~Sterling, TNG

I'm bored with my CIS web site and a little tired of maintaining it. For anyone looking for it's content, it still exists and I'll be bringing it back, but I'm trying to put together the next generation content management system for my web site.

History: Okay, this is pathetic. I am so picky about my crud that I have literally spent the last 7 years trying to put together a content management framework for web design as my number one pet project. All of that work and I have very little to show for it. In that time, I've restarted at least once a year.

The original reason for all this work is that I wanted to have a journal of articles and essays that I updated on a regular basis, but wouldn't have to maintain the index. I wish I could say that 7 years ago, I started blogging before "blogging" was even a part of Internet jingo, but I did want to do it 7 years ago.

More History: I've been "programming" since I was able to read. Something around five years old. I wasn't really programming per se, but I did know how to copy programs from Compute Magazine. When I was eleven, my friend Lucas gave me a (pirated) copy of Turbo Pascal 6.0. He also had a tutorial he'd gotten off of a local BBS to learn Pascal. From there, I got my one wish for my sixteenth birthday, Borland C++ 3.1 with Application Framework and then taught myself C and C++. (Yes, I have been geek since I was five years old.)

At K-State, because of the leadership of Dr. Schmidt, I learned Java and became completely emersed in the language. It was around this time, while working as a consultant for Network Resource Group, I began trying to put together a CMS. It wasn't called a CMS back then, but that's what it was.

Over time, I got frustrated with the restrictiveness of the Java language. I always felt like I was trying to wrap my ideas around the Java language instead of just executing them. Java is so very verbose, but it does provide a standard library for doing everything. Anyway, my first attempt went up in flames.

I then had my first, brief, flirtation with Cocoon while I was taking CIS 726 as an undergraduate and built a very small implementation of my personal web site with it. Cocoon was cool, but freaking slow!

I then began my trek for a language that could express what I wanted directly. I wanted a language I can think in. I tried out PHP. PHP is real slick. Last I checked, NRG is still using the second web site I designed for them using PHP. We need some login functionality for clients so they could check on the antivirus email service we were planning to supply (though, I understand they've since dropped that service). Anyway, I replaced a web site that took me two weeks to put together (in Java and JSP) with a new one in PHP in less than four hours. Awesome!

Therefore, I embarked on attempt number three in PHP. This is when I came with the concept of a content management system, which everyone else obviously copied from me. ;) This is when I invented, Contentment, as a framework. Unfortunately, my first concept for Contentment was doomed from the beginning. PHP just wasn't elegant enough for me to do anything but RAD. I like PHP and would use it again, but I will not build frameworks in it. Too much spaghetti.

This and the fact that PHP isn't really good for anything but web templates (though, I understand PHP 5 is changing that) brought me back to my search for a language. At NRG, I had messed with Perl a bit for the antivirus stuff (we were extending Anomy Mailtools) and decided to give it a try. I also gave Python a shot. Both are nice languages. Python offers some very elegant scripting features and freedom from static typing. (I can just hear Dr. Stoughton and Dr. Banerjee cringing at that thought.) Python is just too....ugly for me. Yes, I said ugly. It feels clunky and I have to think to hard to do things their way. It's the same old issue I had with Java.

Perl, on the other hand, is like God's gift to the disorganized thinker. I can think in Perl. I write code like I write a term paper. It's easy for me to read and easy for me to write. It fits me. Unfortunately, it too, is very clunky. Many of the language features are hacked on. Imagine an object oriented language where the objects are just things that are "blessed" with a name. Thus, you could have an array or a regular value or a map "blessed" as the same type but have completely different ways of being used. Ick. So, I cope with the clunk because I know Perl 6 is coming.

Anyway, Perl brings me back to my point. I started an implementation in Perl. I failed. I started another implementation in Perl. I again couldn't stand my own code, and started again. Around this time I discovered Mason, which is a really wonderful tool for embedding Perl into source code and is a mini-content management system of it's own, sort of. I tried again with a Perl/Mason combo and again failed.

I then decided, let's go practical. I'll implement something that works RIGHT FREAKING NOW. Ta-da! It worked!....almost. If you go to the CIS Support Site, you can see my handiwork. It works. The original ~Sterling web site featured a forked version of the same software that was improved in a lot of ways from the original. Unfortunately, both of these were still lacking and slowly became less and less manageable—i.e., they didn't scale as well as I'd hoped.

Thus, I have endeavored to use the best of those tools and added new features for database support and a new forms system to try and make the system more scalable. Unfortunately, I've again tried to go too abstract again and not concrete enough.

This time, I'm going to do it right. I'm going to take the best of my third generation Mason/Perl software and my attempted fourth generation Mason/Perl software to build the fifth generation.

This is why ~Sterling is now a blank slate. I'm going to build it up from scratch and I will make it beautiful, or I will die trying. May God have mercy on my soul.