This is an absolutely brilliant summary of the virtues of PHP.

The important point is that these virtues aren't going away. By comparison this seems to miss the point. In 2020 we won't be programming the web with an advanced Python framework (wonderful as python is). We'll have something which does what PHP did for CGI or Processing does Java, ie. wrap a purpose built, sophisticated back-end (something like Google Application Engine) in a light, domain-specific language. That language won't look like PHP. It would be nice if it looked like Python, but I suspect Javascript is a more likely model.

But it will retain the virtues of PHP : none of this fussy separation of presentation and logic; easy discoverability of where URLs go; fast iterative development; big built-in library etc.


(Hat-tip, BillSeitz for the links)

App. Engine's pay-for-more model goes live.

TurboGears on Application Engine

A blog written on Google App. Engine.

Alternatives to Google Application Engine

Interesting Map-Reduce on Http clusters.

Hat tip App. Engine Guy ... an App. Engine book.

And, of course, I'm not forgetting about Chris Dent's TiddlyWeb either .... though it's harder to track progress without a blog, eh, Chris? :-)

Update: Doh! Chris reminds me there's a Tiddlyweb Twitterfeed

Wow! Manuel Simoni is on fire! with BuckyBase development :

- Import into Google Spreadsheet

- Google Gadgets Visualization

- RDF triples (ah well ... if it makes him happy)

- and is this a TreeGrid???

This is seriously exciting.

Here's something else that looks pretty cool. BuckyBase is a data-wiki where pages are like free-form records (dictionaries of key / value pairs) that can also be can be shown grouped into tabular form.

It's fairly simple at the moment (another just-launched GAE experiment), but I can't help thinking that in my "enterprisey" day-job I work with nothing but data which is structured like this : records that are less than normalized, sometimes viewed as separate pages, sometimes squashed into grids. Give it the ability to add a few extra-constraints, some kind of blank form definitions; hook it up to Google Visualization and let it embed Gadgets; add some more sophisticated querying ... and you've got the heart of a small-business data-base application : Filemaker-as-a-service.

And if Google can ensure that Application Engine really is fast, powerful and secure enough to host serious applications, then it looks very promising as the new standard substrate for a whole ecology of this kind of wiki-derived tool.

This man is cool ... just cured my headache.

Yep. Me too. I think GAE needs a dashboard.

I fixed a subtlish bug in Mind Traffic Control today.

I was trying to pull the email address out of user objects using user.email() ... however it seemed that you might be able to have users who don't have an email address and for who user.email() fails or returns None. Not common, I guess because user id's are based on Google accounts (which is mainly Gmail accounts I'd assume.)

Anyway I've now wrapped all attempts to get user.email() in a try. But next question, what should I do instead? When I find a user without an email, what should I use to identify him or her?

GAE pricing looks reasonable from my perspective.

Or have I not thought through the scenarios? Glad I'm not trying to run some kind of video store of course.

Mind Traffic Control now has #tags.

If you use any word beginning with a # when describing a task, the task gets tagged with this word. And once you start tagging, a filter appears to let you filter your queue to present only those tasks which contain the tag.

Not entirely sure I've got the UI right on this one. It is simple, I think. But maybe not obvious, and maybe not in the right place at the moment.

Comments, bug reports, suggestions welcome as always.

BTW : a good thing about the GAE, it is so simple to add new functionality. This was about three hours of development and another 3 of debugging.

The reason for the longish debugging is what looks like a quirk in GAE.

At one point I was using a user object instead of a user email in a query. (I'm using user email's as user id in the database.) You might assume that this would simply fail with some kind of type error. But interestingly it worked on my local machine (somehow in the SDK it looks as though the user object gets correctly coerced into its email) but not on the appspot server where the query always returned nothing.

Read into that what you will.

Mind Traffic Control roll-out continues.

Nothing spectacular in terms of numbers, but friends are making interesting comments and suggestions; and some strangers are discovering it via the Twitter announcement.

Eikeon pointed to twemes as a place to search for the #tag #MTC on Twitter.

Good chat with Folknology. He's encouraging me to open up the data. Hence I did CSV export of your tasks. Al, likes RSS/Atom but I still need to find out whether feed-readers can do the required Google login to get at a non-public feed.

Rup3rt weighed in with a number of comments starting :

Wow an invisible list machine almost like a gumball/toy dispenser ...

and continuing

I like to see what is ahead but it is good with the delegation - I can line up things for the estagiarios. This is great for non-negotiables like driving instructions, recipes.

* The font for "This task was delegated to you .. may report the sender for blacklisting and delete this task" is a bit big

* I would like a difficult autoaddress (1gg23ff3d3reedd@mindtrafficcontrol.appspot.com) to delegate tasks by email and maybe I could get other tasklists to feed into MTC using this (to just top it up with priority1 or todotoday tasks)

* Maybe paste a list of (line break delimited) tasks that are automatically added

* Maybe show in a widget

* Maybe show total number of tasks

* How would time estimates of task duration fit in? It could be a diversion to see "You have 13 hours of traffic to negotiate")

Good suggestions. I'll be interested to know what everyone else thinks.

But here are some initial thoughts :

Font issue, yep. Mailing tasks in to Mind Traffic Control would be great; a very useful addition. But I'm not yet sure I can do it on the Google Application Engine.

I might be able to do it using another hosting service but that's introducing a lot of new complexity into the system : running two different hosting services, writing scripts on the old-skool one to pass emails it receives into MTC in some way, being responsible for security (how do I stop spammers mailing tasks to you via the system?) etc. Going to take a while to figure that one out.

Importing other formats and / or entering multi-line, multi-task lists is easier and more likely to appear soon. I'll definitely go for the multi-line input box in the short-term future. I'd be interested to hear what formats readers currently use for to-do lists so that I can import them. I immediately think OPML, of course. But are there others?

Widgets ... actually I've been playing with OpenSocial and Orkut Widgets for my other GAE project. It's cute ... but I'm not yet sure what I'd put in a MTC widget.

Task counts and time estimates I'm ambivalent on. I don't want to make MTC a paranoia inducing space where you arrive on the front page to be presented with something saying "Welcome to Mind Traffic Control. You have 280 outstanding tasks". On the other hand, I see that people would like some sort of overall measure of what they have to do. More thinking on this.

Finally, there's a couple of issues of "philosophy", particularly why I'm resistant to letting you flag tasks with "priorities" but leaving that for the next post when I'll be more coherent.

Softlaunch ... no fanfare ...

Mind Traffic Control

This is my first Google Application Engine application. A kind of next-action list for the Twitter generation.

Basic instructions :

1) You need a Google account to login (eg. Gmail) ... it's a GAE app.

2) There's a blue box for inputting tasks you need to do. Once you start entering them, Mind Traffic Control will show you your next action.

3) At which point you have a choice. Say you did it. Delay it (push it to the back of the queue). Delegate it to another user. Defer it to a future date. Or delete it altogether.

4) Keep going.

There are a couple of ideas behind this. First, that people have been getting too hooked up on the idea of "organizing" their tasks and actions into lists. But organization itself isn't really an end, it's a means towards making sure you remember and discover your tasks, as a means towards the ultimate end of getting stuff done. So instead of thinking of tasks as list-management, Mind Traffic Control treats tasks as un-structured flows.

The real focus is on capturing the tasks as quickly and easily as possible. So, inspired by Twitter and Folknology's Rel3, the input box is always there at the top of your page.

The other focus is when the task is presented to you. At this point you need all your options to quickly route the task. In a more static system we might say route into particular "bins" but here it might be better to say "channels" (unless it's the ultimate sink of "done" or "deleted".

Another idea ... it's meant to be the simplest workflow that could possibly work. Just short messages which can be routed. Everything else has to be constructed by humans on top of this. But as, once again, we've seen with twitter, it looks like humans are pretty good at filling out these communication channels.

Anyway, off to bed ... will write more posts here soon ...

please have a try with Mind Traffic Control, and if you have any comments, feel free to post them here.

I've now been playing with GAE for a couple of weeks, and it's still looking pretty good. I've now got an Orkut developer account so I can make Orkut widgets tethered to a GAE based service.

Meanwhile looks like GvR has been doing some cool stuff within Google with internal development tools, and has just released it to the outside world, thanks to GAE giving us access to BigTable etc.

The change in mindset needed for GAE

Zed Shaw's take on GAE is entertaining.