If you are a fan of language “X” and think it’s better than PHP, here’s your chance to convince me. After some discussion with colleagues, I’m very interested to find a general consensus as to which web development language (server-side) is the true “future of web development”. My research reveals that PHP is the most popular web development language currently. Even though it’s clear that PHP is widely accepted, how long will that be true? Is PHP dying?

Now please don’t get me wrong, PHP is a great language that I use daily. It’s powerful, widely supported, popular, and pretty darn stable. Recently, I’ve even had even more success with PHP by supplementing it with CakePHP, a powerful PHP framework that makes development a bit more painless.

Still, even with frameworks and new versions of PHP coming soon, how long can the trend last?

Are you wondering why I care so much?

The reasons are fairly mundane: job security, stability, trends, and money.

I value my career and work as a web developer. We (web developers) provide content to the voracious users of the web and I love being a part of the “internet revolution”. I also enjoy keeping up on the latest trends… I tend to prefer being near the bleeding-edge at all times. Why? Because it’s more fun. Also, I’d say that having a grasp of where the future is headed in web development can be very valuable indeed.

Back to my point: I’ve played with a few alternate languages outside of PHP, but I’m not convinced of their long-term popularity… they just don’t offer anything revolutionary. Maybe I’m expecting a revolution that isn’t gonna happen. Or, maybe I missed the revolution boat already.

So, you tell me; what’s the next revolution? Has it even been invented yet?

Although coding style might seem a minor thing for novice programmers, it really is of utter importance when writing code for a medium-sized or big project. If you code alone, it still is vital to follow coding standards in order to achieve a better level of code readability for yourself. If you code as a member of a team, not following strict style conventions is completely out of the question. Considering that a project which you’re the only programmer for might grow into a team project in the future makes it a crucial matter to follow certain coding standards, as it is a hard and time-consuming procedure to port code to new coding style. And, although many coding style rules can be automated and applied using a beautifier script, many rules cannot (as they fall into the programmer’s judgment), and a lot of rules are broken by these scripts. In addition, many programmers, including myself, do not like using these scripts and believe that using a beautiful coding style yourself is part of the elegance of your own code.

Following a specific coding style is good for several reasons. It makes code more readable and more manageable. It can be easily read and quickly understood and modified by yourself, or by another member of your team in the future. It makes your peers appreciate your code more, as it is more elegant, and simplifies distributing under an Open Source license and documenting it.

Although it is not important whether you follow this or another coding style guide, it is very important that all the code in your project, no matter from whom it was written, follows one and only one coding style guide. Therefore, being specific and strict about which style you choose to use is crucial.

Introduction

This document aims to specify my personally preferred coding style. It is certainly not the only coding style available out there, and you can use your own according to your preferences.

As a general rule of thumb, use this document as a guide to improve the readability of your code. If any particular rule causes readability to be reduced in a particular occasion, you might violate it, but please adhere to the set of these rules in general if you decide to follow them. Keep in mind that simply following a coding standards document does help, but is not the only thing necessary to improve code readability. Care should be taken to avoid too complicated statements and to increase the maintainability of your code.

Sometimes it is more important to optimize code rather than write easily maintainable code. In this case, readability is neglected in favor of optimization. This is acceptable; however, this is rarely the case in modern programming, as optimizations achievable through code formatting are tiny compared to the productivity gained through well-formatted code.

Whitespace

Most programming languages ignore whitespace. Python, PHP, Java Script ignores whitespace in certain locations. This is convenient because whitespace can be used to improve code readability.

Line Breaks

Each statement should occupy its own line, even if your language allows writing many statements in one line. Two statements should never occupy the same line.

printf( "Enter a number: " ); scanf( "%i\n", &i );

printf( "Enter a number: " );
scanf( "%i\n", &i );

Some languages optionally allow the use of ; at the end of lines. In the languages in which whitespace does not play any technical role, always use ; at the end of each line when it is optional. This, apart from avoiding logical mistakes, helps, for instance with Javascript, in making it possible to truncate whitespace in order to limit download times or if you want to obfuscate the code sent to your client. When you use a ; at the end of a line, do not include any additional spacing before or after it, and generally make sure no additional whitespace is present at the end of your code lines if it is not necessary.

Optional line breaks can be used for increased readability throughout your code. For example, you can use an additional line break between two logically different blocks of code to separate them contextually.

Here’s the five most common ways….

1. SELL. Develop applications solely for the purpose of selling them to interested parties. Several applications have already been acquired in this fashion; the most recent example is that of Mozes’ purchase of TextMe.

2. DEVELOP. An indirect source of funds: develop applications under contract for third parties. A number of companies have been posting contract jobs over at the Facebook’s developer forums. There exists a large gap in the supply and demand of available Facebook application developers; as a result, finding potential clients to charge reasonable rates should not be a hassle.

3. ADVERTISING. Use advertisements, cross-promotion schemes and affiliate marketing. It is not feasible to use Google Adsense for this since Facebook does not allow JavaScript embedding. Adsense may be embedded through iFrames, which despite being popular among Facebook developers, is against Google’s TOS. Affiliate marketing is a great alternative to advertisements; my own source of income on Facebook is generated through Amazon’s affiliate marketing.

4. MICROPAYMENTS. Sell services within Facebook through micro-payment transactions. PayPal payments made for accessing premium services could potentially yield reasonable income depending on the application’s purpose, size, and prospective users.

5. GET INVESTMENT. If you think you have something big on your hands and lack the funds to scale it, apply for investment through Bay Partners and others who have expressed interest in funding Facebook apps. This would be the likely course of action for a startup with plans to expand globally within and beyond Facebook.

You can see the whole article here at mashable.

Weedeat is just getting underway…I’ll be posting loads of greatness on a daily basis very soon.  So if it looks naked now…it won’t for long…also you should grab the new firefox 3 if you enjoy the finer things in life.

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