My current stack
Recently, I’ve been reading and discovering many technologies, but I stayed at the observation level. Having more spare time since few days, I decided to crunch into those technologies by reading the APIs, blogs, forums, reviews and listening to podcasts. Now, it\’s time to start test projects for this new stuff.
First, in the open source world, my next targets are jQuery, blueprintcss, Drupal 6, JRuby and Git.
Well known in the Ajax world, jQuery seems to be very light, easy and efficient to find, create and update DOM element. More, it now has UI controls. For blueprintcss, it seems an excellent platform to build a multi-browser compatible site without having to use CSS hacks for this and that. A plus, I know two CSS gurus, Eric Meyer and Jeff Croft, have been working on this framework. In the PHP world, Drupal 6 seems to be the platform I was expected from the beginning. Having work in Drupal 4.7, I was disappointed for the number of bugs and difficulties to have a clear cut between the UI and the code. Since the upgrade to version 6, the installation process is easier and multi-language templates are more easy to create and maintain. Compared to Joomla, Drupal is really a completely CSS themable product.
Next, being a Java and an open source guy, I still worked on ASP.Net projects since a year. I have to admit that the Microsoft world interest me more than never. In fact, it’s not ASP.Net which interest me, but the new products that are coming soon. I am talking about the MVC framework, Entities Framework and Silverlight. I have not read or seen code for now, my sources being co-workers and the podcast from http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com/. At first, MVC architecture seems a lot similar to Struts in the Java world. I guess I will feel more comfortable in a MVC architecture than with postbacks, view states, controls tree, etc. I mean, I wish MVC is more like the other MVC web frameworks instead of being completely different with its own philosophy … like ASP.Net is.
On the other side, the Entities framework used in pair with LINQ is a ORM. The product seems to be really well thought and designed. With these new products, it seems feasible to have a complete efficient and testable application architecture with only Microsoft products.
