Why PHP gets picked

Lately on a few forums that I lurk, more and more people have been signing up and saying something along the lines of “yar, how I makez t3h browsargame?!!!one”.

I don’t really mind people like that. I might mind their grammar, but I don’t mind answering the question or giving them an idea of what direction to take. Generally what I recommend to them is that they plan their systems out, pick a language with the features that they want(I usually list off Perl, PHP, ASP, and Ruby or Python), settle on a database system that works with their language, and go to it.

But for some reason, everyone settles on PHP. I see little to no people mentioning developing browsergames in Perl or ASP or any other language, but topics about browsergames in PHP proliferate; there’s a new one every half hour!

I think that PHP gets selected by most, because it is easy. That’s the only reason. A person can easily sit down and write this: <?php echo 'Hello, World!'; ?> Whereas to do the same thing in Perl, we would need this(on the web): #!/usr/bin/perl -w use CGI qw(:standard); print header(); print "Hello, World!"; This leads to people picking PHP because it’s so easy; they can drop their code into a page along with their HTML, and there are no repercussions. This lack of separation between design and logic drives me insane; I don’t much like working on PHP code that hasn’t been separated nicely.

Ultimately, though, that’s what it comes down to: people who write PHP and steadfastly choose PHP have chosen it because it is easy to embed their code directly into their page, and because PHP has a substantially smaller learning curve than the other languages. Whether it’s actually a viable language for people to use seriously is something that’s been debated for ages now, and probably still will be.

Posted in Code, php, webdev | No Comments »

The Next Big Thing

No, I’m not talking about the song by fm static. I’m talking about the next big webapp.

A lot of us have heard of(or even used) some form of social networking site. These are things like myspace, facebook, nexopia, et al. When it comes down to social networking, there are hundreds of websites for a person to choose from based on their interests to their technical proficiency to their sexual preference. Which one should you use?

Now, naturally most people would just grab whatever presents itself first. At school I see a lot of friends switching to Facebook because Nexopia got blocked. But this haphazard shifting from one social network to the next ends up leaving users with a chain of profiles that they never update.

This is what leads me to believe that the next ‘big’ webapp out there(it seems like everyone is building a handful now) is going to be something that just…tracks all of them. A place where users can go and update their myspace, facebook, and whatever-other-network profile pages simultaneously.

What if this new webapp could also keep track of contact/friend lists accross all of the networks too? You would be able to keep one massive friends list instead of 6 different ones.

Right now, today’s web world is becoming saturated(perhaps over-saturated) with web apps and social networks. Apps focused around gathering all of the information from the other ones and providing a single unified control panel, I believe, are likely to be the ones that will be taking up the slack.

Posted in socialnetworking, web2.0, webapps | No Comments »

A New Kind of Link-Game

My newest project is called “Militarism”. It’s like one of those old viral linking games that everyone used to play, except that I’ve tweaked the idea and added a bit…more. I tried to make it something you actually play, instead of just being ranked against others based on how easily you can deceive trick coerce people into clicking on them.

The idea behind Militarism is that for each click on your unique recruiting link, you gain 1 new recruit and a certain amount of gold. You use your gold(and recruits) to build an army, and you use this army to attack other users that are playing the game.

There are different types of units, and they’re all (sort of) balanced against each other. They aren’t really balanced yet, because Militarism isn’t even in a closed beta stage yet. The idea is, however, that some units will be good at some things, and others will just be general jack of all trades units. Based on the type of units that you train, you can either easily boost your rank within the game, or easily ensure that your rank isn’t lowered by someone else.

Users are ranked based on the size of their army. If one user has 10 units and the other has 6, no matter what kind of units they are, the first user will be the higher rank. However, if the second user attacks the first user and both are using units more geared for attacking, the second user will probably decimate the first user’s army. This will then lower the first user’s rank, and the second user will end up moving up a rank. This is the general idea behind Militarism and what makes it different from your average link game.

Posted in Militarism, Project | No Comments »