eds.activemath.org

I came accross Why PHP should never be taught which is hilarious!

I always had a small mistrust of PHP as being a too easy language but this post is a perfect illustration of how things can go wrong if you have the slightest ignorance about all the details of the environment you are programming for! As a summary it says… equality-test in PHP is not transitive!

Over and over the discussion of JSON vs XML (vs YAML…) appears: they are compared as languages to serialize object graphs. I may be old fashioned but I find there’s no valid reason for anything but XML.

Here’s a set claims in favor of JSON (or YAML it seems):

• JSON is more readable: I am sorry but I don’t find this true, being XML it’s much easier to know where parts start and end since end-tags are named. Most of the times the object graph is not sufficiently indented to recognize any structure hence readability only appears after you’ve tweaked a bit.

Since a few weeks, we are playing with Google Web Toolkit, a very nice tool that compiles java code to JavaScript. Among the features of GWT, transparent remote server invocation is offered. The nice thing is that it right away forces you to consider services asynchronous which yields responsive user-interfaces. The wrong thing is that it seems to be fully version dependent to a point where, basically, one wishes to throw it all away.

Sorry, this time it really is unrelated… but I just wanted to celebrate the joy of OmniWeb again and again.

OmniWeb is a commercial browser, not very expensive, one with customer support and a polish that you never get anywhere else for many aspects! It has secret features for web-developers and this fluidity that pushes you to abuse it…