Recently I have been working on my businesses website to better allow project management and user profile control. Check it out here: www.initial-design.net to see the nearly completed update, v3.0 of Initial Design Consulting
What the heck is wrong with me? Why am I writing about this…
Let me apologize ahead of time to whoever ends up reading this because this is almost definitely not going to make sense the first time someone reads it, which is sort of what this is all about anyways… Okay, here goes.
Today I’m sitting here at home. I’m going over a few things, trying to update my brain before I attempt the daunting task of trying to assemble an application and get some of my work done. I’m going over some of the basic theory behind Ruby on Rails and the first thing that comes up is the architecture. And I know everyone has experienced this before, when you end up reading through a tutorial somewhere trying to get some concept and syntax pounded into your brain, then suddenly there is a massive over usage of reoccurring and conflicting words? I’m honestly growing increasingly discouraged by encountering this. Let me explain what’s bothering me today:
MVC Architecture. Or rather the words that compose the acronym MVC. Model – View – Controller. Now let me explain to everyone what MVC means. You have a web application developed. Now this application can access a database or not, it doesn’t really matter for this architecture, and really, the beauty of MVC architecture is it really doesn’t matter what happens when a user accesses your site, it pretty much just handles all models of a dynamic web page. But oh wait, I just used the word model, the very first word in MVC. HMMM. Okay, let’s start from a different angle here. Model REALLY just means component. I know, that’s strange right? But a model really is just a component and I can’t classify that any more simply than that.
Joomla!
The simplest, most logical, and easiest framework ever made(not just opinion, it’s the most used) is Joomla. While Joomla doesn’t support Object Oriented Programming, it supports PHP and it’s powerful enough for most peoples uses. Joomla is broken down as follows–
Today Google officially released its newest Open-Source web browser for beta testing.
What is it?
Open source (modern) web browser currently available for windows as Beta.
What is it supposed to do?
One box for everything
New Tab Page
Application Shortcuts
Dynamic Tabs
Crash Control
Incognito Mode
Safe browsing
Instant Bookmarks
Importing Settings
Simpler Downloads
Where can I get it?
What’s the install like?
First a small exe that opens to a download while installing method. Very straight forward and smooth.
Review:
First glance: It is extremely clean. No options pull downs above the address bar means tabs go right at the top so there is no fight for screen real estate when viewing pages. But there isn’t an option to go entirely full screen, which will be missed by those people who like to showcase their work for clients without any browser clutter. Also lots of very cool “ajax style” animations for everything Chrome does like downloading things.
If you look in the address bar, Chrome does a very neat thing with your URL, breaking it down in contrast from black and light grey so you can tell what the actual domain is seperate from your paths.
For example: http://www.johnux.com becomes http://johnux.com/
First page I attempt visiting: gameinthemaking.com | That is exactly how I typed it in. The htaccess file for that site forces auto www. for all pages in order to keep search engine data consistent. So in a modern browser(not IE) the url will change to http://www.gameinthemaking.com without any issues allowing me to visit my site. Internet Explorer does a search for the term “gameinthemaking.com” instead of sending me to my site. That’s okay because I among countless other people are trying to wean people off of IE altogether. Google Chrome handles this type of url request just as poorly as IE does in my opinion. Chrome takes the url, adds http://www. to it, and deletes the .com and sends you to this page.
Now click to the page chrome KNOWS you meant to go to! This honestly bugs me. Sure the htaccess file on that site is probably not perfect, but Firefox, Safari, and Opera don’t seem to mind. There might be some reason I don’t know about that explains why it does this, but I’m going to compare it’s actions to the 3 most respected browsers out there and voice my complaint.
Similar to Opera, but kind of smart, and kind of silly: Google Chrome seems to be really building up their Tabbing ability and new tab layout quite a bit. It’s similar to Opera where you have lots of little previews available to you on your new tab, but instead of being your choice of previews, it’s your history and most visited sites. Take what you want from it, but I personally don’t enjoy what comes up:
History like this can be cool sometimes, but what if you don’t want your history displayed? I have a friend coming over who is having a birthday this week. For a half prank/half serious gift I was thinking about getting him an Easy Bake Oven. If he comes over he just might need to go on the web and what would he find? Right off the bat, easy bake ovens under my recent bookmarks and my Most visited pages.
This is where Incognito mode comes in. – Incognito mode can be selected from the option panel by going to the menu and choosing, open Incognito window. This allows for completely clean browsing that leaves no traces of your page visits in Chrome. VERY COOL!
Plugins: ? 3rd party content? Alexa?….: Not yet. I know this is sad, but what else can we say, it’s brand new and I honestly don’t know what Google plans to do about this, but at current I’ll live.
Performance: This is where Google Chrome really excels. By default it seems to have fully working support for flash player which is always nice. The problem with flash being closed source is every plugin for every browser has it’s own quirks that take some getting used to. With Safari I often have trouble getting all kinds of multimedia to work properly unless it’s Quicktime, so I’m not even going to go there. Internet Explorer has tendancies to throw page content over my flash so I can’t view pages as the designers intended. Firefox likes to work a lot, until you have multiple tabs or pages open that all have flash on them, then we have issues not being able to playback more than a few seconds of flash video without manually scrolling ahead a few seconds.
So here is my test. I’m going to keep google Chrome open all day. 10 of them. Each with 10 tabs. All displaying flash on all tabs either video or just animated content. I’m doing this on my laptop(2ghz, 2gb ram XP), and my Desktop(3.6ghz quad-core, 4gb ram, Vista 64) I will attempt to see if there are ever any issues with the flash or content not displaying properly.
What will I use to monitor this?
How about we try the built-in task manager?
And for a more enhanced view? The Stats for nerds option in the bottom left hand corner.
Google Chrome comes with some VERY awesome performance monitoring tools available through it’s task manager that allow you to close things that are using too many resources, monitor pages individually and close them if you need to. THIS IS AMAZING!
You know what? I’m sold, download and install it today. I haven’t got it to crash yet and I’ve been trying fairly hard, watch for an update soon.
I give it a 9.2 out of 10.
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