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Other Blogs The Future of Open Source Web Applications
Open source CMS' and other open source web applications, be it PHP or otherwise have been responsible for the explosion of internet development and coined phrases like "web 2.0" as well as other buzz words.
The other good thing about them is that they are (for the most part) free to use and that's resulted in many companies saving a lot of money. Granted, there is still labor involved in installing, maintaining, customizing, and extending the applications. So this has helped web designers and developers, as well, complete large projects quickly and make a higher profit margin.
It also gives the developer and end users alike a community to seek help from. Open source web apps also help improve things and make a strong effort to expand everyone's education and internet experience. Yes, open source does matter. It is good for everyone out there, except maybe companies that sell web based CMS' and other web applications. However, it also helps them even if their CFOs and accountants don't see it right away.
However, what is to become of the future of open source web applications? What are the downsides? Where is this all going? Who knows. That's the beauty of it. The internet open source community have taken us well beyond what we thought possible and it's almost impossible to predict...But I do have some ideas.
Who Makes the Real Decisions
Unfortunately it's not completely up to the developers. In a perfect world our voices would all be heard and the people with power might take creative input. Unfortunately, those people in power like power and think that they have all the answers. As a result, change is slow. The whole "buzz word" phenomenon has helped with this though and also gives us a bit of humor.
When a big company asks if their site runs AJAX, we have a good laugh. What do we say, "Sure it can." or "Well, it'll cost another thousand dollars a month in hosting to support that." or "Actually, AJAX is web 1.0, we're running on CRAKRJAX which is web 2.0."
So here's a little knowledge. I can never (at least never want to) go into depth about what I'm working on in the real world for fear of breaking laws, losing job, insulting people, and all that wonderful confidentiality stuff. However, I'm going to talk about real world examples.
Company A doesn't want to use a a proprietary content management system for their site because they (and other companies in their parent company) have used these before to run their sites and they haven't worked out. They can't put up new features because the people who sold it to them are out of business or too expensive. They can't hire a 3rd party to develop for them because their servers don't even have PHP (that's an extreme but very true situation by the way that I have encountered personally). So that's why Company A doesn't want to continue using their site and why they don't want to go with another company that will offer them something "custom." In fact, they almost hate the word "custom."
Another example for you. Company B has you draft up a huge document about what they need for their site, what it should look like, how it should be built and organized. Then they tell you that they want to use a certain conent management system (open source or not) because they heard it was "good." By who? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn't matter. It could have been their brother in law who took a weekend course on web design in the middle of nowhere with a professor who made an unrelated comment or said something out of context...or was simply no good to begin with. It's always been my stance that you can't learn about web design in school. It changes too fast. The only way to learn is to do and read on the internet. The things that exist out there that are new and great don't even have books on the shelves. What makes you think a professor at a college could possibly teach a class on it? Go find me a class on AMFPHP, go find me a class on Drup-- oh well hang on. The world is catching up and there are places to go for education on some of these open source applications. We're still a ways away from the mainstream colleges, but there are workshops.
Ok so before I go too far off track. Company B wants a CMS because they heard it was good and isn't making an educated decision about it. Like how I tied that in by saying "educated decision" huh?
My point is there is a lack of education out there. Hey, good for me. Bad for business and the world.
Open Source CMS to the Rescue
Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, Typo3, Mambo, Post-Nuke HAHA! (I'm sorry for that outburst, post-nuke was very important to the cause), and many other free open source web applications help with un-educated decisions. They are increasingly easier to "sell" someone on because they have communities on the internet with a bunch of experts on them. So all of a sudden, there's many people who can work on Company A's site and they don't have to worry about being stuck with the people who built their site. Sure, Company B's happy because they feel justified with their brother in law's discovery of learning how to setup a blog for himself to share photos of family trips.
What everyone kinda brushes aside is that these applications are not always stable and/or secure. Furthermore, they are usually "beta" and because there's a large number of people (from all over) working on them, it's hard for any one person to know everything about what's going on. This is more of a problem for Drupal, Joomla!, as I believe WordPress is a little more organized as well as Typo3 and the others. It depends on who's running the show. What camp you belong to if you will.
So "camps" start to form. Developers are no longer "web developers" they are "Drupal developers" and experts. They spend all their time learning about something that could collapse at any moment or change to the point that they don't know what's going on. Hopefully if they are truly Joomla! or Drupal or WordPress "experts" they will be on top of the changes though.
That's bad for developers to do that though. They start knowing less and less about how to troubleshoot other problems and how to work with other systems. The smart ones will learn as many CMS systems as they can because then they are prepared for whatever one a company decides to use in the future.
Or the smartest developer really gets a good understanding of the language at hand (PHP or otherwise) and learns about different methods, design patterns, object oriented programming, etc. Unfortunately at interviews employers are increasingly beginning to ask the wrong questions. "What CMS' are you familiar with?" Questions like that only exist because their clients are asking the same questions, but it's all wrong. If you know your shit, you should be able to work with any of them.
So to get to the point again here, we're starting to get these "camps" that seperate people and design firms/companies. Company A won't hire the firm because they aren't Drupal experts, most of their sites have been with Joomla!. Or they don't want to hire the firm because they don't see enough examples of sites they built with Drupal. I've personally seen that one and have to cry and laugh at the same time.
Separation is bad - especially within the same programming language! The entire unification that these systems and groups of developers tried to start is backfiring because the idea was so good that other people decided to do the same but in a different way. Well let's not get into the whole problem of web among browsers, but there's the perfect proof.
Web Frameworks - The Future
Well, I have to say that web frameworks are going to be the future. Things like Zend, Symphony, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, and the like are the way. I'm going to go with CakePHP because that's the one I learned best and love. Yes, again we have separation but it's not so bad in this case because all the frameworks allow you to do many similar things and picking up another isn't so bad. Whereas Drupal and Joomla! are way different in architecture...they are also both CMS' and not designed for things like project management solutions or shopping carts (yes, yes, forget about the add-ons for now).
So with web frameworks you can do anything really. Sure many follow the MVC design pattern which a lot of people will tell you is restricting in certain ways and only good for some things. I agree. However, for the web, I believe it to be the most versitile and relevant. Blogs and other CMS, project management, client relationship management, shopping carts, dating sites, community sites (like myspace and such), reservation systems, and other database driven applications are all possible with these frameworks. In fact, that's exactly what they were designed to do and then some.
Games? No. Not so much. Though I have created a trivia game with CakePHP that worked out nicely, it didn't follow 100% strict best practices for the framework. It simply couldn't. No big deal, it's still efficient and secure. However, there are some things these frameworks can't do.
The good thing about the frameworks like CakePHP is that they are extendable, rapid, scalable, and manageable. They are modular in design and can be added onto quite easily. They are very fast to use. They can be made to run under various conditions and equipment. They are easy enough to pick up and hand off.
You don't need to learn Drupal or Joomla! and then find out you need to become a WordPress expert one day. If all these systems (which actually do different things even though they are CMS') were built on a framework like CakePHP or Symphony...then a developer who learned that framework could be prepared to work on any of those systems.
Learn less do more. Or is that write less do more. jQuery and other frameworks/libraries exist for JavaScript as well. They are extremely popular and successful. They also are compatible with WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, etc. already because they do different things and sorta run with these web apps instead of against them.
Now jQuery, Scriptaculous, and Moo Tools are all different but after using one you pick up on the next quickly. To my point: Your time is better off learning something at a higher level (such as these frameworks) than learning how to hack away at a Drupal installation. In the end, you know more about the system and how to fix it and you are prepared for the future.
This is where I believe the "web 3.0" will be. I despise the "web 2.0" term but if there's the "next" thing, it's going to be these frameworks and more specifically the idealology of them. The frameworks exist already. It's just how we use these tools available to us. How we as developers/designers make web sites. It's a state of mind. Web 3.0 is a state of mind, it's a higher level of working. Where we don't "hack" things to work - it's where we take concepts and put them to work. We're less fussed with the code and nitty gritty. We take a more logical, higher level approach to the task at hand.
That's what CakePHP allows me to do. That's what Flex allows people to do. Ruby on Rails, etc. "Custom" systems don't become an issue any longer because there's a community of developers who can pick the "custom" web app up and continue with it. So once Company A figures this out...once the world figures this out, we can really get to a better place.
I believe these open source CMS' like Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress etc. have all taken us far. Very far, but about as far as they can.
So there's my prediction. Open source web applications in the future will move away from limiting things like Joomla!, Drupal, etc. and onto extendible open source platforms/frameworks like CakePHP, Symphony, etc.
Dude, I’m sorry I forgot to tell you (but it was too late at that point). I think the weekend before last Joomla was having an open house event at Google’s NYC headquarters. You were out of town, NYC, that weekend so you would have missed it anyway. It would have been cool to go…
Comment by JimiSlew — October 22, 2007 @ 10:59 am
Think I would have been more interested in straying off the path in Google’s headquaters than the actual event =) But yea I did see that after the fact. Joomla! is good - but it’s by no means universal, nor Drupal or anything else for that matter. I’m already hacking Joomla’s core for this site I’m building at work. When it’s done, it’ll be awesome, but all the hours I’m putting in - it might as well have been from scratch with a PHP framework. Like your per dollar site! We’ll get to that eventually promise.
Comment by Tom — October 22, 2007 @ 8:56 pm