Going on a 5th incarnation of my personal blog, I think I might actually stick with this one as opposed to the others that I have tried. I tried PHP-Nuke & Post-Nuke, but I didn’t have use for 99% of their capabilities. Plus, I don’t need a whole CMS for a simple blog. As a PHP-developer, I tried writing my own, but took too much effort for something I didn’t even know if I’d end up using. Then I went against my programmer roots and went with *gasp*… a 3rd party hosted blog. But as I assumed, the lack of control killed it for me. Being a PHP Developer, running a windows server, and two linux servers, going with someone else hosting my blog just wasn’t going to fly. So here I am, having just discovered WordPress, I am fairly happy with it so far. Installation was a breeze and the interface is great. It’s easy to understand why this is one of the more popular blog platforms out there.

Anyways, enough about… nothing (I tend to do that sometimes), what led me to WordPress was this blog, which I came across doing research on SAJAX and JPSpan . Why SAJAX and JPSpan? Ever since I came across gmail and google maps, the idea of using a single web page as an application intrigued me. You can only make so many html forms and php processes before you become a bit disgusted with the clunky nature of the post-process-respond model that can inter-mingle multiple languages and display/action code all jumbled in one page. It creates complex and often convoluted code for rather simple tasks. Sure part of it might be my programming style, but the inherent nature of the whole system is also a big problem. There must be a better way to do all this, and more importantly, people are getting sick of the surfing the internet in the same way they did 10 years ago, the only thing that has drastically changed is the content out there. But we are still stuck in the
Client: Send server a request;
Server: Reply to client;
Server: Sever connection;

Client: Re-establish connection with Server, send another request;
Server: Reply to client;
Server: Sever connection;

Repeat…

It is a dated process that will hopefully be replaced by something a more intuitive in the future. Well we are starting to reach that time with new concepts and approaches to web design that include these and other methodologies and platforms. For example, check out this awesome XUL-Amazon app. (Yes, you need Mozilla/Firefox as IE doesn’t have XUL support). Also, check out what it looks like on OSX, a real application! I think Microsoft has a lot of things up its sleeve as well for Longhorn in trying to make the web page and the overall web interactive experience much smoother than it is now.

Where’s Java and Flash in all this? Isn’t this whole client-server interaction on a universal platform what it is all about? Yeah, but if it was really the solution, would I even be discussing this right now?

So go check that stuff out and get your thinking cap on as figure out the best way to use these new tools like everyone else is doing right now. There isn’t one clear vision at this point as each has their downsides…. IE probably won’t support XUL for a long time, if ever. You find people who have fallen in love with AJAX and others who think it’s just the latest “Google does it so, it must be cool!” idea. Then you have JPSpan and SAJAX which approach the idea very differently. Microsoft’s Avalon mixed with the rest of the .NET framework will solve this problem, but only on Longhorn PCs, and who knows if the industry will adopt such a proprietary and limited framework.