Practical Internet Groupware

Practical Internet Groupware A book written by JonUdell about developing simple, effective groupware applications based on internet protocols.

(ISBN 1565925378 )

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pracintgr/

I'm re-reading this book: I bought it in late 1999, moved before I finished it, and just got it out of storage last month.

PIG has some excellent things about it: Jon really pushes his unorthodox views that flexible software is more important than "scaling", trying to do everything in one language is unnecessary, and Web applications should be accessible by programs, not just people.

To an ExtremeProgramming partisan, it looks like Jon's this close to crossing some invisible line and joining up.

The book also has some flaws. If you're not a PerlMonk, you'll have some tough sledding figuring out half the code (hint: he typically explains it after each listing). Jon seems like he has a residual case of HungarianNotation, which leads to variables being named for their internal structure (tabHoHoLoL) rather than their purpose (tabSets); in addition to making it harder to understand the code, this will create a lot of work when you go to refactor. And he writes page-long methods -- is calling a function really that expensive in Perl?

The organization is a little strange; there's no overarching project that he describes, though he spends a lot of time on DocBases?, Conferencing, and Authorization (separately and linking them). The major parts are mostly independent, meaning you can read them out of order. In fact, the non-technical reader can treat all of Part I, plus Chapters 5 and 16, as a much briefer -- but still useful and thought-provoking -- book.

Like most O'Reilly books, PIG is almost completely free of stupid little errors (and the only one I can point to is perfectly innocuous). While I haven't personally tried to compile or run all of the code, I could see no errors or typos in it.

According to the O'Reilly Web site, the book is out of print. That's a shame, because there's no way I'm going to sell my copy to anyone. Maybe they can publish a second edition soon; a lot of Jon's excellent advice and ideas still haven't made it into the mainstream (e.g. using XML-RPC).

Finally (and unaccountably), the picture on the cover is of seals and sea lions, instead of sows and hogs. --GeorgePaci

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