New Mexico Information Technology Infrastructure & Architecture group forming

Today, I attended the first meeting of "New Mexico Information Technology Infrastructure & Architecture," the brainchild of Thierry Thelliez, oft contributor and board member of the AgileNM group that I run. Thierry envisions the group positioned somewhere between the AgileNM/SPIN groups and the technology-focused groups (like the New Mexico Ruby and Java users groups) in terms of where it fits on the technology vs. business continuum. Some of the topics discussed that caught my eye:

• Server virtualization
• Web frameworks
• Open source
• Scripting languages (e.g. Ruby, Python)
• Wikis
• Distributed architectures

The next meeting is scheduled for January, 2008. Visit the NMITIA site for more details and to add your input for topics you'd like to see. Like the AgileNM group, Thierry's vision is that group members will largely drive the agenda. So help drive the group in a direction that will meet your professional needs.

Flex Functional Testing with Ruby

I have been playing with Flex the last few days, creating an application to screen scrape audio equipment sales sites on a periodic basis and send me email when a component I am looking for is posted. Currently, I am a little hung up trying to use WebORB interface between Flex 3 Beta 2 and Ruby on Rails. The examples appear to all be written for Flex 2. So far, I have found some references that make it sound doable, but I am not quite there yet.

In the meantime, I ran across FunFX, a Ruby library for functional testing of Flex applications. This is very exciting to me since, until now, I was only aware of Mercury (oops, HP) QuickTest Pro as a testing option for Flex. To be able to test Flex apps with code very similar to the Watir tests I write now is very exciting. I have not fired it up yet, but as soon as I have some experience with it, I'll report back.

Firefox 3 Beta Available!

I just read in the New York Times technology section that the Beta for Firefox 3 (Minefield) is now available. Being too curious, I had to give it a try.

It doesn't work with most of my plugins yet (although I did manage to load Adblock Plus!). The first big problem I found was editing this post. The Javascript editor for Blogger did not respond particularly well, so I am finishing this up with Firefox 2. And, so far, I have not noticed any killer features I can't live without.

Even so, I still plan to use Firefox 3 for most of my casual browsing. The reason I plan to stay with it is speed. Except for Opera, this is the fastest browser I have seen. Mozilla also claims that it has fixed 300 memory leaks.

Killer CMS - Joomla

I hadn't had much need for a Content Management System (CMS) until, recently, I offered to help a friend get her site up and running. She has written professionally for the Web for years, but the actual web design is handled by the organizations she works for. I was going to whip something up for her myself but with zillions of CMS systems available, I didn't see any reason to start from scratch.

She doesn't have a hosting service yet, so I started looking around at some of them. Many hosting services include CMS support. It seemed like it would be easier to start with one that was pre-installed, so I first looked for services with pre-installed CMS. Several providers supported Joomla!, so I decided to give that a try.

Joomla!'s demo site was down, so I went ahead and installed it on my local machine. It was literally installed in five minutes. My home box is a Windows machine and I already had the Apache/MySql/PHP stack installed using XAMPP. If you haven't tried XAMPP, it is just about the easiest way to get the stack up and running on Windows. All I did was drop the .zip files contents into my xampp\htdocs directory, point my browser at http://localhost/joomla/install, answer a few questions and I was done. So many things like this I get frustrated just getting things set up that I give up before I ever start. Not so with Joomla!.

After the install process completes, you have to remove the install folder in order to continue. This is a security feature. Once it is removed, pointing my browser to http://localhost/joomla produced a page that looked like:



So far, I have found Joomla! to be intuitive and easy to learn. But what really makes it exciting to me is the depth of the community behind it. For example, Googling on "Joomla templates" returns 7.9 MILLION hits. The first template site I went to has 1,500 free templates available! Hundreds of plugins are also available. I guess I am the only one in the world who didn't know about Joomla! until now.

My comments are based on the 1.5 RC3 (codename Takriban) release. The current production version is 1.0.13, which I have not tried.

One thing that frosts me is that it is written in PHP. I consider this a hack language, not worthy of real software efforts. Yet people are getting cool things done with it. Too bad it isn't written in Rails or Django. ;-)