November 29th, 2007
Why all this fascination with Ruby on Rails?
The success of 37signals...these guys have built some cool stuff in very small teams.
But in general I believe that a lot of the coding developers (as opposed to user interface developers such as myself) like trying new languages like some men like trying fresh girlfriends.
Each time a new language comes along they think this might be the one.
For those of us just trying to produce working applications efficiently for clients, switching languages is a waste of time and money.
i.e. we will switch but only if the incentives are enormous or our current technology has badly dated.
Many developers are choosing to remain in PHP. CakePHP is PHP's answer to the Rails framework on Ruby.
Dominican developer Kevin Lloyd has written a succinct list of the reasons to choose CakePHP over RoR:
- laziness
- speed
- shared host support
- cost
The big debate about Ruby on Rails versus PHP was set off by Alex Payne of Twitter's complaint about the speed of RoR in an interview:
All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise....there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.
Kevin adds:
I don’t do Web Development for my health or for fun. I design web applications for clients. A lot of my work involves redesign of already existing sites. How do I say to a client: Hey, although your current web host that you’ve prepaid a year for is sufficient for 90% or the stuff you can throw at it, I’m using this new technology and you need to shell out some more $$$ for a host that can handle it.
That's our situation as well. We love web development but it is a means to an end. User interface, front end, user convenience. Of course reliability and security are very important to us as well, but that is more a question of coding practice than coding language.
Read the rest of this entry »
alec |
WordPress |
October 22nd, 2006
What is making the web work for you?
Making the web work for you is making your website generate more leads and more customers and more publicity for your business than the time or money you put in.
Happy Foliovision Clients - 9.2007
We help our clients have more days like this every year.
We make owning a successful website easy and profitable,
leaving you time to live your life and run your business.
For a successful professional one of the toughest part of creating a successful website is the time it sucks away from other crucial parts of your business:
- speaking with clients
- making the deals with clients
- training staff
- fitness and leisure activities
You are successful. You know that every available hour for your business should be spent with your clients or on strategy.
Why would you want to take on a second career as a website publisher? If you're smart, you wouldn't. You are successful - you don't have time.
But trusting your website to just anyone won't work either. The website must:
- look good
- have lots of information
- be popular in the search engines
- convert leads
- regularly add new information
Blow any one of these and your website will be next to worthless. Most web design companies can get one or two of these right. Frankly you need to hit all five, if you want to have lasting success on the web.
All of our client websites have all of those traits. And our websites require minimal intervention from the client.
On the other hand, many of our clients do send us ideas about new features for their websites. From idea to fully functional feature is our issue. Your idea can be a functional new feature in as little as 48 hours, leaving you free to keep doing what you do best: running a successful professional practice and improving your business.
Our clients average about 5 times return on investment on new business alone from their website. We are not talking about referral business converted but only about new internet leads.
Business they would not have obtained in any other way than the internet.
If you are a successful professional in private practice, we can do the same for you.
Many of our customers businesses generally experience close to 100% annual growth while we are working with them.
An accident. We think not.
and let us know about your situation. We'll let you know if and how we can help you.
If you'd like to go it alone, don't miss our weblog on SEO and internet marketing. We share a lot of the nuts and bolts of how to develop a successful website there.
martina |
WordPress |
