Archive for June, 2009

Founders At Work – A Great Business Read For Tech Heads

June 28th, 2009 businessTags: , ,

I finally made time to read Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston

Founders AtWork Book

Founders At Work Book

Wow! What an interesting and insightful book! It’s just one of those books that you wish you had read when they hit the shelves, and it leaves you with strange but exciting feeling that you could not possibly have gained the knowledge within from any other source.

From The Horses’ Mouth

The book contains candid one-on-one interviews between the author and 32 entrepreneurs, most of whom have built the most successful tech businesses in the world today.

Lessons On Relevance

What struck me is the fact that most of these success stories originally started out with a different business idea from what eventually made them successful. The challenges they faced and their accidental discoveries make you realise that the tech business world could easily have been a different place than what we know and take for granted today.

My favourite stories are from the early days of computing (Lotus, Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, Software Arts, WAIS, and RIM). There isn’t a single interview that I did not find interesting.

The Rocky Road

I was bowled over by the humorous escapades of Paul Graham (Y-Combinator) and Evan Williams* (Blogger.com) – Things went horribly wrong yet these folks kept going even with little or no money.
*Evan Williams sold Blogger.com to Google and went on to co-found twitter.com with Biz Stone

Not many people can claim to have inspired new University programs. These folks can and I recommend this book to anyone in the tech business and everyone who isn’t.

Be warned, once you start reading itll be hard to put this book down :-)

Have you read it yet? What are your thoughts?

Building A J-AMFPHP AIR Application in HTML/JS

June 28th, 2009 Adobe AIRTags: , , , , , ,

UPDATE: Enhanced code styling 30 June 2009

This post will show you how to write a basic AIR application in HTML/JavaScript and get it to speak AMF with your Joomla! 1.5 (and above) installation.

If you’re just starting out, see how to setup and run J-AMFPHP in Joomla first. We’ll be creating our AIR application based on that example.

Why HTML and JavaScript?

I’ve seen some tutorials on the web that dive straight into FlexBuilder’s MXML layouts and AS3 classes as a start. Although the thinking behind MXML is to mimic (X)HTML, I feel that starting out with (X)HTML is the easiest way for a Read more »

jQuery vs MooTools – Which One Is The Best?

June 3rd, 2009 JavaScript, MooTools, jQueryTags: , ,

According to Aaron Newton of Clientcide, this is not the question to be asking.

And I happen to agree with him.

These two frameworks just aren’t trying to do the same things. They overlap in the functionality they provide, but they are not trying to do the same things

Opposite Directions

MooTools is aimed more at JavaScript developers, while jQuery is more for people who want to implement JavaScript functionality in the easiest possible way.

jQuery is for people who aren’t necessarily interested in delving deep into JavaScript while MooTools provides an object-oriented framework for hardcore JavaScript development. This is why most people find MooTools harder to use in comparison to jQuery.

jQuery makes working with the DOM easier. MooTools makes working with all of the JavaScript language – not just the DOM – easier.

Both are fantastic libraries/frameworks and I think the better question for you to ask is

Which one should I use for this project

This can be determined by circumstances beyond your control e.g. The project leadership has already selected a framework for you, or the application development framework you are developing on is already using one over the other – and you may wish to avoid bloating-up your application with multiple libraries and increasing load times (not to mention script conflicts).

Different Camps

Here’s an example of what the world’s most popular PHP content frameworks have chosen:

Drupal - jQuery
WordPress - jQuery
Joomla – MooTools

I work in each of these environments and I recommend to anyone doing the same to view jQuery and MooTools as tools – not competitors. You might simple prefer the one over the other, at the end of the day they are just JavaScript; and there’s a right one (tool) for the job at hand.

The Real Thing

I also recommend learning pure JavaScript. It’ll give you a better understanding of what’s going on under the bonnet and you’ll find it easier to work with other JavaScript abstraction libraries. I’ve found my copy of JavaScript Bible – 6th Edition to be quite a handy mate for occasional reference.

How do you see this debate?

/* Update */

Aaron Newton authored the book:
MooTools Essentials: The Official MooTools Reference for JavaScript™ and Ajax Development

Read the full jQuery vs MooTools comparison  here

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