unoriginal1729 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} unoriginal1729) wrote,@ 2006-11-29 00:53:00 |
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Zimki
Yes, it's me again, filling your friends page with boring stuff because I don't have anyone else to talk about these things with. Sorry. I won't be offended if you remove me from your friends. Much.
So, what is going on in my life? Well, despite the general dullness it has been a bit emotionally stressful! I'm talking to about four potential clients at the moment, so there are lots of ups and downs as they sound very enthusiastic, then less so, and then there's silence for another few days. I signed an NDA for a job the other night, but have since had the job held since the venture capitalist funding the venture is not happy about employing me. That's a bit frustrating; I would be really interested to see their business plan, as it's in a market that I'm not at all familiar with. Hopefully one of the jobs will come off soon, as I'm getting bored of pasta.
This morning I came across Zimki, which is a hosted javascript-based web development service. What attracted me to it is that they have a prize of a free MacBook Pro for the best two applications developed using it!
Initially I felt very positive about it. It makes complete sense to remove the continual sysadmin headaches that running your own development and live servers brings. Being able to trivially copy code and data (they are defined differently here!) between live and development sites sounds good too. And having enough capacity available should your sites suddenly get a lot of traffic would be great. But on to the detail, devil and all.
Persistent storage is provided in the form of an object database. Searching for an instance of a class with certain properties is quite simple, though there are name extensions used to specify types of search. I imagine that performance of such searches across large amounts of data is poor (certainly linear time) too. You have to explicitly save modified objects, unlike the ZODB, which automatically stores object modifications if you follow a few rules such as using persistent lists and dicts as appropriate.
Templating is done using the TrimPath templating language. Whilst the language is usually interpreted on the client (why would you want to do that??), at least with Zimki it is done on the server. It's not a pretty templating language, but it looks okay.
The Zimki web user interface is quite slow, and the documentation is badly formatted due to someone having made all html
I don't really feel that Zimki is good enough to replace a good framework at the moment. I don't really understand why you would want to use Javascript on the server side. What's so great about having the same language on the server and the client? Personally I find it less confusing having separate languages, as I can remember what is running where. I suspect that some Java programmers realised that they were more productive in client-side scripting than in server-side development, so figured that running javascript on the server was the way to go. I disagree. A dynamic language is always required for GUI development, but not javascript.
Zimki feels a bit like Zope 2 used to. Some things are really easy, but there's a lot of messy stuff in there, and it's going to take a lot of work before it's really neat. Example code with lines like
doesn't fill me with confidence.
The project is going to be open-source early next year. It will be interesting to see how the framework is developed after that.
For now, I need to think of a useful web application which I could develop using Zimki in order to gain myself a nice new computer. But I don't think that I want to use it for any of the jobs I am working on. I love the power and flexibility of the Pylons framework, which seems to get the balance of having sensible defaults but being easily configurable spot-on. I've become quite disillusioned with Zope 3, but I wonder whether I should ever have been using it anyway. Plone seems to be more accurately on the level of development I am usually working, and whilst Zope 3 is new, extremely elegant and does everything the right way, the availability of so many useful products for Plone and Zope 2 make them preferred environments - especially since Zope 2 can now run Zope 3 applications.
So, if anyone has any ideas for cool web applications, particularly ones suited to being powered by an object database, please let me know!
Yes, it's me again, filling your friends page with boring stuff because I don't have anyone else to talk about these things with. Sorry. I won't be offended if you remove me from your friends. Much.
So, what is going on in my life? Well, despite the general dullness it has been a bit emotionally stressful! I'm talking to about four potential clients at the moment, so there are lots of ups and downs as they sound very enthusiastic, then less so, and then there's silence for another few days. I signed an NDA for a job the other night, but have since had the job held since the venture capitalist funding the venture is not happy about employing me. That's a bit frustrating; I would be really interested to see their business plan, as it's in a market that I'm not at all familiar with. Hopefully one of the jobs will come off soon, as I'm getting bored of pasta.
This morning I came across Zimki, which is a hosted javascript-based web development service. What attracted me to it is that they have a prize of a free MacBook Pro for the best two applications developed using it!
Initially I felt very positive about it. It makes complete sense to remove the continual sysadmin headaches that running your own development and live servers brings. Being able to trivially copy code and data (they are defined differently here!) between live and development sites sounds good too. And having enough capacity available should your sites suddenly get a lot of traffic would be great. But on to the detail, devil and all.
Persistent storage is provided in the form of an object database. Searching for an instance of a class with certain properties is quite simple, though there are name extensions used to specify types of search. I imagine that performance of such searches across large amounts of data is poor (certainly linear time) too. You have to explicitly save modified objects, unlike the ZODB, which automatically stores object modifications if you follow a few rules such as using persistent lists and dicts as appropriate.
Templating is done using the TrimPath templating language. Whilst the language is usually interpreted on the client (why would you want to do that??), at least with Zimki it is done on the server. It's not a pretty templating language, but it looks okay.
The Zimki web user interface is quite slow, and the documentation is badly formatted due to someone having made all html
<code> tags appear on separate lines even when they only represent identifiers in the middle of sentences. Turning off the style made the docs readable!I don't really feel that Zimki is good enough to replace a good framework at the moment. I don't really understand why you would want to use Javascript on the server side. What's so great about having the same language on the server and the client? Personally I find it less confusing having separate languages, as I can remember what is running where. I suspect that some Java programmers realised that they were more productive in client-side scripting than in server-side development, so figured that running javascript on the server was the way to go. I disagree. A dynamic language is always required for GUI development, but not javascript.
Zimki feels a bit like Zope 2 used to. Some things are really easy, but there's a lot of messy stuff in there, and it's going to take a lot of work before it's really neat. Example code with lines like
catch(e) {} // ignore errorsdoesn't fill me with confidence.
The project is going to be open-source early next year. It will be interesting to see how the framework is developed after that.
For now, I need to think of a useful web application which I could develop using Zimki in order to gain myself a nice new computer. But I don't think that I want to use it for any of the jobs I am working on. I love the power and flexibility of the Pylons framework, which seems to get the balance of having sensible defaults but being easily configurable spot-on. I've become quite disillusioned with Zope 3, but I wonder whether I should ever have been using it anyway. Plone seems to be more accurately on the level of development I am usually working, and whilst Zope 3 is new, extremely elegant and does everything the right way, the availability of so many useful products for Plone and Zope 2 make them preferred environments - especially since Zope 2 can now run Zope 3 applications.
So, if anyone has any ideas for cool web applications, particularly ones suited to being powered by an object database, please let me know!
