That is well said, and I think another lesson is don't make the same
mistake twice. I don't have any problem with ColdFusion, great tool.
But I steered away from a company owned proprietary method for a
large, open language with a lot of momentum. I hope I never have to
make that decision again. It was very gut wrenching for me.
Again, especially to Rick, no offense to CF, but with adobe buying
Macromedia and all, who knows what will happen. Maybe I am just
paranoid.
--
Robert Garcia
President - BigHead Technology
VP Application Development - eventpix.com
13653 West Park Dr
Magalia, Ca 95954
ph: 530.645.4040 x222 fax: 530.645.4040
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://bighead.net/ - http://eventpix.com/
On Oct 24, 2008, at 7:27 AM, Scott Cadillac wrote:
Thank you for your nice comments Mark, and for having such a good
memory :-)
> Starting over again is refreshing, invigorating, keeps you young
and is really quite satisfying.
Janet, Dude and any others who are trying or waiting to make these
potentially career altering decisions, take Mark's words to heart
and read his email over a couple of times. He has summed it up well
once again.
In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter what
language you choose. Each has their benefits and pitfalls. What
matters is that you choose one that suits your style of writing
code, has a comfort level for you (licensing and other costs,
etc...) and that you're exciting about learning what it has to offer
you. Choose a language you would be proud to be an expert in.
Once you've got past the initial beginner stage - you'll be amazed
at how far you came in a very short period of time.
And what also matters here, is that you're making this career
affecting decision yourself, and you're no longer waiting for
someone else, in some other company, in some other country - to
handle or carry forward your career or technology decisions for you.
And do this despite any economic or employer pressure you may feel.
Otherwise you're just setting yourselves up to always be a victim of
circumstance (which is very evident on this List).
If you can be happy with your work; your living, your projects and
your life will fall in place behind you as you blaze this new trail.
Remember... Witango Technologies is just a vendor. We are the
employers, and vendors are here to serve us, and if that's not
working out then we need to move on. Phil can choose to catch up to
us if he wishes, but that's up to him (not us).
Thank you, and all the best.
Scott Cadillac
~ 902-624-1266
~ http://www.xmlx.net/
On Oct-24-2008, at 2:26 AM, Mark Hawk Weiss wrote:
Webdude,
It isn't that hard, until you want to get to the finer points. I
started first by installing MAMP on my mac. It installed just as
advertised and I was able to get my feet wet on my laptop at my
leisure.
Then I installed on an old 386 box, Ubuntu version of Linux. I
downloaded it, made a DVD and boom, I was running. Again, as I
recall Ubuntu had it all, installed with no problems and I was able
to get php code I had written on the mac to work. I think Robert is
using some version of Fedora. I don't know that is so great about
it, but who cares when you are just learning and playing in the
sandbox? I was able using Navicat to configure the MySQL db on the
Linux box and PHP was also not a problem. I had one app that I had
written in witango, and I mapped out the business logic on a piece
of paper and decided how I thought it should work. I first got one
page to work, an insert, then another, a select, and then another.
an update, all one at a time. Then I learned about includes and
variables. For me the variables were a bit of a challenge, both in
setting them and using them in display as well as in updates and
inserts. But I eventually got that going, one step at a time. If I
had to do it again to day, I bet I would have to refresh my memory.
It wasn't that intuitive for me. Help from the web, from Robert
Garcia in a couple of short emails. A book suggestion from Ben,
read more examples on the web and again, little by little got it
working. I then put some CSS in to make it look right. That was good.
So a simple app, and little by little it worked. It ran on my mac
laptop and it ran on the LAMP Server. Of course I didn't stress it,
that wasn't the point. I proved to myself I could do it, and if I
wanted to , I would just take it one step at a time, just like
Witango went.
Now there are all kinds of PHP stuff that I am told are so cool,
and free that I still don't have a clue how to implement. At some
point, if I need to , I will slug through it. One thing that is
nice, when you have a select page that works, you start the next
one like that and it does go a bit faster. And at some point, it
would be good to have a mentor who had the time to show you
examples. It would go faster then. I remember how many people on
the list did that for me and witango in the 1.0 days. Eric Weidl
and I spent a week I think at one point at his office in near
Chicago. I worked along side of him and he showed me all kinds of
stuff. A huge help. I am sure you can find someone to help you that
way. There are still nice guys around.
I never did the Zend thing. I downloaded it once when Robert told
me to, but it was over my head so I took it off. I wasn't ready.
At some point, I would like to learn about it since Ben and Robert
rave about it.
The point is, that you can do it. I like the advice I got from
Scott Cadillac. Pick a language and just take it one step at a
time. The all have their strong points and week points. He went
the .net route and has made a great living doing that. Robert and
Ben have gone PHP and are making a good living doing that.
I think Witango has done more for you in learning a new language
that you might think. There are lots of things you understand that
you will be able to make connections with. Scott said there isn't a
silver bullet as to which platform. I think he is right. IIS is
easier to administer than Apache in some ways. but once you get
Apache set up, it isn't that hard. Again a little help from someone
and you will be amazed how you understand it.
Starting over again is refreshing, invigorating, keeps you young
and is really quite satisfying. I think Robert Ben and the others
who work with him, got a huge bang out of moving to LAMP. It was a
step up for him in every way and I think it was very satisfying to
take the challenge, solve the problems and make it work. And so it
can be for you. In a few years, you will be really glad you read
the tea leaves and covered your back side. Author Jim Ferrell said,
"Children learn more from watching someone learn, than from
watching someone teach." So go for it. Be bold. We are all watching
eagerly and learning by watching you learn.
Mark Weiss
http://trustthechildren.blogspot.com
On Oct 23, 2008, at 10:47 PM, WebDude wrote:
Janet,
I feel your pain. I have been busy downloading stuff and poking
around. I have read hundreds of pages on just the install stuff
for Apache, MySQL, PHP, ColdFusion, .NET... I even spent a day on
nothing but open source. I have a spare server I have been
thinking of using just to try some stuff out. What is really
daunting is the pages upon pages and gotchyas on just an
installation... not to mention the additional downloads needed to
make it work in Windows. Funny... I have about 60 sites, some
getting well more then 100,000 page views per day... well over
1,000,000 visitors per month in all - all on one MSSQL dedicated
server and two dedicated Witango servers runninng Witango 2000.
Never a slowdown and has been rock solid for over 8 years. 16 e-
commerce sites, 2 Data Access Managements sites, 4 forums, 12
internal employee sites for some very large corporations, one very
large directory site, 2 online streaming PDF sites and a
smattering of... well, just websites. Now I am losing sleep
because I am so worried about what direction to go. I spent a very
large amount on the corporate license thinking that this was the
way to go and have spent much time and resources in developing all
I have going. I never upgraded because of the 20,000 plus I dished
out and I remember the days when it was discussed that the editor
would be able to output ASP and possibly PHP code... but that
never happened or was just a pipe dream. Frankly, I thought it
would have been a great idea to port output of the editor to more
popular languages. Anyway... enough crying in my beer. I went this
route and now I am going to have to do something about it. I just
spent most of the day trying to install PHP and getting the "hello
world" to work. Tomorrow, I might try to see if I can actually
connect to a database. This is going to take me a little while...
-----Original message-----
From: "janet" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:55:41 -0500
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Witango-Talk: Open Letter to Phil and Sophie
> I was wondering what to say until I saw this email from Webdude
>
> "Well, I have a problem and maybe some of you could help me. I
have been
> using nothing but Tango and Witango since I started developing
many years
> ago"
>
> Yes this is my story also.
> Pretty good at SQL ( MS SQL) triggers, stored procedure, views,
groupings
> , maxvalues etc just a happy place for me, also HTML and
Witango. I found
> that if I had good array results then the Witango stuff was easy.
> So I have looked at other RAD visual products. With ASP.net you
end up with
> blocks of code either in VB or C+, there is s Borland PHP RAD,
Cold fusion
> and Dreamweaver etc. But it seems that the builder tools all
create either
> PHP, VB, C+ or something.
> How come Witango shielded me from all of these languages?
> I know Witango is an XML code generator so why isn't there any
other
> products creating XML? I am asking the wrong question?
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Mark Weiss
http://trustthechildren.blogspot.com
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