Just wondering what pro web developers use to publish their sites. Also I would like to know what big sites have used, such as Amazon, Walmart, etc.
Thank you for your time.
It's a difficult question to answer, I guess. The tools used by a developer depends on the customer requirements. It may be one of the following:
Static site with graphics and/or flash (simple business site)
Dynamic site with front-end html/CSS and database driven backend using php, perl, .net, Java, etc.
A large site that may use ecom along with content management system (CMS). There you may need CMS (such as Joomla) along with compatible plug-ins and customization.
For very popular sites such as Amazon, speed and bandwidth are very critical. Usually, though they start small (say, using PHP/MySQL, or ready-made CMS), they change according to their own requirements sooner or later using custom coding (Java is very popular). This is only my guess!
For co-ordination and publishing, GIT is very popular.
hope this helps.
Related
I need your help for my question.
I need to build a web based application that should perform some activity of document management. I'm evaluating existing document management solution and I need a solution that expose api via rest or other protocol, so that I can interact with them from my application.
I read about alfresco, sharepoint and knowledge tree but I find difficult to understant prices for commercial use. Can someone help me with a comparison of function/prices for a commercial use?
Alfresco is available in two versions, Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Enterprise. Alfresco Community is under the LGPL license. Assuming you want to use it in-house (not distribute it to others), you can use + customise + extend Alfresco Community to your heart's content, without restriction or charge. (LGPL/GPL/etc are distribution licenses, not use licenses, so only kick in when you redistribute). However, Alfresco Community comes with no commercial support, only support provided by the community. For a lot of uses that's good enough, but for other cases you'll want to be able to ring someone for support / get hotfixes backported to your version / etc. In that case...
Alfresco Enterprise is paid for, coming with commercial support (including SLAs, pick up the phone and talk to an expert etc), along with a handful of features that matter in big deployments (clustering being one). Pricing depends on a few things, mostly around size of deployment and SLA, but for small deployments isn't too bad. For big deployments, it can be a huge saving over other systems! Give sales a call, they're very friendly, and only rarely buy me beer ;-)
If you don't want to run your own repo, there's also the Alfresco Cloud version, which comes with a public API. With this, Alfresco themselves run and maintain the instance for you, and you can use the public API to store / retrieve / manage / etc your content. It's much simpler to get going with! But you don't quite get as much control or customisation as with the on-premise versions.
SharePoint might already be covered by your existing Microsoft licensing deal, if you have one. If not, you'd need to decide between licensing on a per-server or per-user basis. See Microsoft pages like this to get an idea of the options, then ring your Microsoft sales rep to get an idea of the pricing. In many cases, you'd need to pay someone else for support, so you'd be back to a similar thing as with Alfresco Community vs Enterprise.
If you're not sure what system to go with, you might be safest and best off implementing your project using CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). This provides a common way to talk to content repositories, allowing you to store/retrieve/browse/search/permissions/etc irrespective of what the underlying repo is. Alfresco provide some information on it, and Apache Chemistry provides open source client libraries for most common programming languages, which makes getting started very quick. There's also an excellent book on CMIS which I can very much recommend! And not only because the authors of that have been known to buy me beer too... ;-)
We have developed a small web application for a client. We decided on the Dojo framework to develop the app (requirements included were full i18n and a11y). Originally, the web app we developed was to be a "prototype", but we made the prototype production quality anyway, just in case. It turns out that the app we developed (or a variant of it) is going to production (many months hence), but it's so awesome that the enterprise architecture group is a little afraid.
508c compliant is a concern, as is security for this group. I now need to justify the use of Dojo to this architecture group, explicitly making the case that Dojo does not pose a security risk and that Dojo will not hurt accessibility (and that Dojo is there to help meet core requirements).
Note: the web app currently requires JavaScript to be turned on and a stylesheet to work. We use a relatively minor subset of Dojo: of course, dojo core, and dijit.form.Form, ValidationTextBox and a few others. We do use dojox.grid.DataGrid (but no drag N drop or editable cells, which are not fully a11y).
I have done some research of my own, of course, but I any information or advice you have would be most helpful.
Regards,
LES2
I'm not sure how to answer this question except to point out that you'd be in good company using Dojo. Several large corporations, deeply concerned about security issues have contributed to the toolkit and use it in their own products. Audits have been done on the toolkit, including one recently which did expose a problem which was quickly patched -- in fact, the CDN feature of Dojo, if you use it, means you can pick up patches like this automatically. Other than that, I'm not sure what proof to offer. A toolkit is secure until someone finds a security hole! Also, there are plenty of things you can do with Dojo, or the underlying HTML/JS technology, which are not secure. You need to follow best practices. One example is with JSON. There are a couple of methods to handle JSON. The base one is fast, works on older browsers, but is known not to be secure. It is meant to be used only with trusted data sources, and typically with the same domain policy, that's what you'll be doing. There are alternatives in dojox.secure which you might want to look at, depending on what you're doing, you may be able to provide an extra level of security to your application.
For performance, you can look at the various benchmarks like taskspeed, which focus largely on the dojo.query DOM traversal functionality common to most toolkits. Of course, YMMV depending on your usage of Dojo, but there's healthy competition between the toolkits and continuous improvement with each release.
For accessibility, all Dijit widgets were reviewed and considered to be 508c compliant. There is more precise documentation on Dojo/Dijit a11y requirements. Not all dojox widgets pass this requirement.
HTH
Let me introduce myself a bit.
I have 7 years of C++ (most MFC) experience, 1 year C#.NET and 2 years Java experience.
I know little about web application, what I did and am doing is Windows desktop applications.
I start to do some (minor) (freelance) side projects in the past half year and uses C# mostly as it's more "rapid" than MFC. But seems there's more web projects in this market than desktop projects. And I do not feel good as long as I do not know web development.
So, should I touch the new web filed for me or just stay focus in desktop application but learn more e.g Python, or Frameworks/Libraries such as Qt or Boost?
My gut feeling is that more and more people/companies are moving their projects to the web. My company, for example, has added numerous web applications since I have been there. Another prime example of this is Microsoft (yes, even them) providing a web-based version of Office, their flagship product.
There will always be a need for desktop applications, but I see more web-based projects in the future. It's always good to learn something new, anyway.
EDIT: Oh, and you don't lose anything by being aware of "desktop-based" processes. You may be doing more server-side programming, even if it is web-based. So, in other words, it doesn't hurt to continue expanding your knowledge in that arena, as well.
There will most likely still be a market for desktop applications for many years to come. However, web development seems to have taken over a large share of the development market from what I can see. I would recommend definitely getting familiar with web development as it definitely can't hurt to increase the number of skills you have even if you never stop writing desktop apps.
Since you have experience with C# you might want to consider doing some ASP.NET work. Or if you feel the need to learn a new technology then maybe consider a framework like Ruby on Rails.
I'd really suggest looking into web development - like you said, there are many more web application projects - and you already know C#.NET and Java, and both of those languages have really good API's / frameworks for web development. ASP.NET for C# and Java Servlets/JSPs.
I'd first suggest learning some really basic HTML to learn how pages are rendered, then try to make dynamic versions using the language of your choice. Then I'd learn some other web technologies like CSS/Javascript/some Javascript libraries - then I'd start looking at frameworks that build on top of the basics in the language of your choice.
Oh, and some further suggestions - there are web frameworks that are component-based rather than request-based - you may be tempted to learn these as a shortcut to web development since most claim that developing in them is similar to desktop development. I really wouldn't suggest this - as in practice you really do need to know how the web works at a lower level to develop custom components, include things that the framework doesn't do, or to debug them when things go wrong even when using these frameworks. If you jump right in you can get lost/confused pretty quickly.
Microsoft Office 2010 will have an online version. To me this is a watershed moment for Web applications. Office apps are an important litmus test as once you can do Office on the Web (which has been the case with Google Documents for some time but Office has important symbolic meaning) you can do most things that most users care about.
Desktop apps won't die but I definitely think they're going to take more and more of a backseat.
I'd highly suggest you read How Microsoft Lost the API War if you haven't already. One of the things that's particularly amazing about this post is that it was written in 2004.
I honestly believe that with maybe the exception of OSs and browsers, everything will be a web app within the next 10 years. Having said that, let me clarify that by everything I mean everything that a) involves a UI of some kind and b) can be guaranteed secure.
User-interfaced apps will always at some point need a backend, which will at some level require code that is not being interfaced by humans and not being executed via HTTP. I am always reminding myself that things like 'cat' in Unix are actually programs that the OS is calling, not just a function built into the OS. MySQL won't be a web app (as far as I know), but app that powers web apps. We may get to a point where these apps are fully developed via a web interface, written, audited, uploaded and called all via a browser, but at some level its still running behind the scenes.
On that second point, about guaranteed security, I can very easily imagine a large corporation or government office running 95 percent of their daily routines via web apps, but mandating that certain high-security operations be done on a machine directly interfaced with some sort of mainframe, after passing through the cool doors with the retinal scans and what not. Or simply because they can't risk moving certain mission-critical apps over to the web, from fear of it breaking our losing data in the process.
But with those two things aside, I honestly believe everything will be web-based. With the advancement of Web Services and XML in general, it will be possible to not only access and interact with our data, but to plug our custom apps into another app and extend that interaction further and in any environment we want.
It's like that Apple ad "There's an app for that." Except once people get the real picture, it won't be an app written for your iPhone, but a URL. "There's a site for that."
I recommend learning the Lift framework. It's as easy to use as Rails, and it's based on a statically-typed language for the JVM, Scala. From the perspective of your background, Scala should be middling to easy to learn, and you'll be more likely to be comfortable with it than with a dynamic language.
In my opinion, you have a good chance of picking it up quickly, learn a lot about good practices in web development, and even expanding your programming horizons a bit.
I've been building a static website and the client has suddenly stated that they would like the ability to change the content( words ) and pictures when they feel like it. What is the best way to do this? I could build something, I just want to make sure there isn't already something out there. I need this to be a simple as possible.
Use a CMS; a Content Management System.
There are plenty of open-source ones. Wikipedia has a list of many CMS's here.
You'll need to decide on a CMS, and set it up. Afterwards, it becomes a matter of styling the CMS after the theme of the static website you have designed. You probably can find many tutorials online, depending on the CMS you choose (that could be part of your criteria).
You can use one of many content-management systems.
Drupal is a very popular content-management system with years of development and a very large user base.
You could also use WordPress, not strictly a content-management system, but because of its flexibility may be suitable to your or your clients needs.
Here's an article on some content-management systems.
What open source toolkit does fatwire compare to and are there some particular advantages to fatwire?
How hard is fatwire to export out of and move to a free alternative?
How stable is it as a platform to write java extensions on?
From a development persepective, FatWire can be unfriendly. Having worked on a number of sites using this application it can easy bloat, and become difficult to maintain.
From a user perspective there has been alot of effort in the UI and this has led to a highly functional tool.
From a client perspective all clients bar 1 (a large news agency) were happy with the end result. FatWire can slow when using complex logic to generate menus or breadcumbs for example or when you have a large amount of content. This is the main reason the one client was unhappy. The FatWire site regularily struggled under the load. It sometimes seen as a solution to all web needs.
As such FatWire succeeds in serving Static Content & Semi Dynamic content, but can flounder when forced to do fully dynamic sites (from my experience).
From the original press release:
FatWire Software announced the rollout
of FirstSite, which is a set of tools
and best practices that helps
companies using FatWire Content Server
get their first Web site or
application running quickly while
providing a foundation for future
expansion. FirstSite includes a
collection of standard templates and
site components that are common to
most sites, combined with
documentation, training, a rich
developer community, and best
practices methodology. FatWire and its
solution partners are using FirstSite
as the basis for developing
content-centric applications for
specific vertical markets. With only
minor, cosmetic alterations,
developers can use the code in
FirstSite to implement a first site,
while simultaneously learning how to
utilize Content Server's capabilities,
such as dynamic content delivery,
personalization, caching, and product
catalogs.
Firstsite is not a product, unless this has changed since 2004 (unfortunately I cannot look, since their developer site is down). Fatwire's Content Server does not compare to any Open Source CMS that I know. It's scope goes much further. I will answer your questions one by one:
Advantages - There are many (or nobody would buy it, and it is not cheap)
On the delivery side: scalability, fine-grained cache control, stateless servlet architecture, ....
On the back office side: virtually no limit to asset types, dynamic content attributes, find-grained security and access control, ...
On the development side: Intelligently architected API with good coding productivity, tag library, ...
Openness
You cannot easily expect to migrate content between any two CMS products, open source or not. While there are ways to extract contant from the database in XML and other forms, using product tools, or simply at the database level, I don't think that this can be an argument for or against using a particular CMS. Ever tried to migrate from Drupal to Joomla?
Stable
I worked on several Fatwire implementations from 2000 to 2004 (back then it was OpenMarket Content Server, then Divine Content Server). It was stable enough for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the S&P sites, and I would expect stability not to be an issue today.
Fatwire is really unique concept from developer point of view. It builds everything on a very abstract, extremely flexible clever asset modeling framework which is stored in relational database.
Application logic is based on "templates" which actually are pieces of JSP code. This JSP code is not like conventional Java, but tags instead. It takes very long from a developer to learn these tags and Fatwire asset api. Expect even months before skilled develpers start to be productive.
Almost nothing useable samples ships along the product. There is advertized "FirstSite" but it is way too simple for the purpose this product is used normally (huge complex sites). So pretty much everything has to be built from scratch.
Cache control is advertized to be one powerful feature. Yes it is, but we had extremely long learning curve and it never worked exactly like one assumed.
Wysiwyg editing has been missed from this product even it is advertized. At least during 2009 it had serious conceptual problems which practically prevented using it in live environments. But it was cool feature for demos and marketing of course. Today it might be fixed.
As a summary and if I were a customer with limited budget, I'd select any open source alternative instead. Mostly because development costs with Fatwire are high due the uniqueness of the product, lack of good documentation and extremely long learing curve. Of course the product price tag is also thing to consider.
And to answer to questions: you have to start from scratch if you move from Fatwire 6.0 to any open source alternative. And it is stable to build Java extensions on.
Fatwire stores content in relation database and file system. Depending on what type of content (structured/unstructured), Fatwire can be evaluated.