Longing for cross-platform

I was rather enthusiastic when the .NET-framework came out in 2002. Especially because it appeared it would be broadly supported: Sun joined the party, Borland, many others. So, we hoped that it could achieve the original ideals of Java: real cross-platform programming. The browser-war between Netscape and Internet Explorer had just ended and it looked like the times of browser differences were over.

Besides that: the framework had a good architecture. Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal and chief architect of Delphi, had been bought by Microsoft (for a transfersum we normally only see for soccer-players). I still like the great possibilities of the .NET-dataset (inspired by Delpi's clientdataset) and the databinding-concepts. Also: the idea that everybody can keep working in their own computer language with the same framework.

But Microsoft kept it's baby too much under it's guidance and more-and-more it became clear that that it was almost exclusively Bill's party.

Open source

In 2007 I started coding with PHP. We had just stopped making theatre for a living. I didn't want to be limited to only Microsoft servers. Non-Windows hosting was also much cheaper (certainly in those days). On the other hand, PHP was better and better supported under IIS. You could say: again I liked the cross-platform possibilities.

It took some time to get acquainted to PHP; it was much more primitive than what I could do with .NET. By that time it had grown to a real Object Oriented language, especially since version 5. But the way open source is built is completely different from propriety software. Compared with .NET, that was freshly architected from scratch, PHP looked like a mess of legacy possibilities that had been made by many different people without a clear plan. Open source development is, by it's nature, more organic. Someone needs something, makes it and adds it to the existing repository to share it with others.

The main incentive to contribute to open source is the experience that you can freely use software made by others. So if you are paid to develop something for a customer and use open source as a basis for it, why not contribute your product to the project so that others can use it too? It is a new way of thinking and it took some time to get used to it.

CMS

I made a small CMS in ASP.NET. Reworked it in PHP (using Delphi for PHP, which was such an unfinished product that it took me a lot of time). The main disadvantage of your own CMS is, that you have to make every extension of it yourself. I had looked a bit at DotNetNuke and liked the many applications that could be used out of the box.

Having switched to PHP several open source CMSs came into view. From the end of 2008 I took a deep dive into Joomla!. I liked the use of Design Patterns and I liked the community that Joomla! is too. I gave a presentation on the Dutch Joomla!Days in 2009 (about the use of Flash-templates) and got to know more and more people from the Joomla!-sphere. At the moment Joomla! is a main part of my life. I like it and want to contribute to make it better.

• the official Joomla!-site: www.joomla.org
• a (the) Dutch Joomla!-site: www.joomlacommunity.eu
• nice framework that can be used in Joomla!: Nooku-Framework

Yepr also makes made illustrations for:

Herman Peeren is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla Project or Open Source Matters. The Joomla! logo is used under a limited license granted by Open Source Matters the trademark holder in the United States and other countries.