Category Archives: Tips

Generate Joomla! 1.5 MVC the Ruby on Rails style

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Joomla! CMSJoomla! CMS

One of the great features about the Ruby on Rails Model View Controller (MVC) architecture is the concept of generators which can quickly create the mvc layers.

The Joomla! 1.5 framework is now using an MVC by choice architectre, however the generators are still missing. Joomla! 1.5 is no-longer just a Content Management System, it is a great framework for building all kinds of web applications with a CMS edge.

My friend and business associate Arash from PeerGlobe technology has written an awesome tutorial to help you Build Joomla! MVCs the Ruby on Rails Style.

[tags]mvc, joomla, rubyonrails, tutorial[/tags]

Clients who don’t get to update their own CMS powered websites!

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In the last few weeks I got a few phone calls from people who had their sites build using some content management system (open source or secret source!) and they were asking me if they could gain access to the back-end of their own site and update some of the content. After some poking around and asking some questions we learned that their web designers are not providing their clients the administrative access and still continuing to charge for every little website update which could easily be done by the clients themselves.

Hey guys … that’s not a fair to your clients!

And to the smart website owners: if any web designer is doing that to you, I think you should honestly give them the boot and seek professional service somewhere else!

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Not all programmers can develop software

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Alright! here is a piece of information that I think every product, marketing, or human resource manager may want to keep in mind:

Every Software Developer can program, but not every Programmer can develop software.

Does it makes sense? here is another example:

JK Rowling can read and write English, but not every college graduate can write the next best selling Harry Potter book even though they both know how to read and write English.

I can get all fancy and discuss all the technical details that set software developers apart from programmers, but I think I communicated my point. To become a software developer one has to spend months and years to program in different languages, and they also learn how to treat code as building blocks to build more elaborate structures know as computer software or applications.

In smaller teams, software developers often design, plan and program their ideas themselves. In larger teams they may focus on the design and planning and hand over the implementation to the Programmers, although programming is often a joyful experience so software developers usually create some programming time for themselves too. Why do you think so many professional developers devote their time to open source projects around the world? because it is fun and exciting!

Normally, software developers are pricier than programmers. If your project is a web or desktop application you may want to consider it a good investment, or else you may end up with a product that seems to be working ( if you are lucky ) but suffers from poor architecture, performance issues or a phenomenon called the “Spaghetti Code!” or the “Dog’s Breakfast!” which makes it very hard to maintain.

You wouldn’t serve that kind of cuisine to your end-users, would you?

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[tags]Software Developers, Programmers, hiring, staff, recruitment, skills, talents, project, project management, human resource, product development[/tags]

When corporate IT resists the Open Source

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Larger companies are slowly introducing Open Source technologies to their organizations and, as most of us know, change even for better isn’t often very easy, specially if they had already invested in technologies such as Microsoft .NET and Windows Servers and subsequently hired staff who are only specialized in those technologies.

Many of the cutting edge Web2.0 innovations are happening in the open source world and they have been developed in technologies such as the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) and Ruby on Rails. The problem is, when the management decides to utilize some of these technologies they immediately face the resistance from the internal IT team.

Reproducing many of the Web2.0 sales and marketing tools in the proprietary world is very costly and expensive and the results are often not so impressive either. In fact I see many smaller companies who are utilizing more advanced web applications with slick user interfaces to power their blogs, content management driven websites, online forums, and Intranets, all thanks to the open source technologies. On the other hand, some larger sales and marketing companies with much larger budgets are starting to feel deprived from the new wave of internet applications, because utilizing one means exposing the internal IT staff to things they aren’t used to see!

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