Don't get free hardware, win it/geek
Posed on Mon, 26 Mar 2007 :: /geek :: link
A while back, I entered a competition to win one of a few prizes. The results came in, and it looks like I was a runner up, netting me a Mac Mini.
First, a rant about Mac OS X. It appears that there is no way to:
- Use a non-mac keyboard without using an external keyboard definition file
- Set the MTU for wireless connections
- Set the 'switch windows' to something other than the awful ctrl+F4
- Set the end and home keys to go to the start and end of the input line, respectively
They also asked me to " become one of our evangelists and tell your developer friends and colleagues about Zimki".
Well, I'm not so sure about evangelism, but I'll certainly blog about their platform, as it's fairly interesting.
So, what exactly is Zimki?
Well, it's basically a server side Javascript parser, based on SeaMonkey. The thought of using Javascript as a server side language is, initially, enough to make you run a thousand miles. After you get over your initial shock of this and examine it a little more closely, it does make at least a moderate amount of sense. It's entirely OO, so you should be able to pull in common functionality, perfect for the quick deployment of Webapps that Zimki is designed for.
Of course, this does rely on having the core libraries available. The only ones which seem to exist at the moment are:
- trimpath.js - a JavaScript templating language
- wiky.js - a Wiki markup language
- feed.js - an RSS / Atom feed generator
This brings me nicely on to the next issue: documentation. There is a thorough lack of it. Thus, more classes may exist, but who knows. This is my MAJOR bugbear about Zimki. Give developers docs, and a nice coding environment, and they're happy. Zimki doesn't have either. Oh wait? I haven't mentioned the coding environment?
All editing seems to be done via a text box with some AJAX magic on the save button. But the save button doesn't work in Linux. Oh, and you can't indent your code. And you can't use a local editor.
This may sound all doom-and-gloom for Zimki, but it isn't. The editor could do with some attention, but it's not a show stopper. Zimki does manage to throw together HA concepts, backups and database (ish. The database object idea which Zimki uses is something I really don't like, but that's personal preference). The cost model they use is rather... odd. A charge is made for each call to the Zimki framework. I'm not a beancounter though, so I can't tell you how cheap/expensive this system is. If you know JavaScript well, and want to develop a complete webapp in it, this is certainly a good tool.
Now hopefully they'll get some documentation together and so people can actually USE the thing. If you're bored, why not play with my app that I wrote.