Last Week In Perspective: Joel Spolsky, Hani, SSH Hacking, Translator Plugin & Anaconda Theme

Last week was an interesting one as hot debate raged over Joel Spolsky’s article on enterprise language, Hani rightly bashed copious logging of open source software and my article on hacking attempts from Caltech topped the list of most read articles. We released Anaconda, a beautiful 3 column WordPress theme and version 3 of Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress.

First let’s go over Joel Spolsky’s article on programming language for enterprise application development.

Language Wars
Joel rightly pointed out that pretty much there are four (he mentioned 3.5 but I don’t understand his issue with Python) language for enterprise development - Java, C#, PHP & Python. He expressed concern over Ruby’s slowness & scalability. Frankly if I were to develop an enterprise app today, I would have the same concerns too. Java, C# & PHP have all proven their merits. I am not much into Python so I will refrain from commenting on it.
Ruby & RoR needs to be validated with large scale enterprise applications. His personal preference for C# is understandable as he has long experience with Microsoft product. However if you are not famed Excel manager, Joel Spolsky and you are not strongly biased one way or another then I would suggest that you go for Java. Again the core competency of your team is crucial in decision making.
BTW: Here are my answers to Joel’s questions.

“What is it with opensores and logging?”
Hani has, in his entertaining but vulgar style, criticized open source logging style with specific reference to JBoss & Spring.
He has gone one step further and offered to go over their applications for free and send them a patch to remove all their spurious startup messages. I agree with him. Sending out reams of logging messages can only confuse your users. It also shows sloppy programming, keeping debug messages enabled. And Hani got married. I am not sure if I should congratulate him or rue the loss of yet another bachelor to the altar of marriage.

Simple Thoughts beats Joel & Hani
That sounds sensational, doesn’t it? In reality my article on brute force ssh hacking attempts on my server was the most read article on JavaBlogs last week, ahead of Hani & Joel’s.

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress 2.x Blogs
Last week was extremely hectic for us as we released version 3 of our popular Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress 2.x blogs. It provides automatic machine translation of your blog in eight different languages - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. It is search engine optimized, supports WordPress widgets, uses nice permalinks, super-fast (cacheable), provides tremendous SEO boost and lots more.

Anaconda Theme for WordPress 2.x Blogs
However that isn’t all. We also released Anaconda, a beautiful flexible CSS based 3 column WordPress theme. Anaconda uses flexible 3 column layout which is designed entirely with CSS. The center column and left sidebar are flexible and adjusts to browser size. Anaconda comes with inbuilt support for 15 popular WordPress plugins out of the box. Anaconda also provides 17 WordPress widgets for you to extensively customize your site without writing / modifying a single line of code. Anaconda works without any configuration out of the box. It is also extensively customizable for those who need it.

That’s all, my friends.