I spent Friday afternoon with an impressive technology crowd that gathered here in Austin from Avenue A | Razorfish. I’ve blogged many times over the past few years about how these Interactive Agencies hold the keys to the kingdom on bringing “sexyback” to the Enterprise. It’s been nearly a few months since the blog/firestorm kicked up starting with Mr. Bill (Gates) fueled by Scobleizer.
What I saw with mine own eyes at the AARF gig was red hot enterprise-worthy sexy stuff– borderline enterprise porn. 
The integration was downright obscene!
One of the highlights of the event for me was meeting Tim Bray, pictured to the right here with me. Tim keynoted the event and was described to me by Shiv Singh as one of the original authors of the XML standard. Readers of this blog know what a geek fangirl I am, so I rushed poor Tim at the evening before’s cocktail party and talked his ear off for about a half-hour with mostly nonsense. He kindly took this photo, so I could post it on the blog.
The next day, Tim showed a slide on PHP referencing integration challenges with Wordpress and Drupal. My video interviewing skills are (UM) lacking, but I managed to ask him about it, just in case any Enterprise 2.0 hopefuls were considering PHP as their platform choice… You’ll see Tim is very much the Ruby on Rails fan here.
Incidentally, it’s worth mentioning that BSG’s web site and our e.laborate platform is all Rails, baby. It’s times like these that I wish I were more technical, but to hear a guy like Bray gush over the simplicity and ease of agile development with Rails, makes me feel proud of our apps team. I’ve been on many calls with Scott Brittain, our with customers and with industry insiders. I always learn something from Scott and enjoy talking to the “apps guys” whenever I can. We talk a lot about how this so-called revolution is not about technology, but hey, the technology is one heck of an enabler, ain’t it? It’s like trying to imagine the 60s social revolution without electric guitars.
Rawk on for freedom you awesome geek gods.
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The debate about PHP vs Rails is fascinating.
I am an ex Smalltalk programmer and as such love the who MVC paradigm. This is what Rails brings to the table. Through standards it enforces the Model View Controller separation.
Maybe it’s an evolution of languages. Convoluted C or Fortran programs enforced no separation, although it is perfectly possible to write good elegant procedural code with good standards that makes it maintainable However, must old procedural language programs were a bear to maintain, and as for separating the UI and placing a different one on top… well good luck.
Maybe Rails is a similar evolution from PHP. All the point made above are true for PHP, but as Tim points out Rails makes it a heck of a lot easier to be agile and adaptable to different environments and / or UI/s than PHP because of the standardized separation.