Noselead

I'm probably the easiest person to be persuaded, given a good set of credible arguments. I think the culprit might be in that I try to be open minded by everything, and think about stuff from as many aspects as possible, and not taking a ridiculously hard stance about a thing, just because "it's my opinion".

I just read the blog post How To Launch Software. Unsurprisingly, it got me to Think about LightFrame's launch. I realize that I've thought of doing both – first showing (read: force) it to some people I know to get the initial wrinkles ironed out, and once this 'beta period' is complete, I'd go all out and try to get as much visibility as possible.

But, as I've also realized for myself, this is extremely stupid to do, since I'm doing this by myself right now, and can't assume that I'd get anyone else doing this with me without paying even a nominal amount of compensation. Assuming that LightFrame has a serious bug (wild imagination not required) and people start hitting on it. I'd need to fix it ASAP. But since my LightFrame-time is very limited, my response time is insufficient, so before I get it fixed, the eyeballs are gone, and LightFrame's back to obscurity, with added buggy reputation.

"Yeah, I tried LightFrame, but it was buggy, so I didn't bother. CakePHP works better for me" is a quote I don't want to see. I'm aiming more towards "Yeah, I tried LightFrame, but it was a bit immature. I like the ideas behind the O/R mapper, but I'll stick to CodeIgniter for now."

Resources (time and money mostly) taken into account, the natural growth path would serve me and my mental sanity better.

Discrimination of Character

Java, if anything, is the spokesthingy for UTF8. NetBeans IDE is written in Java. So why the heck is the default character encoding for files in NetBeans anything other than UTF8 (I'm guessing ISO Latin 9 or something similar). In fact, you can't even change that in the settings. No, you have to go to a config file, and enter "-J-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8" by hand in a config line. WHAT!? WHY!? That's right. Monumental. Foundering.

Apart from that and the fact that scrolling the source code down with a scrollwheel is strangely slow, NetBeans 6.5 shows a lot of potential in the PHP front of things. Code completion, PHPDoc recognition, even code mistake hints, it's all good. Oh, but I do miss my Cmd-D and Alt-up/down, even if I can live without them.

LightFrame is in the back burner. Not forgotten, not suspended, but I'm simply not trying to find time/energy/inspiration for it. If I happen to find any of the three, I'll try to write a line or two, but it's not systematic. With a wedding coming up, in which I play a somewhat central role, the imminent honeymoon thereafter and an ensuing of reparations/restorations of a certain and recently aquired terraced house, I'm wondering whether the not-actually-at-all-official release date of 01.01.09 will hold.

But, once the fixer-upper is fixed-upped, I finally get my own study, with my own pseudo-privacy. Maybe that's when I start really churning forth the code.

NetBeans 6.5

NetBeans 6.5 beta shows some promising stuff. The PHP stuff has taken huge advances since the 6.0.1 version I tested a few months back. For one, it's officially supported out-of-the-box, no 3rd party add-on required. Neat.

I'll start using it for the time being. There's one bug I've already noticed, but that's not too bad. I'll probably give my thoughts once the beta stops being beta.

Fixed Some Hosting

I just talked to our CEO and got fixed some virtual server hosting, all compliments of the firm. Nice.

I'm planning to set up a "community website" there. This would mean an online user manual, forums, some news and a blog replacing this temporary (*cough*) one. To give the NIH syndrome a whole new dimension, I'm planning to write these from bottom up on top of LightFrame. This serves a dual purpose: For one, it would showcase what the framework can do. I have even planned to have those components open sourced, providing them as "snap-in plugins". But this would also be (another) real world use case, making sure that LightFrame lacks nothing a non-trivial website requires.

After all, it would be quite hypochritical to claim LightFrame to be worthy of the developers' time, but not using it myself, should it suck.

But more on this later on. This is a totally separate project; I have 800 lines of PHP code to rewrite first.

LightFrame Forever

I'm seeing (first hand) what kind of decisions has made the next Duke Nukem as late as it currently is.