ThinkingNectar

I was fortunate to attend April PHP User Group meetup 2008, again at the beautiful SMU campus. The topic as not PHPish as of previous meetup. We instead have Micheal Lim of Comiqs and Choon Keat of SharedCopy to present on Django and Ruby on Rails respectively.

First, it is just so that a couple of days ago, Google announces Google App Engine and I looked forward to the presentation on Django. And for Ruby on Rails, it always had been a open secret of mine to meddle with it and see if it really makes programmers happy.

Micheal presentation was simple and straight forward. Nothing too fanciful but he shows hard facts about the processing ability (link to follow once I get to see the slide) that Python have over the other language. Also the cited that Python is a general language and is used by Google and Youtube. And PHP, he cheekily stated in his slide that Uncle Harry uses it. Funny guy.

But impresses me is that Django comes with a adminstrative panel when an app is created.  Pretty much save a chunk of development and more often than not, the UI of  the admin panel is secondary when time and developer effort is limited. A rather good feature.  I guess PHPMyAdmin will work as well, but a admin panel is always welcomed.

For Comiqs, Python/Django is used, with the normal HTML and Javascript, together with Flash for the end user GUI.

Choon Keat is up next and he comes across to me as a natural presenter and he presentation was entertaining as well as informative. Of course aided by a generous dose of RoR marketing material in his slides.

He presentation caught my attention when he talked about version control in source code, SQL changes and deployment. Deployment version control interests me the most and I might sound amatuerish if I am to admit that currently we do not have a integrated deployment version control system/work flow in place. Capistrano was mention as the tool to use, which Micheal Lim uses on Comiqs too.

Moving on, Choon Keat covered closure and alias. Both which I find to give a lot of flexibility to the developer.

To end off, I will state some chunk of wisdom from the 2 speakers and then some:

“Framework for perfectionists with a deadline”

-Micheal Lim, on the tagline of Django

“When I launch my website, millions of people do not come”

-Choon Keat, on deployment control

“Creating is cheap, just do and try.”

-Choon Keat, on the current dropping cost of app development

“Commons and exception, highway and traffic light”

-Choon Keat, on picking the correct tools for the best fit job

“Ruby is slow”

-Shurn Heng, on Choon Keat when Choon Keat was the last to react when Micheal Cheng needs a  napkin

Check out the live blog over with Nicole for this meetup.