Tag Archives: development

Google Wave impressions from a developer point of view

A couple of days ago I finally had my Google Wave sand­box account. Given that I just fin­ished devel­op­ing my very first robot, I thought I’d share some impres­sions on the whole thing. From the user-​side, things are far from being ready. Some impor­tant fea­tures are still miss­ing, just to name one you can’t remove user from a wave once they joined (or, alter­na­tively, there’s no way to ignore a wave). Indeed, given that I joined sev­eral waves to try other people appli­ca­tions, I’m get­ting con­tin­u­ous noti­fi­ca­tions. But anyway, the whole thing is to me like a great devel­op­ment play­ground where I can make all the sorts of experiments.

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When the “Python Vs PHP” war matters

Yesterday I had a meet­ing with a cus­tomer about a new site I should develop for them. Since they’re a book pub­lisher, they wanted an online book store. Apart from the tech­ni­cal details (the site isn’t as simple as you may believe, they need a lot of not-so-easy-to-do stuff), the most impor­tant point we focused on is the fact that they have an inter­nal IT tech­ni­cian that han­dles all their com­puter needs. If you’re asking your­self why this mat­ters, keep reading:

  • me (to be precise, my company) stopped development of PHP sites about one year ago in favor of Python
  • we release the web site’s code to them
  • for this project, we haven’t been asked any kind of future support; this means that when the site is finished, we won’t touch the product anymore (unless they don’t pay us to do the modifies they need)
  • but they don’t want to pay us to these modifies, because they have their internal IT technician
  • their technician knows only PHP (and he never even known the Python’s existence until yesterday)

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