What kind of future for Servoy Stuff?
Published by admin on
Sunday, July 18, 2010 - 00:01:04
- Filed under General, News, Announcements
Yes, that’s the question I’m asking myself right now.
Although this blog will still be relevant, as the expression of personal ideas and opinions about Servoy/Java development and the Servoy microcosm, I’m still undecided about what to do with the rest of the site.
Now that ServoyForge is out and is so much more adapted to host and maintain my plugins/beans and other various Open Source projects, with all the tools available there (svn repository with anonymous access and commiters access, extended issue tracking, version management and roadmap, wiki, file downloads, forums, user managements, etc.), there’s not much justification for keeping this site up.
In any case, I will have to get rid of all the redundant information, make sure that people are properly redirected to the ServoyForge relevant projects, but this means that most of the content of Servoy Stuff is going to be deleted.
It’s a bit of a shame since this site has been very successful… Looking at the stats today, I see that more than 14 months after launch, there has been 13303 visits and 26593 downloads since I started tracking them in July 2009: the tutorials being the most successful, followed by the BrowserSuite and the VelocityReport of course…
Anyway, I guess that apart from this blog, and maybe the FAQ (that needs updating, really), there’s not much to keep.
So, unless you have some very good ideas of content that you would like to find here, a new (stripped) version of the site will be available soon, with the blog being the primary content this time, and all the rest freely available from ServoyForge.
Still hope to see you around!
Would you rather take the blue pill or the red pill?
Published by admin on
Tuesday, July 6, 2010 - 01:00:03
- Filed under General, News, Development
Recently on Servoy’s forum someone linked to a blog where he started putting his impressions about FileMaker (described as ‘the comfort zone’) and Servoy (with its ‘learning curve’).
Nice subject, I thought, you can write tons of stuff about that’s for sure!
Somehow his dilemma kinda reminded me of that scene in The Matrix where Neo is offered a choice between the blue pill (a nice little dream) and the red pill (the shocking reality). When comparing FileMaker to Servoy in terms of software engineering, the choice is strikingly simlilar to the one offered there.
The blue pill:
- everyone can, without much effort, build enterprise software
- no need to learn about computer stuff… that’s for geeks only
- Object Oriented Programming? Come on, do we really need that?
- transactions, who the hell is using this anyway?
- programming languages are not necessary, you can do it all with wizards nowadays
- no need to know SQL to query a database intelligently, the program will do everything for you
- naming conventions? that’s so eighties!
- who needs a DB schema today? normalization? who cares, just put everything in a flat table, the program will sort everything out for you.
- etc. etc.
The red pill:
- building enterprise level software is a craft, and it takes long years of experience and learning to be able to write good software
- you will need to understand how things work to build things right
- if you want to build sustainable code, there’s no way out of OOP
- care about transactions in multi-users/multi-threads/multi-threads/multi-nodes is essential to your data safety
- no wizard of any sort will be capable of building an entire software of enterprise quality for you, you will have to do it yourself
- creating/querying database without a good understanding of SQL is going straight into a wall
- you need to organize your code/methods/forms/objets right from the very beginning, otherwise you will end up with an unmanageable mess, that you will have no time to rewrite later, and regret deeply
- undestanding database schema, entity-relationships, constrains is something you can’t do without if you are serious about software programming,
- etc. etc.
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