Diaspora PHP Fork

[Edward Hotchkiss]

I'm 1/3 through a PHP fork built on Code Ignitor. The advantages are that you can upload, then navigate to your node, and be prompted for install. I think that people would run nodes and accept the project even more if it were ready accessible to the average user to point and click. Thoughts?

Regards,

--------------------
Edward Hotchkiss
edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com
http://www.edwardhotchkiss.com/
--------------------

[michael chrisco]

is it on github?

On Nov 25, 4:07 pm, Edward Hotchkiss <edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com>
wrote:

[Edward Hotchkiss]

no, i have an earmark for it. i'm working my way through it, no one from the diaspora team nor anyone else contacted me on it so im going it alone on a private repo unless someone else is interested -

-edward.

[michael chrisco]

there are quite a few people interested in a PHP solution.

On Nov 27, 1:32 pm, Edward Hotchkiss <edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com>

[Edward Hotchkiss]

http://www.diasporaphp.com/
https://github.com/edwardhotchkiss/Diaspora-PHP/

i've started it on codeignitor for speed and rapid mvc development. kind of a unilateral decision.

handle/email to add anyone who wants in on the project?
would anyone handling the diaspora ui/ux/design want to sync up? i'm going to either fork or rework a lot of the design and interface.

- edward.

[Patrick Aljord]

You should just work on gnu social (based on status.net) or buddypress
(based on wordpress), it's written in PHP and uses the same protocols
as diaspora (ostatus). Don't waste your time:

http://www.gnu.org/software/social/

http://buddypress.org/

[Edward Hotchkiss]

1. the first link doesn't load.
2. wordpress is slower and not mvc or as modular. plus buddypress looks fugly. also it doesn't really work with the whole 'de-centralized' social network concept -

the issue with these other open source [no offense] social networks is that they don't understand ui/ux/ia/design. it would be easier to recreate the project on codeigniter than decipher their setup.

[Michael Mellinger]

Hi Ed,
All of GNU.org seems down (http://www.gnu.org/). Probably back up
later or tomorrow. I don't know Ruby or PHP at the moment. However,
isn't Ruby(and Rails) the hot web language these days?

http://rubyonrails.org/applications

It can't be that hard to learn.

-Mike

[Edward Hotchkiss]

Mike,

I already program in Ruby / RoR and about every language under the sun. You can't create something big and expect an end-user or even middle-ware end-user to install a rails app / gems. LAMP is "The Standard". As far as "The hot web language"; it was ... about 5 years ago.

Maybe you should learn Ruby and contribute, it could be a good learning experience for a novice programmer.

[Michael Mellinger]

Just create a YouTube video and people will be fine. Something along
these lines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX-MzAB_vgE

Does the M in LAMP stand for Mongo? Seriously, I'm sure the system
can be packaged once it matures. yum install diaspora*

-Mike

[michael chrisco]

LAMP stands for Linux Apache Mysql and Php. There is also WAMP (with
windows) and MAMP (Mac OS)

You can get hosting for such servers pretty cheap or set one up
yourself. The reason so many people are pushing for this option is
1) thats the platform that they know
2) its cheaper than custom config servers *usually*

That being siad, each language has its good and bad points. PHP and
Ruby are comparable, Mongodb are comparable, apache and thin are
comparable. basically, the current setup the diaspora team has set up
is a skeleton of the LAMP setup just with different parts that do the
same thing (or near it).

Diaspora has something like LTRM but its not as snazzy as a "LAMP"
server :)

[michael chrisco]

Is there something I am missing. There does not seem to be any code
here?

On Nov 27, 7:03 pm, Edward Hotchkiss <edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com>
wrote:
> http://www.diasporaphp.com/https://github.com/edwardhotchkiss/Diaspora-PHP/

[michael chrisco]

Glad the youtube video is helping people out :)

On Nov 27, 8:12 pm, Michael Mellinger <mmellinge...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Michael Sofaer]

Hi,

I don't really agree that the difference between Ruby and PHP is going
to matter when it comes to being able to install it. The install
process for Diaspora on a totally empty CentOS machine remotely from
your box is three lines. Just get yourself a CentOS cloud instance
and:

git clone git://github.com/MikeSofaer/sod.git
cd sod
./sod <ip_address> diaspora diaspora <password>

I do want to put together an acceptance suite for inter-server stuff,
so that people have a guide to implement in other languages, but we're
not ready for that yet, we're still changing the protocol too much.

I guess what I'm getting at is that it's cool that you are building a
PHP version, but please keep in mind that the protocol is in flux, and
we have to take care that our servers stay interoperable. It's one
thing to ask pod operators to pull code, and another to make them wait
on a PHP fork to implement a protocol change.

-Michael

[Edward Hotchkiss]

Working on something to push to be ready for a collab.

[Edward Hotchkiss]

I'll keep it in mind. What I mean is an install for a typical end-user with an upload / browse to dir and install via web. 1.2.3.

[mishu dark]

I'm very interesting in this fork, I've been programming hard sites for Banks and Gig Company's, i would like contribute

2010/11/27 Edward Hotchkiss <edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com>

[Edward Hotchkiss]

let me know your github username

[mishu dark]

I'm mishudark in github, but i dont have projects hosted in github for my company confidential rules

2010/11/27 Edward Hotchkiss <edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com>

[Patrick Aljord]

On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 10:30 PM, Edward Hotchkiss
<edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com> wrote:
> 1. the first link doesn't load.

gnu.org was down, it's up now http://www.gnu.org/software/social/ (I
hope you've heard of gnu before :P).

[Edward Hotchkiss]

1. got it
2. yeah gnu, open source? :P just going to roll my own OStatus implementation.

[Jason Lewis]

I have to echo the sentiments earlier, the thing to do if you're excited about diaspora but only code PHP, is to work on interoperability with an existing PHP project, like http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ or one of the many other Federated Social Web projects. Forking Diaspora at this early stage is just absurd.

I also have to say...

OK, the LAST thing I want is to start anything resembling a flame war, much less a Holy War. 

<semi-flame mode>

But one of the most exciting things about Diaspora for me is the fact that it's all Ruby and javascript. I really believe PHP tends to lead to bad code for some reason. Maybe PHP attracts bad coders, or maybe it's just because PHP is a horribly designed language, but seriously, if you're excited about a project, LEARN THE LANGUAGE. 

Every programmer should learn a new language a year. Ruby is possibly the most exciting dynamic language to come along in the past 20 years. If you learn Ruby, and hate it, fine. Work on another project. But 'forking' a project (ok, recoding in another lang is NOT forking, it's porting, but whatev's) just because you're to lazy to learn the language it's coded in is NOT how things progress. It's how effort gets divided, code gets duplicated, it's the opposite of DRY. 

It would make more sense to start your own PHP project and call it 'ScatteredSeeds' (learn Greek) instead of pretending it's a 'fork' of Diaspora. Srsly, there are existing PHP FSW projects that could use your efforts, or Diaspora (the real one) could use your efforts... but duplicating effort is RETARDED. It's the OPPOSITE of everything we've figured out about the right way to develop software over the last four decades.

</semi-flame mode>

I apologize if I come across as a dick, but I write code for a living, and nothing irritates me more than duplication of effort without necessity. It makes life worse for everyone, everytime. Nothing good ever comes of it. EVER.

 Thanks,

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    
                       
Mobile         410.428.0253

AIM             canweriotnow
Facebook    http://www.facebook.com/canweriotnow

[Jason Lewis]

sorry, I meant to include this link: http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2008/06/04/where-did-all-the-php-programmers-go/

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    
                       
Mobile         410.428.0253

AIM             canweriotnow
Facebook    http://www.facebook.com/canweriotnow

[Robby O'Connor]

+1 on all of this! he makes an excellent point as to the question of why this is even a thread to begin with...

The project is barely anything that resembles anything close to maturity yet. Learn Ruby On Rails and stop listening to the crap people say and try and form an opinion yourself. If I sound like a dick, oh well, I've stopped caring.

Diaspora shows promise, so why not contribute a growing project?! It's also great to put on your resume!

--rob

On 11/28/2010 11:17 PM, Jason Lewis wrote:

I have to echo the sentiments earlier, the thing to do if you're excited about diaspora but only code PHP, is to work on interoperability with an existing PHP project, like http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ or one of the many other Federated Social Web projects. Forking Diaspora at this early stage is just absurd.

I also have to say...

OK, the LAST thing I want is to start anything resembling a flame war, much less a Holy War. 

<semi-flame mode>

But one of the most exciting things about Diaspora for me is the fact that it's all Ruby and javascript. I really believe PHP tends to lead to bad code for some reason. Maybe PHP attracts bad coders, or maybe it's just because PHP is a horribly designed language, but seriously, if you're excited about a project, LEARN THE LANGUAGE. 

Every programmer should learn a new language a year. Ruby is possibly the most exciting dynamic language to come along in the past 20 years. If you learn Ruby, and hate it, fine. Work on another project. But 'forking' a project (ok, recoding in another lang is NOT forking, it's porting, but whatev's) just because you're to lazy to learn the language it's coded in is NOT how things progress. It's how effort gets divided, code gets duplicated, it's the opposite of DRY. 

It would make more sense to start your own PHP project and call it 'ScatteredSeeds' (learn Greek) instead of pretending it's a 'fork' of Diaspora. Srsly, there are existing PHP FSW projects that could use your efforts, or Diaspora (the real one) could use your efforts... but duplicating effort is RETARDED. It's the OPPOSITE of everything we've figured out about the right way to develop software over the last four decades.

</semi-flame mode>

I apologize if I come across as a dick, but I write code for a living, and nothing irritates me more than duplication of effort without necessity. It makes life worse for everyone, everytime. Nothing good ever comes of it. EVER.

 Thanks,

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    
                       
Mobile         410.428.0253

AIM             canweriotnow
Facebook    http://www.facebook.com/canweriotnow

[Robby O'Connor]

That's a cute link!
On 11/28/2010 11:18 PM, Jason Lewis wrote:

sorry, I meant to include this link: http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/2008/06/04/where-did-all-the-php-programmers-go/

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    
                       
Mobile         410.428.0253

AIM             canweriotnow

Facebook    http://www.facebook.com/canweriotnow

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 11:17 PM, Jason Lewis <jasonl...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have to echo the sentiments earlier, the thing to do if you're excited about diaspora but only code PHP, is to work on interoperability with an existing PHP project, like http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/ or one of the many other Federated Social Web projects. Forking Diaspora at this early stage is just absurd.

I also have to say...

OK, the LAST thing I want is to start anything resembling a flame war, much less a Holy War. 

<semi-flame mode>

But one of the most exciting things about Diaspora for me is the fact that it's all Ruby and javascript. I really believe PHP tends to lead to bad code for some reason. Maybe PHP attracts bad coders, or maybe it's just because PHP is a horribly designed language, but seriously, if you're excited about a project, LEARN THE LANGUAGE. 

Every programmer should learn a new language a year. Ruby is possibly the most exciting dynamic language to come along in the past 20 years. If you learn Ruby, and hate it, fine. Work on another project. But 'forking' a project (ok, recoding in another lang is NOT forking, it's porting, but whatev's) just because you're to lazy to learn the language it's coded in is NOT how things progress. It's how effort gets divided, code gets duplicated, it's the opposite of DRY. 

It would make more sense to start your own PHP project and call it 'ScatteredSeeds' (learn Greek) instead of pretending it's a 'fork' of Diaspora. Srsly, there are existing PHP FSW projects that could use your efforts, or Diaspora (the real one) could use your efforts... but duplicating effort is RETARDED. It's the OPPOSITE of everything we've figured out about the right way to develop software over the last four decades.

</semi-flame mode>

I apologize if I come across as a dick, but I write code for a living, and nothing irritates me more than duplication of effort without necessity. It makes life worse for everyone, everytime. Nothing good ever comes of it. EVER.

 Thanks,

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    
                       
Mobile         410.428.0253

AIM             canweriotnow

Facebook    http://www.facebook.com/canweriotnow

[jdeisenberg]

+1,
Put succinctly: "People who want to re-invent the wheel usually end up
re-inventing the flat tire."

On Nov 28, 8:17 pm, Jason Lewis <jasonlewi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have to echo the sentiments earlier, the thing to do if you're excited
> about diaspora but only code PHP, is to work on interoperability with an

> existing PHP project, likehttp://opensource.appleseedproject.org/or one of

> the many other Federated Social Web projects. Forking Diaspora at this early
> stage is just absurd.
>
> I also have to say...
>
> OK, the LAST thing I want is to start anything resembling a flame war, much

> less a Holy War <http://www.ist.rit.edu/~jxs/jargon/html/H/holy-wars.html>.

> Email          jasonlewi...@gmail.com

[Bèr Kessels]

Hello,

On 29-11-10 06:54, jdeisenberg wrote:
> Put succinctly: "People who want to re-invent the wheel usually end up
> re-inventing the flat tire."

while that is true, lets take a little distance:
- There are people willing to contribute to Diaspora, who prefer[1] PHP.
- Diaspora is about a Distributed Social network.

I think it is a good thing that people here wish to contribute to that
"larger" idea, even-though their immediate goal is to erect a opponent
to Diaspora.
I come from Drupal, where there (often) is a strong "we VS Wordpress, we
VS phpBB, we VS [fill-in-your-popular-CMS-ish-thing]" undercurrent. I
have always been a believer in much better interchangeability: being
able to migrate to-from Drupal-Wordpress, as joint effort of both
communities would make em both better products.

Open Source is about openness. We, diaspora, should recognise that a
large multilingual, multi-project flock of Distributed Social Software
gets us much closer to our goals then "Being the one app".

To the PHPers out there:
* start off with describing the current protocols that Diaspora deals
with: pubsubhubbub prolly being the starting-point.
* If there are "flaws" in the Diaspora impl. of these protocols, or if
they could be improved to make interoperability easier, tell it here.
* get organised and work towards a first PHP-only diaspora Hub.

To the Rubyists:
* Please do not prove the preoccupation about Rubyists true: don't be
smirky, don't look down and don't tell others that What You Do Is By Far
The Highest And Best (We all know Ruby and Rails are the best :)).
* And lets listen to the bug- and feature reports from those wishing to
connect their app, written in their language to ours.

B�r

[1] Whatever their reasons be, whether you find them silly that they
wish this, is beyond the point. Lets stick to "There is an itch there".

--
Identi.ca/Twitter: berkes
Drupal and Ruby on Rails development: http://webschuur.com
Drupal training: http://wizzlern.nl

[Jason Lewis]

    
                       

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 6:16 AM, Bèr Kessels <b...@webschuur.com> wrote:

Hello,

 <snip>

Open Source is about openness. We, diaspora, should recognise that a
large multilingual, multi-project flock of Distributed Social Software
gets us much closer to our goals then "Being the one app".

To the PHPers out there:
* start off with describing the current protocols that Diaspora deals
with: pubsubhubbub prolly being the starting-point.
* If there are "flaws" in the Diaspora impl. of these protocols, or if
they could be improved to make interoperability easier, tell it here.

These two points are basically what I was trying to say.

  

To the Rubyists:
* Please do not prove the preoccupation about Rubyists true: don't be
smirky, don't look down and don't tell others that What You Do Is By Far
The Highest And Best (We all know Ruby and Rails are the best :)).

Apologies for letting my own lang prejudices into the thread, it's not about that... that *is* why I put those comments between <semi-flame> or <snark> tags.

 

* And lets listen to the bug- and feature reports from those wishing to
connect their app, written in their language to ours.

Bèr

I'm all for a hundred, a thousand distributed social networks blooming, and talking to each other... I just have concerns when a) there a re already a bunch of projects out there, some with a large existing PHP codebase, and b) instead of contributing to those, and working on compatibility, people want to recode a Ruby project in PHP. I just cannot for the life of me see how that makes ANY SENSE whatsoever.

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com 

[krystal]

I agree that those of us who are more into php should be helping
appleseed and a big focus for both projects should be getting them to
work together. Ants can kill monsters, but only if we work together.

We all have our opinions about languages and tools, and although they
are all perfectly valid opinions, I would disagree that the diaspora-dev
group is the place. Perhaps we could have a new google group,
"ruby-...@googlegroups.com" for them.

Krystal

[Michael Mellinger]

There's no reason to debate it. The project is being written in Ruby. There is no good reason to throw it away and start over in PHP. Now the Ruby guys need to learn PHP?

How about doing the project in Scala/Lift? Now that would be really cool. Foursquare proved that's a good technology.

See the problem?

http://railstutorial.org

-Mike
Sent from my iPhone

[michael chrisco]

If I can offer a suggestion:

1) Since we have little relative control over who codes in what
platform, we let people make a "Diaspora in XYZ language". The core
developers though are going to stick with Ruby and Mondodb for reasons
of their own.
2) So far, I don’t see any code, and in a project like this one where
things change day by day, we need some perspective. If the code does
not exist, then we don’t have to deal with it now.
3) Being limited to one platform is just that, a limit. This limit can
be a boon for Ruby enthusiasts, but a bane to those who have many
years of experience in other languages and platforms. No need to
exclude those of us who speak in weird tongued languages just because
we prefer them.
4) We are doing great if we already have people interested enough to
try to recreate the whole codebase in XYZ language :)
5) We all what the project to succeed. Although we may disagree, we
are no less divided.

On Nov 29, 6:14 am, Michael Mellinger <mmellinge...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There's no reason to debate it. The project is being written in Ruby.  There is no good reason to throw it away and start over in PHP.  Now the Ruby guys need to learn PHP?
>
> How about doing the project in Scala/Lift? Now that would be really cool.  Foursquare proved that's a good technology.
>
> See the problem?
>
> http://railstutorial.org
>
> -Mike
> Sent from my iPhone
>

> On Nov 29, 2010, at 8:10 AM, krystal <sfkrys...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > I agree that those of us who are more into php should be helping appleseed and a big focus for both projects should be getting them to work together. Ants can kill monsters, but only if we work together.
>
> > We all have our opinions about languages and tools, and although they are all perfectly valid opinions, I would disagree that the diaspora-dev group is the place. Perhaps we could have a new google group, "ruby-...@googlegroups.com" for them.
>

> > Krystal- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Aditya Patawari]

My username is adimania

--
Aditya Patawari
http://blog.adityapatawari.com/
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Adimania
India

[Daniël Bos (远洋)]

I too would be interested in a PHP port, as that is something I would
actually install and use. I have never understood the reasons for
choosing Rails (I know it's very easy to prototype and get something
up and running). PHP is basically ubiquitous, in fact, it's hard to
find a hosting solution that *doesn't* support it. Finding good Rails
hosting is alot more difficult.

> On Nov 27, 2010, at 11:40 PM, Michael Sofaer wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I don't really agree that the difference between Ruby and PHP is going
> to matter when it comes to being able to install it.  The install
> process for Diaspora on a totally empty CentOS machine remotely from
> your box is three lines.

I understand it's very easy to get the whole environment up and
running on a clean box, but that is still something requiring shell
access and probably sudo rights, which is not easy to get with most
web hosters. I happen to run my own server, so I do have the ability
to set it all up, but quite frankly, I couldn't be bothered. I have
alot of other stuff running (all LAMP) and installing and configuring
an entirely different stack next to that is just too much of a hassle.

> I do want to put together an acceptance suite for inter-server stuff,
> so that people have a guide to implement in other languages, but we're
> not ready for that yet, we're still changing the protocol too much.
>
> I guess what I'm getting at is that it's cool that you are building a
> PHP version, but please keep in mind that the protocol is in flux, and
> we have to take care that our servers stay interoperable.  It's one
> thing to ask pod operators to pull code, and another to make them wait
> on a PHP fork to implement a protocol change.
>
> -Michael

Now don't get me wrong, I fully support the Diaspora effort, and hope
it will achieve great adoption, however what bothers me is people (not
you!) being unsupportive of ports, saying just move your ass over to
another project. A truly distributed social network can only succeed
if there are many competing implementations. In that spirit it would
be awesome if there were a Java/Python port which could run on Google
AppEngine, so people could run their own node for free (in most cases)
hosted by Google.

To conclude, I understand and support the "build something working
first, standardize later" philosophy of Diaspora, but I do hope the
community will keep an open mind to competing implementations and
support those as well. You never know which implementation will grow
to world domination ^_^

--
远洋 / Daniël Bos

email  : cor...@gmail.com
phone  : +31-318-711063 (Dutch) / +86-18-701330735 (Chinese)
weblog : http://blog.loadingdata.nl/
ostatus: cor...@status.loadingdata.nl

[Timothy Fisher]

Rather than creating a "ruby-...@googlegroups.com", just create a
group to discuss the PHP fork of Diaspora for those who want to work
on that. However, I'd first encourage the PHP developers to at least
learn Ruby and Rails and get some experience with it. You might
actually like it, and worst case you have another language under your
belt. Another benefit of learning a new language and framework is
that whether you stick with the language or not, you always learn new
ideas and concepts from it and you can bring those back to your
preferred framework/language.

Tim

[Patrick Michael Niedzielski]

On sab, 2010-11-27 at 22:30 -0500, Edward Hotchkiss wrote:
> 1. the first link doesn't load.

http://www.gnu.org/ is experiencing troubles at the moment. (First time
I've ever seen) They're hurrying to fix the problem. Just wait a
little bit; it should be up within a day.

Cheers,
Patrick

--
Humm and Strumm <http://hummstrumm.blogspot.com/>, a Free Software 3D
adventure game for both Windows and *NIX.

freeSoftwareHacker(); <http://freesoftwarehacker.blogspot.com/>, a blog
about Free Software, music, and law.

[Aditya Patawari]

Hey Edward,

There is no code in the repo. Are you planning to share it so that
others can contribute?

[Robert Campbell]

I just finished my finals yesterday, and just this morning decided
that I will start learning ruby then eventually the rails framework so
I can fork and develop diaspora.

I currently know C, C++, C#, Java, VB and PHP. Adding ruby to this for
the sake of diaspora is not a bad thing.

I would also be interested in a PHP only version as diaspora for
various reasons.

Anyways, I see people here comparing PHP the language to Rails the
framework... Apples and oranges much?

If you want something php-based to compare Rails to, how about Zend or
Symfony. I agree, PHP is not the most beautiful language but you can
write efficient and elegant code in it if you know it well enough.
Some people seem to believe that if you use ruby, then you are exempt
from writing ugly code. Believe me, one can write ugly code in any
language. I believe the problem with the php community is the large
number of inexperienced programmers claiming to be experts, writing
hundreds of crappy tutorials posting them all over the internet,
luring other inexperienced programmers into adopting their crappy way
of doing things. They may thing they are helping people who are new
to the language but they are just doing an injustice.

Proof of this: My goal for the Christmas break from school is to learn
ruby and ruby on rails framework. I've already found and bookmarked
descent documentation resources to help me.

My friend who has yet to learn php asked me for resources to help him
to learn php. I searched for about a hour for a descent tutorial or
documentation that he could, and I did not find a single well written
one that shows an effecient way to learn php as a beginner. All i see
are articles claiming "the best way to learn php", "php for newbies",
"php this", "php that" and the contents of all those articles/
tutorials were utter rubbish. A whole lot of mixing markup with
business logic.

stuff like:

sql query here to get resultset
foreach resultset as result
echo markup+dynamic data
end loop

what the hell?

I just said f&^* it and told him that I would teach him php myself.

I hope my ruby endeavours for the Christmas holidays will be a
pleasant one. It's certainly looking good so far.

[Jason Lewis]

As far as the PHP vs. Ruby on Rails apples and oranges thing:

Ruby on Rails vs PHP

Also, two of my favourite quotes:

“PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.” - John Ribbens

"For me, the purpose of life is, at least partly, to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, so Ruby is designed to make programmers happy." --Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz)

I have to say, the fact that Diaspora is getting people to learn Ruby makes me even happier about this project. I don't understand the mentality of "I'm going to reinvent the wheel instead of learning a new language." It seems amateurish. One of the best pieces of advice to programmers I've ever heard was, "Try to learn at least one new language a year." Even if you never use it professionally, learning LISP (for example) will change the way you look at recursive functions, for instance, which will probably improve your code in whatever language you happen to be using.

I agree about the documentation, btw. http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ is a great place to start.

Jason

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    

[Mike Dupont]

Hi guys, I jave made some (bad) video screencasts on how to get started with ruby and git and ssh
check out my channel.
http://www.youtube.com/h4ck3rm1k3tng

For me the reason for supporting diaspora or considering developing it is that it is not in php,
please don't switch. php = people hate perl. ruby is at least similar enough to perl for me to learn.


just my opinion.

mike

--
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania flossk.org flossal.org

[SpaceGhost]

On Dec 16, 10:43 am, Jason Lewis <jasonlewi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as the PHP vs. Ruby on Rails apples and oranges thing:
>

> Ruby on Rails vs PHP <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQXqWkWqnSw>

>
> Also, two of my favourite quotes:
>
> “PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs,
> whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but
> perverted professionals.” - John Ribbens

Very cute quote. As for a month or two ago when someone claimed what
the hot thing was and what was 'standard', I'd like to inform them
that the web has no standard for server side languages. PHP is 100%
runtime and mainly a web language. Ruby is quite a few things more
than that. So, comparing the two on the web is saying 'php is more
common' and 'ruby on rails is less used' Since rails3, the problems
that were present those five years ago are hence disappeared. The
black magic that is now available with rails/metal/rack/etc. has much
more possibility while having the added win that is it being ruby. :)

I'd be very interested in seeing anything that PHP can do that ruby
can't. This doesn't mean 'php does it easier', it's a question of
'ruby is incapable of doing this'. It would help me decide which
project to contribute to. Because I'm fairly certain the advantages of
ruby far outweigh the advantages of php after you learn the concepts
and practices.

> "For me, the purpose of life is, at least partly, to have joy. Programmers
> often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of
> programming, so Ruby is designed to make programmers happy." --Yukihiro
> Matsumoto (Matz)

That's on the cover of my Programming Ruby 1.9 book that's update for
1.9.2 It was the main delight I took while reading the whole book a
few times in a week.

> I have to say, the fact that Diaspora is getting people to learn Ruby makes
> me even happier about this project. I don't understand the mentality of "I'm
> going to reinvent the wheel instead of learning a new language." It seems
> amateurish. One of the best pieces of advice to programmers I've ever heard
> was, "Try to learn at least one new language a year." Even if you never use
> it professionally, learning LISP (for example) will change the way you look
> at recursive functions, for instance, which will probably improve your code
> in whatever language you happen to be using.

I agree with learning languages whenever possible. The law of the
instrument shouldn't ever be present in one's toolset. It's amateur
for sure and while I love ruby and use it as much as possible, I use
other languages when it's the better solution. Hence my learning
erlang and haskell side-by-side while doing my ruby. PHP and a ruby
framework shouldn't be in a battle, but they should compliment each
other. PHP - easy to deploy for the majority of the world and has its
own common practices (Which I argue aren't the best in the least.)

> I agree about the documentation, btw.http://guides.rubyonrails.org/is a

> great place to start.
>
> Jason
>

> Email          jasonlewi...@gmail.com
>
>
>
>
>
<snip>

~SpaceGhost

[urban arpad]

I did some Drupal hacking a couple of years ago...

I like COBOL better than PHP.  I think I want to recode Drupal in COBOL.  Who's with me?
Hell, I like Fortran and Smalltalk better than PHP!! :-P

[Patrick Michael Niedzielski]

Let's write it in Emacs-LISP! I can see it now...diaspora-pod-mode...

--Patrick

[Joseph a Nagy Jr]

Could we recode Drupal purely in Javascript?

I know enough javascript to be dangerous and that's it (same with Perl
and PHP).

[Joseph a Nagy Jr]

On 28 Dec 10 10:20 PM, Patrick Michael Niedzielski wrote:
> On mar, 2010-12-28 at 20:01 -0800, urban arpad wrote:
>> I did some Drupal hacking a couple of years ago...
>>
>> I like COBOL better than PHP. I think I want to recode Drupal in COBOL.
>> Who's with me?
>> Hell, I like Fortran and Smalltalk better than PHP!! :-P
>
> Let's write it in Emacs-LISP! I can see it now...diaspora-pod-mode...
>
> --Patrick
>

I'd rather learn .NET and recode Diaspora for it. *blech's at LISP and
especially Emacs* VIM forever! Viva la Vim! Viva la Vim!

[Jason Lewis]

You're all wrong. Let's rewrite Diaspora in PL/I, and only support EBCDIC encoding.

Hey guys, my pod's running on an AS/360! The interface is curses-based, so you'll have to use tn3270 to connect to it, but...

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    

[Andreas_P]

"every language" Hey pretty cool: Finally a Racket Coder... is it
really as powerful as haskell/commonlisp?

On Nov 28, 4:53 am, Edward Hotchkiss <edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com>
wrote:
> Mike,
>
> I already program in Ruby / RoR and about every language under the sun. You can't create something big and expect an end-user or even middle-ware end-user to install a rails app / gems. LAMP is "The Standard". As far as "The hot web language"; it was ... about 5 years ago.
>
> Maybe you should learn Ruby and contribute, it could be a good learning experience for a novice programmer.
>
> On Nov 27, 2010, at 10:49 PM, Michael Mellinger wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Hi Ed,
> >  All of GNU.org seems down (http://www.gnu.org/).  Probably back up
> > later or tomorrow.  I don't know Ruby or PHP at the moment.  However,
> > isn't Ruby(and Rails) the hot web language these days?
>
> >http://rubyonrails.org/applications
>
> > It can't be that hard to learn.
>
> > -Mike

>
> > On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 10:30 PM, Edward Hotchkiss

> > <edw...@edwardhotchkiss.com> wrote:
> >> 1. the first link doesn't load.

> >> 2. wordpress is slower and not mvc or as modular. plus buddypress looks fugly. also it doesn't really work with the whole 'de-centralized' social network concept -
>
> >> the issue with these other open source [no offense] social networks is that they don't understand ui/ux/ia/design. it would be easier to recreate the project on codeigniter than decipher their setup.
>
> Regards,
>
> --------------------
> Edward Hotchkiss
> edw...@edwardhotchkiss.comhttp://www.edwardhotchkiss.com/
> --------------------

[Johnneylee Rollins]

All you whipper snappers and your fancy high level languages. I wrote
diaspora in ASM for i386 and it's chugging along happily. Kids these
days and their fancy languages... :(

~SpaceGhost

[Thomas R. Koll]

Why not write a PHP interpreter in COBOL so you can use PHP for all
the lame parts of the job and embedded COBOL for the really hot sh*t.

--
Thomas R. "TomK32" Koll
just a geek trying to change the world
http://ananasblau.com || http://photostre.am || http://photolog.at

[Brandon Kernell]

I would greatly like this as I am not familiar with Ruby, but I have one problem.

Having a PHP fork means that anyone can have a social network. As much as I love the idea of all of these services talking with each other (like statusnet does) I think the web is going to be overcome with DIASPORA social networks and people are going to get confused on which ones to sign up for.

I completely understand they want users to be able to install and run this on their own server, but there needs to be limitations IMO. Maybe im over reacting?

[Luca Faggioli]

I think that "the possibility that anyone can have a social network" is the all point of Diaspora and other similar projects...

luca

2011/1/19 Brandon Kernell <bra...@kernell.me>

I would greatly like this as I am not familiar with Ruby, but I have one problem.

Having a PHP fork means that anyone can have a social network. As much as I love the idea of all of these services talking with each other (like statusnet does) I think the web is going to be overcome with DIASPORA social networks and people are going to get confused on which ones to sign up for.

I completely understand they want users to be able to install and run this on their own server, but there needs to be limitations IMO. Maybe im over reacting?

--
Luca Faggioli
OneSocialWeb JID: lu...@social.openliven.com

[Spiral Syzygy]

This is the whole point. It won't matter which they sign up for so
long as they communicate their address correctly. Anyone can set up an
email service, the internet is over run with email providers and no
one is confused who to sign up with because they all can talk to each
other smoothly. That is what we're going for with Diaspora and social
networks.

[Hugo M]

I think that mantain PHP and Ruby Diaspora compatibility could be a problem only if the exchange protocol changes very often (I don't think that is probably). But, Im think right now is a waste of time create a new fork, why reinventing the wheel? I think it would be better to finish the Ruby Diaspora, an then yes, you can do a Lisp Diaspora if you want but we would have a finshed working Diaspora in Ruby.

2011/1/19 Spiral Syzygy <spiral...@gmail.com>

[Jason Lewis]

Hell, why not? You could write it in Scheme for SCISWeb, or Smalltalk for Seaside... there's a web framework for everything now... hey, you know what would be even better than PHP? Cobol On Cogs! Jesus, sorry to be so snarky, but I can't believe we're still discussing this. 

a) there are already distributed-social-network projects in PHP, i.e., http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/

2) Sorry to be harsh, but if the ONLY language you know is PHP, and you're afraid to learn another language, this project is probably better off WITHOUT your code. PHP encourages horrid, sloppy code, and it's a rare programmer who ONLY speaks PHP and can write code that isn't a spaghettified abomination.

guh... I'm not trying to denigrate the coding skills of anyone on this list because, frankly, I don't know most of you. But the typical pattern for successful open source projects goes like this:

def contribute

  if this_looks_neat

    learn_the_language_its_coded_in

  elsif im_too_lazy

    find_a_similar_project_in_my_crappy_language

  else

    find_another_project

  end

end

well, that's the Ruby method... (pardon the pun)

again, not meant to flame... just... sheesh...

Jason Lewis

Email          jasonl...@gmail.com    
                       
Mobile         410.428.0253

AIM             canweriotnow
Facebook    http://www.facebook.com/canweriotnow

[Hugo M]

Jason I agree with you.

2011/1/22 Jason Lewis <jasonl...@gmail.com>