Programming

 

In the world of the web I am a dinosaur.  The fact that I am still going strong means I am a very adaptable dinosaur with good evolutionary tendencies but a dinosaur nonetheless. 

 

Maybe a better way to position myself is that I am a wise old sage with a white beard, sitting on the top of a mountain, who has seen it all.  While I now live by the mountains I can't claim enough hair to fit this role.  But it begs the question of what I've actually seen...

 

• NCSA Mosaic.  I started building web applications within months of the initial onset of the graphical web browser.  This means I also witnessed...
• The birth of Netscape.  Yes, my professional career is older than what many consider to be the driving force behind worldwide acceptance of "that web thing"
• The rise and fall of languages.  I started in Perl, got a book on Java before it was released, and developed in C.  I remember HahtSite (do you?) and got in with ColdFusion once I had the means to acquire a license.  I watched ASP rise and morph into .Net.  I saw PHP creep into the web arena and become a powerful force.
• The rise and fall of server technolgoy.  I downloaded 75 floppy disks to install Linux in 1993.  I played with the NCSA and Cern web server software before NCSA became Apache.  I watched IIS struggle into this world and slowly get a market share.

 

I spent 12 years developing in ColdFusion and created the Blackbox Methodology for developing ColdFusion applications as well as Blackbox 2.  Later I developed an even more flexible MVC framework for ColdFusion called CFKungFu.  This became the basis for the Mercury Framework, the current PHP system I have built and continue to develop.  Mercury is an MVC frameworkd designed to service either a single site or many sites on the same server.  It is optimized for SEO -friendliness, speed and design/development flexibility.  There are currently about thirty sites running on Mercury.