Hull Digital April Meetup

Just a week after the event, some notes from the Hull Digital April Meetup on the 11th.

I was a bit late arriving, but I did get to see some interesting stuff about Model View Controller (MVC) in JavaScript from Duncan McMillan. He’s a web designer and developer at Art and Soul. MVC is a very popular way to structure an application, and it was interesting to see how it can be employed when you are writing a web based client program with complex behaviours. If you want to find out more about this technology Duncan suggested the site todomvc.com as a good place to start.

Of equal interest, to me at least, was the Paper application that Duncan used to present his talk. This made for some lovely looking slides. The application is interesting for another reason too; they are using the “freemium” model to sell the program. The starter version costs nothing, but before long you are paying for extras to give you different fonts and sketching tools. I rather like this way of selling a program. It means that you can only pay for the things that you are going to use. It also means that you will take the trouble to learn how to use a feature once you have paid for it, and that you are not overwhelmed with features in the program when you first start using it.

Next up was a chat from Stephen Lewis who was talking about the latest developments in PHP. I first used this ages ago. I’m so old that I can remember that PHP stands for “Personal Home Page”. It is a server side scripting language of great power, that integrates really well with databases. I used it to run PHPBB, a bulletin board system that for many years powered the forum in our department. Stephen was telling us that the language is still moving forwards, with object oriented support and lots of other goodies goodies. I’m not sure his talk will send me back to writing PHP again, but it is interesting to see that such things are still moving forwards.

All in all an interesting evening. And I even got a free drink.