect the coder to do things in a certain way. This may put many coders off, because they have to spend time learning, not coding and this costs money. What they may not realise, though, is that every hour they spend re-coding form validators instead of learning a framework that does it for them, adds up over time.
The old adage of work smarter not harder is extremely relevent here. There will never be more hours in a day. Trying to use all of them is impossible. Trying to improve productivity with out changes in thinking won’t work. We as web programmers know how this web thing works. The designers of these frameworks know how this web thing works. We really should be working together to work smarter.
