Comments on: WordPressMU: Making a smart platform choice

By: Julian Harris

Julian Harris — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:04:52 +0000

Re: standards compliance: one headache you have with .NET is that its controls generate lots of extra divs everywhere, and have accessibility problems. in the UK, accessibility requirements are law, and we’ve been burnt by this several times with clients recently, where .NET just refuses to budge on the issue.

Which brings up my next point: closed source. I manage projects these days rather than code — but in my spare time I code in Rails. It really is an odd thing not to be able to step into the library and figure out what the hell is going on. I’ve always, always been able to do that (Metrowerks C++, Java, PHP, and now Rails, with everything except runtime.lib back in THINK Pascal in 1990.) My poor team mates!

My experience is that PHP is more widespread, but you can get less disciplined programmers, as PHP doesn’t really encourage much in the way of, well, any kind of structure. One consideration is to advertise for PHP programmers who want to move to rails — then you’d get the best of both worlds. But mupress certainly is a great product.

By: The Dude Dean

The Dude Dean — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:47:29 +0000

The only two social networks I can think of using asp (not including a microshaft product) are orkut and youtube. Both were bought out by Google.

By: Nik Cubrilovic

Nik Cubrilovic — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:26:00 +0000

“from what I’ve seen and heard, .NET is simply not a web-friendly (read: standards based) platform for building a people-powered Web 2.0 community on. ”

completely untrue. these guys should build in whatever they are good at..

By: Haacked

Haacked — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:16:49 +0000

I’d agree with you that at first ASP.NET reflected Microsoft’s culture of not caring much about web standards, but a lot has changed since ASP.NET 1.0 and 2.0.

ASP.NET 2.0 has much better support for standards and tableless layout (look into CSS Control Adapters).

Sadly, not every group embraces it at MS, but there are many developers on the ASP.NET platform who do embrace it. You shouldn’t use Channel 9 as an indictment of ASP.NET just because that site uses tables for layout.

Look into the “ALT.NET” movement in ASP.NET and you’ll see there are many who do “get the web” on ASP.NET.

At the time of this comment, for example, your site’s homepage doesn’t validate:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffactoryjoe.com%2Fblog%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&verbose=1

Mine, built using an OSS blog engine with ASP.NET, does.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fhaacked.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&verbose=1

Of course, that could change at any moment if I happen to post non-validating comment.

The point here is that in any system where a user can post HTML, it’s challenging to support web standards. You can violate web standards in *any* platform, not just ASP.NET.

By: Jerry Bowles

Jerry Bowles — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 21:40:07 +0000

As a non-geek I can’t speak to the technical arguments here but I can tell you that I’m using a .NET platform (Blogtronix) for some client projects because it is an excellent blogging and aggregation platform with a number of standard community features (profiles, personal networking, ratings, bookmarking, etc.) already built-in. Reuters is using it for its new Reuters Interactive site (www.reutersinteractive.com) and I have a personal site that hasn’t been upgraded to the latest version at http://www.socialmediatoday.com Maybe this is a non-techie way of looking at things, but shouldn’t you always start the selection process with the software and platform that comes closest to doing what you want it to do out of the box?

By: Martin Edic

Martin Edic — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 13:38:42 +0000

I’m not a programmer but I have to ask: why not use Ning and skip the whole process?

By: John Roper

John Roper — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 01:11:14 +0000

You are just MS hating. MS’s slimy business practices aside, .NET 2.0 is just as good as the other platforms you mentioned. As for the community aspect I agree both the other platforms have a lot more “vocal” community. But are you building a business or trying to win a popularity contest? I would carefully consider the cost of a platform switch (particularly its impact on test and ops) before making any changes. Are you really delivering more value to the investor or just wanting to play with trendy technology?

Also the statement “Adherence to web standards and open data formats can help mitigate both the cost and pain of the development of new web-based environments and platforms.” seems like a lot of marketing BS to me. Do you really believe this? Channel 9’s crappy table layout may be inelegant but it renders on every browser and your customers don’t care if the website they visit is using floated elements or tables.

Politics should have nothing to do with your decision. As the employee of a startup company you are building a business, not running for office. Some investor somewhere has entrusted you with a lot of money. And I guarantee that all that investor has in mind is a return on their investment, and not that you are hanging out with the cool kids.

By: An Alternate Look at Platform Selection : Venture Chronicles

An Alternate Look at Platform Selection : Venture Chronicles — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 20:27:12 +0000

[...] not often that you find such a remarkably well constructed discussion about making a platform selection that doesn’t actually have much to do with the technical [...]

By: Michael Neel

Michael Neel — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:21:50 +0000

Some .Net corrections (not meaning to take away from points on the other frameworks):

ASP.NET 2.0 is XHTML and CSS 2.0; failure to use it this way generates warnings in Visual Studio.

ASP.NET AJAX Client (JavaScript Libraries) are 100% Open Source (not shared, but true open) - they don’t require anything but a webservice supporting JSON or SOAP.

Visual Studio Web Developer Express is free, as in beer, and for commercial project development.

The .Net CLR can run code written in C#, VB, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. This is true of web apps (ASP) and think apps.

ASP.NET apps with AJAX, can be developed very quickly. Take a look at the videos on http://asp.net to see what I mean.

By: links for 2007-07-19 at Jason P. DeFillippo

links for 2007-07-19 at Jason P. DeFillippo — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:13:33 +0000

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