Posts filed under 'Business'
Recently I found myself constrained by the puny 200GB of my Mac Book Pro and I bought a 500GB Seagate drive to replace it (a fast 7200 rpm one).
The Macbook Pro has no easy access for the drive so you have to resort to dismantling the case to access it.
This put me off replacing the drive because I would probably be voiding the warranty and was running the risk of damaging this expensive piece of equipment.
I’ve been filling the drive with pictures from my recent camera purchase and I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I bought the new drive and went online to find some good tutorial on how to crack open the Macbook Pro case.
After a few searches, I noticed that many people were referring to the iFixit.com website.
It was very easy to find the tutorial I was looking for, I didn’t have to register, and each step was made very clear and simple.
It took no time to open the case and replace the drive.
I was very happy with that find.
Now, that’s not the end of the story.
A couple of days before I replaced the drive the left fan of the laptop suddenly became noisy. This would happen a few times a day, at random, and would last 10-20 minutes.
My only solution to get this repaired was to get to the local Apple service shop. Even though I knew exactly which part number was to be replaced, they still wanted me to:
- go across town to visit them so they could see for themselves what the problem was: annoying because the problem was intermittent so I may have to go for nothing.
- wait for the part to arrive a few days later.
- go back to leave the laptop
- go again to collect the repaired laptop the next day or so.
So all in all: about 6h spend travelling back and forth + no laptop for a couple of day + the risk that some indiscreet technician start looking through my personal stuff.
Instead, I went back to the iFixit website:
- identified my machine
- found out the list of spare parts available from their store
- added the fan to my cart
- paid for it.
- found a guide that showed how to replace the part.
That took me all of 10 minutes; I placed my order on Thursday and the next Monday I received the part … halfway across the globe!
I also got a survey request from iFixit and left some comments, from which I got back two nice detailed email follow-ups, one from the CEO saying they were implementing my remarks as part of their site improvement efforts.
Well, I thought I would share this story. It’s not that often that you get excited by an online vendor that not only does its job well but goes beyond expectations.
August 26th, 2009
I like buying technical books.
Unfortunately, here in Hong Kong, we have less choice: there are not that many technical bookstores that cater for English-language books and the selection is rather limited.
So whenever a book isn’t available here, I buy it online as a PDF.
It’s cheaper, saves postage and I can keep them handy on my desktop computer at work and my laptop.
I love Safari and being able to access such a large library of books online in such a flexible way is great, but if you’re not in the US, the experience is not always that pleasant, with the site sometimes becoming a bit too slow for comfort.
The publishers I regularly buy ebooks from are O’Reilly, when they make the PDF available, and Apress.
O’Reilly’s PDF may have your subscribtion details embedded at the bottom of each page.
It’s perfectly reasonable and doesn’t ruin the experience: I can still search, copy snippets to the clipboard and print the book if I need to keep an annotated copy.
Apress encrypt the PDF with your account email. Again, that’s fine by me, they don’t prevent me from using the book and it’s not a great annoyance to have to type the password to unlock the book.
Now comes Wrox (Wiley): they publish fine books and even have some available as ebooks.
The biggest issue I have though is that they assume that people who buy their books are all potential criminals:
- The book is as expensive in paper as it is in ebook format. That can’t be right: ebooks have zero reproduction cost while paper books have huge material costs.
- The ebook version needs to be registered with Adobe Digital Editions that locks it to a particular machine.
- You’re only allowed to download the ebook to 4 different PCs and you’ve got 2 weeks to do so.
This seems fair, but it’s not: if I change OS or PC, I’ve already burnt 2 licenses.
- You can’t copy/paste more than a page at a time, up to 10 pages every week… that’s just a bit silly.
- Can’t copy any of the artwork, diagrams, etc.
- Doesn’t say anything about what happens if Adobe drops their particular DRM software or if I need to use the book on the next laptop I’ll buy a year from now.
- Adobe Digital Edition only supports Windows and Mac and a Sony reader. So using Linux (even though Wrox plublishes books about it) or a Kindle or any other mobile device is out of the question.
So the net advantage of buying an eBook from Wrox (Wiley) is: your guess is as good as mine.
Yeah, you can buy each chapter as a PDF: great value, at US$4.99 per chapter, the book is costing you nearly US$100. You can get the fully printed version for half the cost…
Still, I’ll concede that being able to download a particular chapter can be useful.
The bottom line is: if your book gets printed, it’s going to be pirated and distributed for free in ebook format within a couple of weeks of being published.
While thinking they are protecting their copyright, Wiley is in fact punishing people who buy their books.
I’ll stick with Apress and O’Reilly I think. At least I don’t feel treated like a thief.
12FEB2010 Update: Wrox is now trying DRM-free PDF ebooks. We can only applaud this decision. While the offering is still limited at the moment, most or all of their books will eventually be available DRM-free.
Bookshelf by Charles Kalpakian
March 11th, 2009
This project provides a custom and enhanced message box replacement for the default MsgBoxfound in Access. A Test database for Access 2007 is available at the bottom of this post. (Updated Tuesday 17MAR2009.)
What’s wrong with the default MsgBox
The default message box in Access is sometimes useful to warn, inform or ask confirmation from the user.
It has, however, a few drawbacks:
- It is bland: the standard message box does not even follow the currently selected Office 2007 scheme.
- The amount of text it can display is limited: if you try to display too much text it will be truncated.
- You can’t copy or save the content of the message.
- Because popup boxes are viewed as intrusive, people tend not to read them and end-up closing message boxes before they realize they may have contained useful information.
- They only displays plain text: you cannot format the message to draw attention to the key points.
- They are blocking, meaning that nothing can happen in the main application while the box is displayed (it can’t even shut down).
Sometimes you need to display an important message or require users to make take a decision.
Message boxes are not to be abused but they serve a useful purpose.
An enhanced message box
Rather than using the bland standard message box you can now have something a bit more customized.
Plain Text version of the enhanced custom message box under the Office Blue Colour Scheme:
RichText version of the enhanced custom message box under the Office Black Colour Scheme:
Here are the features of the enhanced message box:
- It is entirely compatible with the standard one: just change
MsgBox to Box
using find and replace should be enough (see tip below to avoid getting strange errors).
- It allows the user to simply click on a button to copy the content of the message to
the clipboard or save it to a text file to a configurable default location.
- It looks and feels like it belongs to the main application, following its colour scheme.
- It attempts to prevent users from blindly closing the modal box reading the message: buttons will first be inactive for a configurable amount of time. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is quite effective.
- There is a
RichBox version that can display rich HTML content, not just plain text, so important parts of the message can be formatted in a useful way.
- It is able to display large amount of data. While it’s not something you usually want, it may be useful for the message box to display more text in some situations (log or tracing information, legal documentation, etc).
- Rather than sprinkling your code with “
& vbCrLf & _” uglies, you can embed newlines in the text itself by using C-style “\n” escape sequences that will automatically be transformed into the appropriate newlines. Makes for clearer code and less typing.
- Because you get the source, you can easily customise the message box with new icons and colours to better match your overall application’s personality.
- It is non-blocking: if your application forces users to log-off after a certain amount of inactivity, the enhanced message box will just close rather than prevent Access from shutting down like the standard
MsgBox does. Of course, it’s up to you to decide how to handle that gracefully, if at all.
- It properly displays the expected button captions based on the language of the operating system, so it behaves very much like the default
MsgBox (for instance, it will properly display “Cancel” on English systems and “Annuler” on French ones).
- It also properly plays the system sounds associated with the type of message. You can also enable or disable the sound effect as needed.
How to use it
Download the demo below and copy (drag & drop) the following into your application:
- the
FormDialog form,
- the
API_GetTextMetrics module,
- the
Dialog module.
If you rename the FormDialog, make sure you replace any occurrence to it in the code, in particular in the Dialog module.
Since the enhanced message box is just a replacement for the standard one, you just use it like you would use the MsgBox.
There are a few additional settings that can be used to change the behaviour of the enhanced message boxes.
One is that you can adjust the delay before the buttons become activated.
Another one is that you can enable or disable whether beeps should be played or not.
The last settings is the folder where we should save the content of the message when the user clicks the Save button on the message box.
These few settings make the enhanced message box more customizable.
Large text
The standard MsgBox cannot display much text. On the other hand, there is no real limitation to the amount of text the Box and RichBox can display.
When the amount of information is too much to fit the maximum allowed size for the message box the text will overflow and can be scrolled up/down as necessary.
Limitations of the RichBox
The RichBox version relies on the normal TextBox control’s ability under Access 2007 to display RichText wich is nothing more than lightweight HTML.
Because font size may be varying a lot in the message, it becomes very difficult to accurately predict the size of the box needed to display the whole message.
Short of implementing a complete HTML engine, we have to rely on some assumptions to display HTML.
The risk is that sometimes the content may not properly fit the TextBox control in some circumstances.
If you use the RichBox, thoroughly try displaying your messages and tweak the HTML as necessary to include additional lines or non-breaking spaces to ensure that the result looks good.
If you don’t overuse font size and don’t display in multiple fonts the RichBox should do the right thing most of the time.
Don’t overuse the RichBox to display colourful messages. There is a fine line between being informative and tasteless. Keep colours and formatting where it is useful.
I think that in most cases, the plain text version Box is more than enough.
Replacing MsgBox in existing code
As I said above, replacing the standard MsgBox is easy but you need to make sure your search and replace parameters are configured correctly:
If you’re getting strange compile errors, it may be because you forgot to tick the Find Whole Word Only and some of the strings containing the letter sequence “msgbox” were replaced in the process.
If that’s the case, you can revert the damage by simply doing a search and replace across the whole project on:
- VbboxStyle or VbDialog.BoxStyle to be replaced with VbMsgBoxStyle
- VbboxResult or VbDialog.BoxResultto be replaced with VbMsgBoxResult
How it works
The code makes extensive use of Win32 API calls.
Most of the hard work is done in the FomDialog class form. There is too much there to really go into the details but you are welcome to have a look at the commented code.
The code relies also on a utility function from Stephen Lebans used to calculate the size of of text. I have made some minor modification to that code so I would refer you to his original implementation if you are interested in calculating TextBox sizes for forms or reports.
In the code for the FormDialog, I re-implement some of the expected functionalities of the MsgBox: proper arrangement of the buttons, displaying of the appropriate icon, etc.
Once this is done, we calculate the size of the textbox needed to display the whole of the message.
In the case of RichText, we first use Application.PlainText() to convert the HTML into properly formatted plain text. We then calculate the Textbox size using a slightly larger font than needed as a way to ensure that the content of the RichText message will fit the box in most cases.
Once we know the size of the TextBox, we can easily resize the form to properly display the TextBox.
If there is too much text, we resize the form to its maximum permissible (70% or screen width and 90% of screen height) and change some of the visual cues to let the user know the text is overflowing.
One thing of note is the way the form is kept modal.
Rather than using DoCmd.OpenForm and DoCmd.Close I use the form as a class and create an instance manually (see the code in Dialog.Box and Dialog.Richbox). I keep this instance alive until I got the form’s result back.
If you are interested in knowing how the form is made modal, this is the code in FormDialog.ShowModal() what keeps the form open until the user clicks a button:
The Sleep() function is a Win32 API that stops the current process for the given number of milliseconds. This in effects hands back the control to the Operating System for a short time. That way the system is still responsive and does not consume resources when it’s just waiting for user input.
Sample database
You can download a sample database containing all the necessary code as well as a number of tests.
This version only contains the database in Microsoft Access 2007 accdb format.
Download the EnhancedMsgBox01.zip (116KB), v1.3 containing the ACCDB database.
Code Updates
v1.3: 17MAR2009
Thanks to Henry of Access-Pro.de for proposing a correction to the default buttons behaviour.
- Updated behaviour for the default buttons. They are now focused in a way that matches that of the standard msgbox.
- Reversed the naming of the buttons on the form to make it a bit more consistent with the standard box.
v1.2: 07SEP2008
Thanks to Andy Colonna (http://www.pcesoft.com) for uncovering the following bugs (check out his free Spell Checker with source code!):
- Corrected bug in
Form_FormDialog.FilenameSanitize() function that would
fail to remove all invalid characters for a file name.
- File name for the saved text message will be truncated to first 32 characters
of message box title in
Form_FormDialog.MakeFriendlyFileName().
- Changed the use of
FollowHyperlink to ShellExecute to avoid security warning
in some instances in Form_FormDialog.btCopyToFile_Click()
- Corrected twips to pixel conversion bug in
API_GetTextMetrics.fTextWidthOrHeight() that
would result in an improperly sized dialog box when the text message was too
wide.
v1.1: 08AUG2008
- Corrected code for
DefaultButtonDelay (thanks to Geoffrey) (was referencing
wrong variable, causing self-referencing code).
- Corrected code for
Box and RichBox to take the DefaultSavedTextFileFolder
into account (the path was previously not passed onto the dialog boxes and
the text file would always be created in the application folder instead of
the one specified by DefaultSavedTextFileFolder)
- Added license notice at top of source code.
v1.0: 20MAY2008
Resources
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Free for re-use in any application or tutorial providing clear credit is made about the origin of the code and a link to this site is prominently displayed where end-users can easily access it.
May 20th, 2008
Business Week has a recent article where the author foresee the demise of Windows in favour of Apple’s OS.
Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking I was reading one of these overenthusiastic 1925 popular-science article promising us that within just a few years we would all use our own flying car to get to work.
Yeah, right, mine is parked right under my window.
The basic premise of the article is that Apple will attack the corporate market through the back-door, using the iPhone and its forthcoming development platform.
The author contend that development to the iPhone will drive interest in the Mac and allow Apple to displace Windows by offering more business-related applications that would eventually not require Microsoft’s OS running side-by-side in your Mac, freeing you of the dominance of the evil empire.
Please read the article first.
Done?
Hmmm…
Ok, let’s see…
First, let’s be nice: if Apple want to eat at Microsoft’s dominance of the OS market, then all the better: more competition will drive innovation and choice, which is always nice.
There is certainly some truth to the idea that Apple could offer some useful tools and technologies to the corporate world.
The problem is that author of the article was a bit too much of a Mc Fanboy(TM) to make his arguments compelling.
Let’s start direct quotes from the article.
Speaking of the ability of the Mac to quickly switch from a Windows application to a Mac by using a keyboard shortcut:
“Windows users, in the very near future, will be free to switch to Apple computers and mobile devices, drawn by a widening array of Mac software, without suffering the pain of giving up critical Windows-based applications right away.”
Useful as it may be, it’s forgetting one thing: if you need to be able to run your windows application under a Mac, you will need to give Microsoft money for the Windows license, making the newly found convenience of running the two OS together seamlessly a fairly expensive one, both in terms of computer resources and money.
While it will interest a lot of people and they may use their windows apps on Apple hardware is this really compelling enough to make it a viable migration path?
About the new Mac OS kernel:
“That kernel has proved easily adaptable across the entire Apple product line, from highly complex servers all the way down to the relatively simple iPod Touch. Such modularity allows Apple to add whatever functions are necessary for each product environment—all while maintaining cross-product compatibility.
By contrast, Microsoft has held on to an OS tethered to the 1980s, piling additions upon additions with each upgrade to Windows. With last year’s arrival of Vista, Windows has swollen to 1 billion bytes (a gigabyte) or more of software code. The “Mach” kernel of the Mac OS X, however, requires less than 1 million bytes (a megabyte) of data in its smallest configuration, expanding modestly with the sophistication of the application.”
All this is so silly and skewed that I wonder where to start.
First, kernel size is irrelevant: a basic kernel functionality does not make an operating system. Additionally, I doubt that we’re comparing the same functionality and for desktop or server applications this is utterly irrelevant.
For small devices Windows has its own flavours and they can quickly be deployed to almost any hardware with minimal effort.
Applications built for Windows built for mobile devices can be ported to Windows without too much trouble, and vice versa. Whatever platform you’re developing on, applications for small hardware are always an exercise in compromise: there is no way that you can just recompile an app for a different target and have it just work beautifully in any device. A mobile app must take care of power requirements, limited screen estate, memory and CPU limitations and specific usability issues like the presence of a touch-screen instead of a keyboard and mouse.
The point is that you have to take the platform into consideration when crafting software.
Besides, using .Net makes it fairly easy to develop applications for any flavour of Windows.
Additionally, whether the OS under the XBox is different or not from the desktop version of Windows is also irrelevant: you can develop games under the XNA platform that compile and work just the same under Windows as they do on the Xbox.
Now, for the argument regarding the “additions upon additions” made upon Windows that contribute to its bloat, it’s an easy shot to make and an unfair one: Apple has had no regards for its legacy applications and since its primary market was consumers, it could get away with making each of its major OS release incompatible with the previous one.
We can argue whether it was a good thing for Microsoft to keep all the quirks from previous releases of its operating system alive but we must not forget that in the corporate world, Windows has close to 100% market share on the desktop.
What that means is that Microsoft could not afford not supporting business applications across versions. it would have been suicidal to even envisage dropping compatibility.
If Apple ever get into that corporate market above a few percent it will have to guarantee compatibility between versions of its OS and programming tools if it wants to have any chance at being taken seriously at all.
When companies spend money developing an application that is critical to their business, they don’t want to hear about its supporting OS becoming incompatible every couple of years.
Apple would have to support and maintain compatibility for at least 10 years for every major OS version. So far Apple hasn’t shown that it was capable of that type of commitment.
A small digression.
A couple of weeks ago I found some old files of mine on a floppy.
They were Ami Pro files, made at a time when Ami Pro 3.1 was the best word processor around.
Problem was that I could not safely open these files any longer: filters for various word processors would mangle the complex layout of the pages, making them un-usable.
Out of curiosity, I found a full version of the original Amipro 3.1.
I had no expectations of being able to run that setup package. After all, Ami Pro 3.1 came out in 1994, before Windows 95 was even released!
Well, I clicked on that setup.exe file and watched the installation process go through…
Everything went fine.
Surely, I thought, there is no way this is going to run under Windows XP. It’s going to crash for sure.
I double-clicked on the 16 colour icon and lo and behold, the whole thing actually ran! Flawlessly!
I was able to open my old files without any issue, save them under another format.
Everything worked, miraculously.
That application was written at a time the Internet didn’t even exist yet I was able to install and run it without problem on a current operating system.
Back to our regular schedule.
“Despite Apple’s relative scarcity on corporate desktops, Mac laptops are already well accepted within the enterprise, with a market share of more than 20% and growing. For business travellers, the new MacBook Air, some three pounds lighter than comparable Windows-based laptops, already offers one huge advantage.”
First, Apple has a almost 20% market share on overall laptops sales only, not corporate sales.
Second, that figure is for the US only. Apple’s laptop market share in the world is certainly not bad, but it’s a quarter of that figure, making adoption of Apple laptops outside the US very small indeed.
Third, while Apple laptops are certainly sexy, they bring their own issues to businesses: lack of in-house serviceable parts, issues with making them fit into a complex infrastructure, hardware and software compatibility problems.
Bringing Macs into your organisation can be painful. Of course, it’s never impossible, but beyond simple setups, it takes time, energy and money to make stuff work seamlessly.
So I contend that, unless you have a serious commitment to Apple, most of the Macs getting into companies are for simple usage: fetching emails, browsing, making presentations and maybe Photoshop, although it seems that the application that was once the sole reason for some to use macs is now going to switch side, at least for a little while.
For Macs to become a first-class corporate platform would require that Apple makes a very serious commitment to cross-platform development to make applications work on Windows as well.
I seriously don’t think that the ability of Macs to run Windows side-by-side will do much: as mentioned above, the expense incurred offers no real benefit to businesses and having to support both platforms would increase the cost of ownership because of the upfront cost of buying and installing multiple OS, 15% higher average cost of Apple laptops compared to other similarly specified laptops and the cost of maintaining and supporting multiple hardware and OS stacks.
Slickness can only get you so far I suppose.
“While Mac desktops offer a growing number of superior features over Windows desktops”
Seriously dude, what superior features?
“Apple’s recently introduced Leopard servers compete in a market of unhappy Vista server buyers where Microsoft’s market share is only 40%. Leopard has a decent chance to expand from its small beachhead.”
Huh? Vista servers?
WTF is that?
You can’t be talking about Windows 2003 because it’s actually a rock-solid platform and there isn’t much to complain about.
Windows 2008 is just coming out and it looks just as promising.
Apple has some seriously nice server hardware, it’s so beautiful to look at all this engineering that it gets me all hot and bothered.
Seriously though, on the server side, Leopard would not be in competition with Windows but with *nix.
Server-side applications like ASP, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL Server and the myriad other Microsoft-only server software will only work on Windows.
Apple is not going to compete as a platform for hosting these which means it will host services traditionally found on Linux/Unix/BSD systems.
In that *nix camp Apple would certainly be a good contender, although it would have to prove that it can compete with the low license and hardware cost of its competitors and offer more.
One more thing to remember: Apple is in the hardware business: it uses software to lock people into its hardware business.
I’m all for competition but at least using Linux or Microsoft products doesn’t lock me into a single hardware/software platform pair: I have orders of magnitude more choices when it comes to my servers, desktops and laptops than what Apple can offer me.
Apple products may be slick and beautifully engineered but they certainly don’t offer more freedom: chose an iPhone and get stuck with a single network provider, buy an iPod and get stuck with iTune, buy a mac and get stuck with Apple, limited software offerings, no serious games and limited hardware support.
One other thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft has acquired a huge weight in terms of software development power: new technologies have been pouring out of Redmond at a pace that is impossible to follow.
The number of developers and companies able to develop software for Windows platforms is wayyy above what Apple can dream of at the moment (we’re talking about millions of developer making a living off Windows).
Apple will need to make serious efforts to woo the huge amounts of developers it needs to bring enough business and non-business applications to its platforms before it can become a serious competitor to Windows in the corporate world.
Whether Apple has the capacity and will to do that instead of remaining a consumer-oriented company remains to be seen.
That being said I wouldn’t mind developing software for Apple platforms. I would love to be able to use a generic “surface laptop”, a sort of larger iPhone that could be used by sales people for taking orders and showing off new products.
Anyway, the point of all this was simply to offer a modest reality-check to an article that should have been a bit more measured and balanced in its fanboy-ish enthusiasm.
April 13th, 2008
LAMP, Zend, .Net, Struts, Ruby on Rails, Catalyst, and a hundred other development platforms all compete for you attention, all pretending to be the only thing you’ll ever need to satisfy your every needs in web or UI development.
Making a decision is really hard: you want the best for your new project and want to make the right decision. In most cases, that means not cursing yourself down the line for a choice that didn’t turn out as expected.
When you start looking into all these platforms you can be blown away by the ease of implementation and elegance of some; your head spins at all the features and claims being made and it becomes hard to achieve a rational decision.
I’ve been faced with that very issue recently and it sucks. Actually, the time spent investigating all these possibilities is really what is being sucked away.
Of course, learning about new technologies is not just fun, it’s also essential: you have to keep on top of what’s new and decide if you want to join in on the fun or just stay comfortably where you are.
I also realized that you need to get away from the coolness factor of each these much touted technologies and actually try to be objective.
During my investigation, I tried to decide what were the really important factors that I should consider to make a rational choice.
I came up with the list of the following 10 questions that I think everyone should ask themselves when choosing a platform for an important project.
1- Is the platform wide enough?
New technologies that can show amazing productivity get all the buzz. After all, that’s what we developer want: enough with the nuts & bolts! Give us a toolbox with all new shinny power tools!
The problem is that often these technologies are impressive, but looking beyond the sample projects into what actual users get confronted to, you start noticing discussion threads that should obviously signal that the platform is not wide enough.
Choosing a technology that hasn’t achieved its goals can be a huge problem down the line: you implement 80% of your project in record time, only to realise that the platform you chose doesn’t support proper cross-browser detection, or that its implementation of security is way too lax, or that it only support XML for data storage and now you actually need a real database for performance reasons…
In those cases, you can of course develop those areas yourself and contribute to the project, but doing so supposes that you planed it all along and you factored that in your schedule, both in time and in cost.
2- Is it popular?
In other words: are other professional people actually using that platform in real life?
I’m not talking about Joe Developer using it for his local community church website. I’m talking about businesses or large organisations actually using that software platform successfully.
If all you need is a simple 3 page website, then professional popularity amongst the Top 500 business companies is probably not that important. On the other hand, if you plan to build a large project, or you know that your project could grow large in the future, then you probably want to ensure that others have taken it there before you.
3- Is it mature?
Has the platform existed for long enough that it went through enough abuse to withstand almost anything you can throw at it?
A technology that is only a couple year old may be too young to have evolved to the point where it actually can solve most common and not-so-common problems. Technology evolves through iterations: each one is a good long hard look at what didn’t work and tries to fix, improve and extend.
A young technology may be more cutting-edge and exciting, but when you need to commit to it for a big project, its age may quickly come as an issue; its shinny surface may blind you to the black holes waiting below…
4- Are local developers available?
Always think about the future. When you’re gone from the project, who is going to look after it?
Getting a web project entirely in Rebol may be cool and fun, but how many people in your city actually use that thing anyway?
Aren’t you creating a liability if you’re dead-set on choosing a platform that cannot be maintained?
5- Is it scalable?
Most projects start small but dream of ending-up big.
It’s usually fine at the beginning when the number of users and visitors is manageable, but what happens when you start to be successful?
After all, that’s why we craft our projects: we want them to succeed, we want the world to see them. When the world starts coming though, will the terrific platform we’ve chosen break at the seams?
How much overhead does the platform create? It is flexible in its database support? Is there a way to implement clustering or persisting sessions accross multiple servers?
What’s the cost in memory and CPU resources? How many simultaneous connections can you get? What are the bottlenecks? What do you need to do to compensate for them? How much would it cost?
6- Do you have control?
Some frameworks work hard for you and can make you really productive. Sometime though, they try too hard and hide too much from you.
When a feature doesn’t exactly work the way you want you have to dig deep into the entrails of the beast to make sense of it and change its behaviour.
A platform that was all nice and pretty can get very dirty and complex inside, making it difficult to adapt to your needs.
A platform should do most of the hard work but still allow you to redefine its default behaviour without much hassle. It should be built with extensibility in mind, making easy thing easy and difficult things possible.
A case in point are 4G development platforms: they usually have a fairly narrow field of expertise and tend to use graphics and nice simple paradigms to quickly build complex tasks but when you are faced with a specific issue that hasn’t been solved by the platform, you often have to resort to ugly hacks to get around their limitations.
7- Does it satisfies the essential constraints for your project?
When being blinded by something cool, we often become skewed in our judgement and guilty of lowering the importance of constraints that are actually critical for our project.
In all honesty, I really wanted to use Ruby on Rail, and I liked the principle and elegance of it so much that I came to seriously consider it, that is, until I came to my senses and looked into something that is critical to my project: support for complex Asian languages.
Ruby is being developed in Japan, so you could think that it should be able to handle complex ideographic characters well.
Turns out that the Japanese are not terribly fond of Unicode and, unless I’m mistaken, prefer to use Code Pages instead. The result is that Ruby doesn’t have great support for Unicode, and that sucks.
That’s why Unicode was created: to attempt to simplify all this patchwork of implementations that are not compatible with each other.
Because I needed to be able to handle English, Mandarin, Cantonese and probably any other language out there, Unicode is the only viable option to abstract the issue of language enough that it becomes manageable.
So because of Ruby’s poor support for Unicode, it would not be rational to use Ruby on Rails for my particular project as it would probably greatly increase the complexity and hacks necessary to manage complex Asian languages in a unified and simple way.
8- Documentation?
All framework have a more or less steep learning curve: you need to think differently to adapt to the particular framework’s frame of mind, so to speak.
Make sure that the framework has a lively community, that it has more documentation than you can swallow and that documentation is well organised.
Make sure also that there are samples, tutorials, webcasts, videos or whatever that cover the principle aspects of it.
A beautiful framework no-one talks about means that no-one will answer when you have a question. A beautiful framework without documentation is useless. A beautiful framework with lots of disorganised docs means that you’re going to waste a lot of time experimenting instead of building your project.
9- Support?
Here I mean support in the wide sense of the word: who is behind the framework. Are they likely to stay in business long after your project has been completed?
Are they commercial or Open Source? In either case there are issues for and against: a commercial venture backed by a small company may falter and disappear overnight. Similarly, an exciting open source project managed by only 2 people can suffer the same fate when they decide to move on.
Support also includes what help is available to you when you encounter issues. Is there any guarantee that you could have your important technical questions answered?
If you encounter a large issue, is there someone to help you?
I would contend that the best and most serious projects should have professional help available: you can always fall back on paying someone to help you through, whether it’s the original developers, a paid-for support hotline or a third-party specialist, it’s important that you know you can get your answers when you’re stuck.
Developing for an important project without safety net is dangerous: you can waste a lot of time and effort, endangering the very project you are undertaking, if you stumble on a problem you cannot solve yourself.
Large frameworks like .Net or big Open Source projects usually have enough users and support groups and specialists that it’s likely any question you may have has already been answered somewhere or that you can pay someone to help you out when you need it most.
10- What do you know best?
Every framework is based around a particular data-management model. Every framework is built with a particular programming language in mind. Every framework demands that you learn something new.
How comfortable are you with the requirements? how long is it going to take you to start to get really productive?
Like their real-world counterpart, it can take very little time to learn a new language’s words and syntax but it takes years to become proficient in it. A framework adds another layer of abstraction that you will need to get experienced at.
If you need to both learn a new language and a new framework, chances are that you are at best months away from being able to churn code without having to look into the documentation every 5 minutes.
Learning new languages and concepts is necessary, but again, if you chose that route you must be sure that your project has that learning curve built-in, otherwise you’re going to move at the pace of a turtle when in fact you chose that particular framework because you though you would be more productive and faster than a sparrow.
If you chose a new framework, make sure that you already possess most of the knowledge it requires: in my particular instance, I chose .Net and C# because I have already worked in that framework and I know it can tackle the project without me having to waste too much time on learning the platform rather than implementing the project.
We all should seize any opportunity to learn something new. Learning is often more exciting than doing the same old thing over and over again and it’s a necessary part of staying in business. Curiosity is an excellent quality that must be nurtured and indulged.
The issue is when to do it.
Choosing a new development framework is not easy. The best way to tackle the problem is to pose it as a risk analysis study.
The framework you chose should simply be the one that poses the least risk to you succeeding your project.
October 1st, 2006
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