[Lazarus] Lazarus make me create better apps

Myles Wakeham myles at techsol.org
Thu May 20 18:35:22 CEST 2010


Razvan wrote:

 >Yes PHP is not a strong language and doesn't have a strong toolkit but 
 >there
 >are so many PHP developers and many 3'rd party tookits for it and some >of
 >them can be used with any language. Most company owners only care about
 >getting things done, i was lucky and nobody ever forced me to do >anything
 >serious in PHP, i did work with JS, Flash and SwishMax all three are 
 >almost
 >the same thing and much nicer than PHP but i wouldn't use any of these 
 >for
 >anything serious unless i was forced to.

This is a really good point, and I wanted to add to it.  Web 
applications typically have an extremely small 'shelf-life'.  Although 
there are plenty of PC desktop apps developed in the 1990s that have 
been maintained, updated, etc. and are still in wide use today, there 
are not too many examples of web applications that share this.  Most 
either died a natural death, or were completely re-developed, or had 
major facelift changes, etc.

Because web applications are highly visual media, then trends in 
graphics design, social culture, etc. all affect what is a 'cool' web 
app in ways far different to PC applications.  If you, for example, are 
looking to purchase something online and you go to a site that looks 
like it was developed in 1995, there is a natural reservation of how 
serious the company is.  Web apps expose not only technology to the end 
user, but a sense of commitment that the developer has to current 
technologies, etc.  And since its a highly competitive environment, 
companies are constantly spending big bucks to update their websites, 
web applications, etc. assuming that they might get 1-2 years of use out 
of that development phase before having to do the whole thing all over 
again.

In this world, investing in rock-solid, fast performing tech has to be 
compared with limited return on investment, and fast changing 
technologies that the end users are using to view it.  In this regard, 
PHP has a lot to be said for it.  Sure, its not as 'sexy' a development 
environment as Delphi/FPC, etc. but the end result of a web application 
is typically a short lifespan, so investing heavily in both time & $ to 
get the site done 'right' often has limited return on investment.

Now that isn't to say that you should abandon all hope of doing web 
application development in FPC.  Quite the contrary, but using languages 
like PHP in partnership with FPC seems, to me, to be the best fusion. 
FPC on the back-end, but working with PHP/HTML5 on the front-end.  High 
availability of developers in PHP, so you can handle turn-over easily. 
And generally shorter development cycles.

Thoughts?

Myles
-- 
-----------------------------
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions USA, Inc.
www.techsolusa.com
Phone +1-480-451-7440





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