The problem domain

“We must pass the architects review” said the client to me with a frightened voice. “You do not know them, they are a real pain in the …” “I need you to manage and make our in-house architects happy, they can stop any project!” – I hear this often and it makes me think if these architects have forgotten why they are there for – to facilitate the empowerment of business through technology.

Why are these architects blocking any new project?

An architects needs to drive the satisfaction and enablement of business, but he also need to ensure that new solution conforms to security and technology standards he has put in place to ensure the quality of the overall enterprise/solution-set.

Business drivers (such as cost and timeframes) sometime conflict with the company’s overall technology strategy and if an architect sticks to the “perfect process, perfect framework, perfect technology” he could kill most projects proposed by business.

How to be a roadblock

1. Enforce cumbersome technology approval processes that take a very long time.
2. Mandate unneeded documentation.
3. Criticise every decision without giving any alternatives
4. Drive SOA and integration where there are not needed
5. Mandate N-tier (N>3) architecture even for the simplest of sites
6. Focus on technology and forget about business needs

How to be a productive architect

1. Streamline technology choices
2. Promote a pragmatic approach
3. Facilitate  business integration, when needed, through SOA
4. Understand the business and  it’s needs

The architect needs to be the “go to guy”, guru or, at worst case, the Mega-geek – not the roadblock.

I have noticed an immediate increase in hits from Google on the same content, using the same SEO principals and same links. The increase is significant (around 20% more traffic over the last 5 days)

Which makes me wonder:
Does Google prefer WordPress over Drupal?

// create an object
var anyObject = {'someAtt':'someValue', 'otherAtt' : 'otherValue'};
// get the object to source
var anyObjectToString = anyObject.toSource() ;
// now write the string
document.writeln(anyObjectToString );

Here is the printout of this code in firefox:

In Internet Explorer and Chrome this will generate a Javascript error – but this is not for production so using it in Firefox would do fine.

First one:

Windows LiveWriter is an impressive blog editor, and is probably the cleanest one. It provides the familiar user interface that one would expect from usual Microsoft applications. Writing a blog entry with intuitive features like a rich text editor and spell checker is easy. Users also have the ability to quickly add images and other media

Source –  http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/01/15-desktop-blogging-tools-reviewed/

So here we start:

• here
• is
• a list

1. and an
2. ordered
3. one too

Image:

how does it look on the desktop side:

Do you know of a better desktop blogging tool?

Note- Since the publishing of this post I have ported my Blog to WordPress

CakePHP

The problem / symptoms

When calling a server side cakephp method through Ajax calls usualy in combination with JSON encoding, the call fails. The server returns HTTP 200 and everything seems fine, but the Ajax call just doesn’t work.

Diagnostic

By default, cakePHP adds debug information to it’s HTML output. This debug information is very useful, but also very disruptive to Ajax calls and JSON parsing.

The solution

Turn debug off by setting it to 0 – There are two ways you can do that:

1) For the entire cakephp application – go to core.php under the app/config folder and replace this line “Configure::write(‘debug’, 2);” with this line “Configure::write(‘debug’, 0);”

2) For only a specific method call – add this line to your relevant method in the controller –

function yourAjaxCallMethod() {
         Configure::write(‘debug’, 0);

…

}

Let’s face it- old browsers are a pain in the rear. Browsers like FireFox 2 and Internet Explorer 6 do not behave like modern browsers. They do not render HTML in the same way and do not interpret JavaScript in the same way. You can, most of the time, fix these issues, but the process costs a lot in terms of testing, development, and time to market. I was just involved in a project were a client insistent on going through 12 browsers and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for that line item.

The problem is that clients still use these browsers and expect to view your site properly with their legacy browsers. So, when do you stop supporting old browsers?

Option 1 – follow the big companies

Big companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announce their support for legacy browsers. When they stop supporting an old browser you know you can start doing that too.

• For yahoo check out – http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/
• For Google check out – http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/web-browser-support-for-docs-and-sites.html
• For Microsoft check out – http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP010294751033.aspx

Option 2 – Check out browser statistics

If a browser costs you 10,000$ to support, but has only 0.5% market share, you have a good business case to removed it from your supported list.

Here is an example of where you find browser usage statistics – http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Here is another example –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_table

Option 3 – negotiate with your clients

This is a tricky one, business owners have limited budget, you need to agree with your business owner which browsers should be supported. If he/she insists on supporting old browsers they need to know how much they are going to pay for that, and how much are they going to loss in other fields, such as functionality.

Leverage your knowledge

Know your clients, if you are developing an application for Mac users, you should definitely support safari. If you are developing an application for internal use, you can mandate a much smaller set of supported browsers.

Rule of Thumb

As a rule of thumb, I recommend supporting at least two of the latest versions of most popular browsers.

Here are two examples:

Grungie wp theme

iZen wp theme

Disclaimer: WordPress themes evolve very rapidly, if you are reading this post in a year from now (let’s say April 2011) this recommendation might be deprecated.