The Perfect 10: Installable Web Apps
In our popular Perfect 10 series, Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge discuss what their favorite install web applications are, but…what are yours?
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! What do you think? What do you think of the applications we chose? What are the installable web apps that you would recommend to the Shot Of Jaq community?
16 Comments to “The Perfect 10: Installable Web Apps”
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It sounded like Ack said DockyWiki, did you mean DokuWiki?
Certainly sounded like DokuWiki to me. And googling ‘dockywiki’ throws up… nothing.
Dokuwiki is a nice wiki though. Never been a huge fan of the default appearance of dokuwiki sites, but it’s certainly very easy to install & manage.
Oh, and really, jQuery? It’s awesome, but I wouldn’t call it an ‘installable web app’.
I did indeed mean Dokuwiki, and I agree that they look lame by default, but theming is pretty easy
I think the 5 I use the most are 1. Trac 2. Wordpress 3. Mediawiki 4. Drupal 5. PHPMyadmin
At work I also use 6. Hudson (Maven builds for Java) 7. ReviewBoard (Code review system) 8. Nexus (Maven repository manager)
Also quite useful are 9. Ampache (music server) 10. Gregarius (news reader)
I also love Django and JQuery but I don’t think they count as web applications! Apache goes without saying.
Aq: Interesting combination of development apps, I wonder if you could use CouchDB, Django, Twisted and JQuery together in one app…
One installable web app I think is missing is a good home (social) media server. Which is why I’m building one. http://webian.org (incidentally that site uses Wordpress & Trac)
Webian sounds great! I’m going to subscribe and see in what way I can help: I have limited programming skills but know some stuff about media file formats so I might be able to help.
At the moment I’m using GNUMP3D to reach my music, which resides on my server, from the outside world through a webinterface. I can stream all my music (mp3/wav/flac/ogg) which gets downsampled to 128Kb so it doesn’t eat too much bandwith. The webinterface is automatically updated whenever I add tunes. This is my most favourtie webapp at the moment. A shame it isn’t supported anymore and people are pushed towards Icecast streaming.
Great! See you there bas-r
I just found an application called subsonic, which seems very promising on the music streaming front. Even has an Android client to stream music to. Installing it right now. http://www.subsonic.org/
You have already mentioned most of the things that I use in the shot, but:
Joomla: Extremely powerful and flexible CMS, prefer Wordpress whenever possible though as it is much easier to theme.
Squirrel Mail: Keyboard friendly(AJAX free) web mail client.
I also agree that JQuery is not an application, its a library, and django is a `framework’ which is just a fancy word for library.
I have to second what Stuart said about Twisted. It’s a superb framework for doing network applications where you need something that is not a simple web app. My experience with it was really hard to get started with, but once I got over that first hurdle I found it to be a very natural way of doing things. I’ve been using it for a couple of years and I’m still discovering new things about it, but they don’t seem difficult any more.
I was working on an application with it while I was listening to SOJ today. The application uses multiple server protocols on HTTP and straight TCP/IP sockets, it opens multiple client connections, it runs application logic in the background independently of any communications, it does all sorts of AJAXy things, and it does all that simultaneously in a tightly integrated fashion in one application. I would hate trying to do that without using Twisted.
Twisted is hard to get started with, but it’s well worth the initial effort.
Great shot guys, just one recomendation: try SQLBuddy (www.sqlbuddy.com/) its a great AJAXy alternative to phpmyadmin. It’s not that powerfull but it looks and feels a lot better for most basic database messing arround.
Namaste
I’ve got to voice my personal support for Wordpress. It’s fantastic and has so many useful (and easy to install) plugins.
I rather like phpMyAdmin too and have it installed anywhere I have to do extensive MySQL work.
I use docuwiki in the place I work for internal documentation. It’s gread since it’s easy to use and doesn’t have to many features. So everyone can correct anything that happens to have changed without a 3-day training. And you don’t have tons of files on the server in thousands of different formats all explaining some process or workflow…
I have to say that MongoDB is a great alternative to couch. Really good performance and straightforward to use, though takes the same shift as learning couch when you’re used to SQL databases.
If you’re looking at building web apps that don’t follow a standard content mechanism I would highly recommend Pylons, it has a very small learning curve and you have the full glory of python behind it. If you were using twisted, pylons would be a great way to hook up to it.
I’d really agree with aq and say jQuery is probably the easiest way to get into JavaScript, I see a lot of its users just installing plug-ins and not going much further. The fun really begins when you make that ‘async’ switch and start to build up your own great ways to handle events, understanding how callbacks work and getting used to using jSon objects that can hook up to rest apis. There are lots of other very good JavaScript libraries out there though, so its worth looking to see which can do the job for you.
+1 for MongoDB. Once you get out of the SQL mindset, you find yourself using it ways you could not have conceived of with SQL.
It’s seriously fast, scales, and setting up replication just seems too easy to be true, but it works.
I made a note to check out the greasemonkey script that Stuart mentions ties into gMail and shows the social link to your contacts.
I think it was from this shot and thought it was called “rapportit” but can’t find it.
Any corrections for me?
http://rapportive.com/