I liked this illustration of 2008 Internet and tech trends by Matt Inman. He did one back in 2007, too. It’s not particularly comprehensive, I just think he’s a good illustrator. His portfolio is creative and vibrant. Now that I’m working on my own web projects, I’m starting to appreciate good, original design work.
It took me a couple days on my current PHP/MySQL project to get the DB abstraction with proper error handling, input validation, and relational support coded to the point where I’m happy with the model. This was after trying Zend_Db, Doctrine, and Propel, which are all good libraries, but I hit points where the work of getting it to do what I wanted efficiently just wasn’t worth it. I decided it would be faster to just roll my own slim library.
I’m always mystified at why DB models are such a hassle to code, so I spent a little time reading. I think I get it now. It has to do with the mapping problem between relational systems and object oriented systems.
Ted Neward, writer of several books on C# and Java, calls this “The Vietnam of Computer Science“. What he’s saying is that object-relational mapping (ORM) quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. The problem stems from the conceptual disconnect between the language and the data store.
Hoping to shed additional light on the subject, I went looking for alternative perspectives to my PHP/MySQL solution. Since it’s all the rage for ease of use, I was mostly curious about Ruby, the Rails framework, and object oriented databases.
Ruby is certainly different, but after some reading, I’m starting to understand why the language lends itself better to the OO style of DB abstraction. On top of that, Rails has powerful scaffolding that lets you flesh out pieces very fast without the code getting ugly. With ActiveRecord in mind from the ground up, things can be pretty elegant some times.
I also found some really cool systems for bridging the gap between languages and data stores. For instance, check out MagLev for Smalltalk/Ruby. Imagine using an OO DB so you don’t have to do the relational mapping, doing it in a distributed fashion, and using things like shared memory more efficiently as an object staging area between your running site scripts and the DB. That’s kind of MagLev.
All of this is interesting, but for the current project I’m sticking with PHP. However, on the next project I might try Ruby on Rails. I want to see first hand if and how it overcomes some of the challenges.
On a slightly tangential subject, a part of me really dislikes the weak typing of both Ruby and PHP. The net effect in PHP is that you pretty much end up using arrays for everything, making it hard to keep track of structure. Ruby on Rails does get around some of the weak typing issues with some better built-in validation, scaffolding, and member attributes (I’m not sure if that’s what they call them). Sometimes I’d rather be doing C#.
A few days ago, I started development on the web site portion of one of my new projects. The project is comprised of mobile applications working in tandem with a main web site to deliver a service. However, this post isn’t about the specifics of that project. It’s about a paradigm shift in web development that I have noticed upon returning to the space.
I started development as I always have: prototyping a MySQL database and then constructing PHP pages to flesh out an experience. There would be one PHP script per user facing page, and each would be rife with HTML, include statements, session checks, database queries, display logic, and so on. A library directory would contain includes with common procedures.
Then it hit me: this is exactly how I would have done it five years ago. Web development has changed in that time, and surely I am wiser now. How can I do this better?
The approach I just described is what I refer to as the traditional PHP approach. There may be more official terms, but that’s what I think of it as. Data, presentation, and procedural logic are all intertwined. You write a set of library procedures for manipulating data, all following the create, read, update, delete (CRUD) model, and then call these procedures within PHP/HTML pages for each user facing page.
You usually end up with files like this:
<?php require_once('config.inc.php'); ?> <html> <head> <title>Search</title> </head> <body> <form action="" method="post" name="searchform"> Search <input name="search" type="text"/><br/> <input name="search_submit" type="submit" value="Search"/> </form> <?php if (isset($_POST['search'])) { require_once(LIB_DIR . '/Db.inc.php'); require_once(LIB_DIR . '/Search.inc.php'); $db = DbSingleton(MY_DB_STRING); $res = Search($_POST['search'], $db, 'table'); while (($row = $res->fetchRow())) { PrintRow($row); } } ?> </body> </html>
This is a simple abstraction for a search page using the traditional approach. An included config file defines the location of the library and a database connection string. There is some HTML for the form and a PHP block for querying the database and displaying results.
As you can see, logic, data, and presentation are all in one file. Think about this for a moment, and you’ll realize that this approach is going to get real ugly, real fast. Without clean separation, it becomes harder to isolate tasks such as web design from tasks such as business logic and data manipulation.
Addressing this problem is the whole point of hot, new frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Rails separates data, presentation, and logic, and it achieves this through the use of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm.
MVC is a design pattern for structuring applications. How you interpret that pattern is up to you, but in general, the pieces are:
In other words, the controller interprets a request, instantiates the appropriate models and gets the data, then it packages the data up and hands it to the requested view for presentation.
MVC makes sense as a good paradigm for developing a web site, and Ruby on Rails is the predominant example. However, that doesn’t mean one should drop their favorite language in favor of Ruby on Rails. I like PHP, and PHP can do the MVC pattern just fine. To that regard, I found 7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails by Derek Sivers to be enlightening. Here is a quote:
I spent two years trying to make Rails do something it wasn’t meant to do, then realized my old abandoned language (PHP, in my case) would do just fine if approached with my new Rails-gained wisdom.
The “Rails-gained wisdom” - the MVC paradigm that I’m talking about - is really what’s important, not the language you do it in. As Derek found out, Rails still has some drawbacks despite all the buzz. You might be better off applying the “Rails-gained wisdom” to a language you are more comfortable with.
If you are a PHP person like me, you don’t have to roll your own framework. The PHP community has joined the MVC bandwagon with projects like Zend Framework, Symfony, and CakePHP.
I recommend trying Rails or one of the PHP frameworks before trying to write your own. People interpret the MVC pattern differently. Trying other frameworks will help you discover which interpretation style works best for you.
I like the Zend Framework the best, and this article pretty much explains my reasons. Plus, it’s sponsored by Zend Technologies, the creators of PHP. Some resources I’ve found helpful are:
This is the extent of my discoveries so far. I hope this post helps someone else thinking of starting a web project. I’ll be using the Zend Framework in my new project, and we’ll see how it goes.
Mix 2008 ended yesterday. It’s a web development conference run by Microsoft. Check out Ray Ozzie’s keynote.
I found Ray’s 2007 keynote to be more interesting. The 2008 keynote focused more on Microsoft products, whereas I felt the 2007 keynote was about broader web trends and provided some great insights into the future of the web.
For those of you that don’t know him, Ray Ozzie is the new Chief Software Architect at Microsoft who is taking over the role from Bill Gates.
Also, there was a candid interview with Steve Ballmer. The interviewer is Guy Kawasaki, who is the author of some of my favorite books for startups and is well known for his evangelism at Apple in the ’80s.
Proper typography can mean the difference between an elegant web site and an utterly hideous one. How to Size Text in CSS on A List Apart gives particularly good sizing advice to help you achieve typographic perfection. It has an extensive set of screenshots demonstrating the results of various experiments in Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, and Firefox.