Category: Rastin Mehr

An Engineer often starts with designing and building a machine or structure, and then plans on finding ways to integrate it with the people’s lives. Architects, on the other hand, start from outlining the user needs and experience, and plan on designing a machine or structure that caters to those needs.

Great architecture doesn’t always mean great performance. Great engineering and performance don’t always mean user friendly. There has to be a balance of the two, and that’s one way to find out how well an idea has been executed.

When I was a university student, for a Software Engineering project we would often start from designing the database which is considered to be the core DNA of an application software, and then we would add piles of code and the user interface (UI) on top of that. The result was something more or less functional but something that only a computer engineer could appreciate! That approach worked because as students we couldn’t afford losing marks if the software didn’t meet the requirements.

Continue reading Engineers vs. Architects

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!

Continue reading When corporate IT resists the Open Source

A friend of mine, Robert posted this on his facebook profile. I thought it was really funny!

Packt Publishing today has announced Joomla! CMS as the best PHP Open Source Content Management. Packt also confirmed that Joomla! CMS version 1.5 despite being the release candidate was the basis for this decision. The award marks the second time Joomla! has won a prestigious Packt prize. Runners up were Drupal, followed by e107.

Joomla! CMS is currently being supported by a community of 140,000+ members and a team of Core Developers and Development Work Group Members ( I happen to be one too! )

Joomla! CMS version 1.5 has been written from ground up and it has a comprehensive API with a beautiful Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. Jooml! CMS also has a very intuitive and user friendly administration interface. Joomla! is not only a great CMS out of the box, but also it makes a great framework for developing all sorts of different web applications.

The judges indicated that Joomla! is ‘possibly one of the biggest success stories in open source of late’. “Its first release came in only September 2005 and since then has grown to be one of the most downloaded Content Management Systems on the web.

• Joomla! website: Joomla! Wins ‘Best CMS Award’ Again!
• PACKT Publishing: Joomla wins best php open source content management system

[tags]joomla, packt publishing, packt, winner, award[/tags]

I’ll be there this afternoon. I believe there are at least 180 people showing up but there are only 100 seats available, so I better get there early. I bet I get to meet really interesting people there.

Building facebook apps has been one of my recent fields of interests. We usually build a web application and then think about populating it with users, on facebook we already get a large database of more than 40 million users, so now how can we say no to that!

It is possible to build FB applications using all the existing frameworks such as Joomla, Drupal, or Ruby on Rails and such. There are some differences of course, for example instead of HTML the output is going to be Facebook Markup Language ( FBML ). If you are curious, just get a FB developer account and attend few of these events. You’d be surprised what independent developers are cooking up these days.

I am already receiving ideas and inquiries from my Marketer friends. Although I must admit I still haven’t seen any real useful FB application yet. Most of them do not go beyond silly online group games. Even Facebook staff are still experimenting with the API and refining the concept using constant community feedback.

In case you wanted to make the event even more populated, here is the address:

Vancouver Film School (VFS) Theatre 1

420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings

Vancouver, BC

5:30 – 9:00 PM – Tuesday October 23rd 2007

and here is the Facebook group for this event.