Presidium Podium

I’m more than a little bewildered by all the rumblings in the CLEC/ISP community in the last year or two in favour of IPTV, or IP-based television content delivery.

For those not familiar, it is basically the same service as that of your cable or satellite provider; channels of television content beamed into a set-top box. Except, instead of using the traditional HFC and/or waveguide and QAM transport infrastructure that cable uses, it is prospectively delivered (1) over a variety of last-mile infrastructure in telecom companies’ incumbent plant, such as copper ADSL2 loops, direct fiber to the premise (a la Verizon FiOS), and (2) it comes as an IP-based data stream, leveraging a variety of approaches that seem to suit this aim — e.g. multicasting.

I think that in general, IPTV is a dead-end business model for ISPs and CLECs to pursue.

As is widely acknowledged to happen from time to time, I did not consciously arrive at the conclusion suggested in the title until stumbled into a recent debate on ISP Planet’s isp-clec list about affordable and/or partly open-source driven head-end equipment for IPTV and associated accoutrements for the required network build-out. It’s something that came to fruition as a realisation as I devoured the exchanges about encoding gear, GPON vendors, etc.

Having bared that thesis, I will attempt to indemnify myself with the disclaimer that I am not a full-time market analyst, do not work in the video space, and know relatively little in detail about the technology. Additionally, I do not watch TV. I have not even had cable for many years now. And in general, television, the film industry, and entertainment as a whole are at the absolute dead-bottom of my list of personal or professional interests. So, I cannot possibly claim much credibility or authority here even if I harboured such designs.

It’s just a gut feeling. But gut feelings carry a frequently under-acknowledged significance in the anatomy of business decisions.

The first and most principal problem: TV is obsolete. No, I am not saying that nobody watches TV anymore; that is rather self-evidently not the case, and it seems implausible to even imagine American society without one of the most critical elements of its vitality–if that is the appropriate word to use. Indeed, the seemingly inextricable relationship of television to the basic respiration of American society — at least, on a pedestrian level — is one of the best known things about American society.

What I mean is that the traditional, incumbent nature–and particularly, the format–of broadcast television is on the decline. Television conceptualised hitherto, as a one-to-many broadcast network offering a fixed selection of professionally prefabricated content interspersed with frequent advertising, is not a growth industry.

The leading cable networks’ viewership has been consistently falling for several years now. Hollywood is beset by successive, protracted strikes of the various writers’ and actors’ unions, contributing to a blight of new and original content as well as a commonly acknowledged tendency to recycle, rerun and reuse. New shows are crafted according to predictable and overused formulas to — at least, I think — a previously unseen level, as epitomised by the bromidic “reality” genre. A study released just over a week ago suggested that the median age of habitual American TV viewers is now 50. Advertising revenue has plunged. The news channels part with growing segments of audience as more and more people–most especially the youngest demographics–move to the Internet to get their news.

Of course, this assessment falls short in its failure to consider certain lopsidedness in the trends. Various pay-per-view and on-demand movie channels, and other accessories of the technological upgrades heralded by digital cable, have actually registered modest gains.

All the same, I can’t see how anyone could be moved to suggest that these market conditions are investment-grade. Far as they may be from a proclamation of TV’s imminent demise, the stench of decay and obsolescence seems to be in the air.

That’s not to say that consumption of the essential phenomenon of the moving picture has abetted, although that may be the case with categories of younger viewers who have switched to the textual realm of the Internet to obtain their news–and increasingly from non-traditional media outlets, to boot.

Rather, the medium and the basis of the content has shifted increasingly in favour of online video content such as YouTube. As with the challenge to traditional corporate media posed by blogging, more and more video content that is considered entertaining and defining in popular culture is becoming user-generated and collaborative–”amateur,” if the terminological preference of the incumbents is to be respected. Perhaps more significantly but less overtly, there is a plethora of commercial (and some free) sites offering streaming feature-length movies, comprehensive archives of TV show episodes, and much more. Some of them are probably legal and have content licensing arrangements with the industry. Most, I imagine, are not. I can’t really say, as I am not a consumer thereof.

Even among those whose consumption of the boob tube has not significantly diminished, TiVo appliances have become commonplace. They conveniently defeat intrusive advertising and dutifully record shows to be watched later, according to the viewer’s own schedule and preference.

All this points to the irreversible trend that people are no longer satisfied with bulk, canned streams of content, or anything resembling “channels.” The next generation of video content is something like YouTube, if not necessarily identical. It my involve a marriage of the YouTube paradigm with a number of other presentation formats, technologies and approaches, including ones that may not have been conceived or applied yet. But essentially, something that carries its click-and-pick spirit forward.

It’s no different than where the music industry has been headed, where, aside from the more publicised and prolific lamentations about CD prices and labels screwing artists and so forth, the critical - if understated - key factor is that people want to cherry-pick their songs. Nobody wants to pay $16 for a CD where they won’t like all - maybe even most - tracks. But they are quite happy to pay $.99 for a single track from the iTunes store. It’s because they want that specific track, right here, right now, easily and quickly. And they want to amass it into a large, portable collection on the device of their choice (which, in light of the DRM restrictions, makes market acceptance of the Apple approach somewhat curious, if not necessarily beyond the reach of explanation).

And then, of course, there is the woefully limited landscape of choice offered within the RIAA production and distribution cartel, and the incredibly high financial barriers to entry it carries. How are you going to get your band’s album into the Barnes & Noble music section? Online music distribution democratises the playing field considerably, if not perfectly.

This is where things are headed. Toward openness, clips, bites - all on-demand, and bolstered by the convergence of digital delivery features with the interactive possibilities offered by computer interfaces, fed by the Internet — so much as that remains possible in light of the vicious hostility displayed by the telcos and MSOs alike toward net neutrality and all the issues surrounding that.

(By the way, the cable companies know this. That doesn’t mean they like it. That is why they have lined up to impose bandwidth and data transfer limits on customers once again - once thought to be a tired anachronism of a previous generation of the Internet economy’s evolution. It’s because they assume–not without some justification–that if you’re transferring 60-80 GB/month or more, you are either a prolific BitTorrent pirate or you’re watching a lot of streaming video, which means you’re not watching TV, which is a terrible, terrible thing indeed.)

Rome is burning, and you want to build a telco-cum-cable company providing what can and should be properly called legacy broadcast content in the middle of it? I’m not in MENSA, but if someone tries to take your money to invest in something like that, I’d say don’t fall for that scam. Run for the hills!

The second issue is with the technology, marketing, costs, and competency of the sort of organisation that a telco-land network service provider (CLEC / ISP) is.

Who said the head-end technology available within an independent CLEC’s budget works well, and is reliable or mature? Nobody I’ve spoken to who has tried it. Of course, I could just be speaking to the wrong people.

A friend of mine, who works with MSOs for a large vendor, has informed me that a lot of the gear typically found in major MSOs’ head-ends is overpriced, overrated, and suffers from egregious duplication and wastefulness stemming from lack of interoperability. But, I am not persuaded that anything built out there to replace it for a CLEC’s build-out budget actually works. Mind, this isn’t really my area of technical expertise, so I just don’t know. But nothing I have heard has been particularly encouraging. If anything, it’s been abusive and disdainful of Mickey Mouse solutions.

Who said last-mile broadband delivery infrastructure in the US, particularly copper or hybrid ADSL2, can handle high-definition, full-motion digital video streams with the level of robustness TV viewers take for granted with conventional digital cable, or that the equipment and technology necessary for delivering it over IP has those qualities either?

I know that a lot of the distribution infrastructure feeding the MSO head-ends has been IP-based for a while. But the last-mile portion is done with QAMs and RF. Are you sure you’re going to match that consistency with New Age ADSL2–still a largely uncharted province in terms of its rollout in North American telco plant and all of its idiosyncrasies, most notably a lack of fiber to the premise–and IP-based decoders?

If my experience of the extreme sensitivity of users to the quality of service issues (read: the way it’s inferior to the PSTN experience) in residential VoIP delivery is any indication, the Monday Night Football crowd will probably lynch you. Yes, I know a lot of that has to do with the feebleness of delivering carrier-grade voice over the Internet, which isn’t how IPTV would work at all, but that is not a hinderance to the point.

The network build-out, presumably involving some combination of copper ADSL2, fiber to the premise, and various hybridised transport, is a very capital-intensive undertaking. And as if the regulatory and bureaucratic burden on CLECs isn’t enough already, franchising agreements and content licensing enter the picture as significant CAPEX. I don’t know how much any of that costs, but I have a hard time imagining that an independent CLEC can get it the same breadth of it, on the same terms, as the large cable MSOs.

Third, to harness an insight of Clint’s: video is hard. Let alone to do right. No, it’s not insurmountable, but it is fraught with considerably more technical and logistical complexity than, say, voice or data. As Clint has remarked, it is relatively easy for a cable entity to enter the telephony space, especially as they already do data, making VoIP a logical, ostensible proposition. The synergy in triple-play is there for them. But telcos trying to reform their competency upward from voice/data into the video space is much harder. The synergy in triple-play is there for the MSOs because it’s a downhill battle — they already have the hard part. Telcos, institutionally, would have to fight an uphill competency battle.

But if that’s not discouraging enough, the real question is — where’s the elusive value proposition, the uniting elixir that is going to bring all these customers and the windfall profits for the enterprising CLEC?

What is being sold?

Something that people don’t already have, like … cable TV? Very funny. Perhaps rural areas not covered by cable might be a candidate, as relatively few as they are, but it is a stretch of the imagination to consider that the infrastructure there - i.e. the copper plant - is ready to support a brand new ADSL2 roll-out. Sure, remote DSLAMs with their fiber tails can be intrepidly built, but if the cable company doesn’t think there’s any ROI in building out their plant to the area because of population density or demographics, you must know something they don’t.

You might try for rural areas that have inferior, legacy local-yokel cable with a narrower range of features and content access, but you’ll have to conveniently ignore the existence of satellite–and hope your customers do too.

Aside from that, what’s the value? A little bit of bundled savings on triple play? Using New Age, avant garde technology that is unlikely to work as well as the perfectly good cable TV that is fairly ubiquitous, over experimental delivery mechanisms? And to suppose that your cost structure — and urgent need to recoup the cost of the build-out you just did and that the MSOs already have — is going to allow you to offer that competitively? CLECs/ISPs are often straitjacketed from even offering voice and data competitively with the ILECs unless they’re simply willing to take a margin hit; how did TV get to be the manna from the sky?

Marketing this type of stuff with any significant conversion rate is hard enough as is. It’s going to be even harder if you have nothing superior to offer. This is a good time to brush up on the subjective theory of value: just because television may be a novel, interesting business for a telco doesn’t mean its customers will think — or experience it as — a novel, interesting product. Well, they might think that, but the correlation between thinking certain things and voting with dollars would prove disappointingly low.

Having said all that, there are probably a few niches here and there where going into the TV business might make sense, such as multi-tenant buildings (MDUs). Or maybe if you’re fortunate enough to get a shot at a free and clear monopoly on a small (but growing) rural municipality if you do the trenching. Well, okay. That could work pretty well.  But then the question arises:  Why not do that from the cable side, instead of the telco side, from an infrastructural perspective?  Get stuff that already works well.

In any event, I’m not prepared to condone a business model based on the theoretical possibility of making it work with a set of highly specific, contrived artifices. I’m sure there are circumstances in which there may be an extremely compelling business case to offer janitorial services or lawn care, too — maybe do a deal with Blackwater in Iraq or something. Pockets of the extraordinary notwithstanding, it doesn’t count.

The news is not all bad. As I mentioned above, TV may be dying, but consumption of video content is not. If what you’re interested in is capitalising on the possibility of offering the next generation of computer-convergent set-top boxes with access to all sorts of newfangled content options whose market share and significance is likely to meteorically rise, that’s not such a bad idea.

But in that case, concentrate on rolling out the next generation of high-speed broadband access and customer premise equipment, especially as much of it is likely to be Internet-driven. If it turns out that this is not the case, you can add distribution and plant to drive new content models later. Why on earth would anyone want to get quagmired in the business of television as such? Why the stampede to imitate what the cable companies have been refining for decades, and provide an alternate distribution mechanism for the exact same content?

It’s time CLECs, Wall Street, and vendors got off this insipid IPTV bandwagon. Independent CLECs need to find something better to do.

So, yes, for the first time in my adult life, I’m unemployed.

I was dismissed from the concern for which I have worked for the past two and a half months last Thursday. It is impossible for me to go into any detailed explanation in a public forum without greatly compromising my professional position and, as increasing numbers of people blogging about work-related matters are discovering, potentially creating legal exposure for myself for libel, defamation, breach of NDA, and whatever else employers can come up with.

It suffices to say that my relationship with the business owner was problematic and not without recurring friction, and that various chronic personal choices, behaviours and shortcomings of mine are culpable here as well. No, I don’t feel that I bear full responsibility for this outcome or feel that my termination was somehow fair and reasonable, but it would simply be disingenuous and immoral to lay it all at my employer’s doorstep. It is as complicated as it is simple.

Contrary to what I always expected to be the case if I ended up in this position, I am actually all right at just this moment; if utilised in a fiscally conservative manner, I’ve got about ~2-3 months of cash reserves to float by on. But that’s not really a relief in any kind of grand scheme. As an individual living in downtown Atlanta, I have very high living costs and lead a high-overhead life. This would be a good time to be still stuck back in Athens with a few hundred dollars in recurring expenses, not in Atlanta with two mortgages, a car payment, HOA dues, insurance, and whatever other goodness.

Indeed, from the standpoint of my first instincts, it is quite terrifying to not have an income, and worse, no concrete, anticipated means of having one. I’ve never really been in this position before — even for a short time– since I got out of high school. The potential ramifications of financial failure in some or all of the above-mentioned asset / expenditure categories are absolutely not an option, without a doubt. And I have enough life experience to know all too well that two or three months is practically nothing compared to the average required turn-around time on a variety of economic pursuits, including jobseeking. Actually, finding a job in my field can easily take much longer than that.

That’s the take of the first instincts, anyway — yeah, despair and feel like a miserable failure, pretty much. But this is not the time to listen to those first instincts. This is a time to figure out what I’m going to do next and execute it. Quickly.

So, despite my despite my strong inherent anxiety about having ended up in this situation, I’ve decided I’m going to listen to my rational side and see this as an opportunity, not as a tragedy.

The truth is, ever since I developed my entrepreneurial ambitions with Evariste Systems in late 2006, I’ve wanted this. No, not to be fired, of course, nor to be jobless quite this very moment, nor to otherwise have my hand forced. However, in my head, I wasn’t planning on staying employed much longer; it’s hard to say how much, since I was so squeamish about taking risks and putting myself in this position of acute insecurity. Maybe a few months.

All this time, I’ve been miserable at every job I’ve been, pretty much irrespectively of whatever objective engagement I might have otherwise had with its content (although, the inane and bromidic content figuring into a lot of them didn’t help at all). It was the mere fact of the condition of employment in an existential sense.

I haven’t been able to entertain a professional self-concept that left me feeling “at home” or “comfortable” with what I was doing at a company; all I ever felt was that I was “stuck” there. Those who have known me in this period of my life can attest to a dense narrative replete with practically daily, unabating gripes about how impossible it is to try to do side-work, work on side-projects, and/or engage in some form of side-business on top of a taxing and exhausting “day job.” Oh, and my level of enthusiasm for working on anyone else’s stuff, engaging in their process, following their dicta, etc. when my mind and my heart is entirely about my own business ideas and ambitions. That enthusiasm has been on life support and barely breathing for a good while now. I just don’t care to do anything for anyone else in anyone’s office any more; all I can see and feel is how putting any spirit into it takes away time and energy from my own projects. I’ve found that it doesn’t even matter if the substance overlaps considerably with my personal technical and business interests; the mere fact of its being done in the context of employment asperates away all the joy.

I’ve also come into contact with a number of very viable and compelling opportunities throughout this time that I’ve had to pass up, neglect, and/or drop the ball on because there is no realistic way to execute them as side work in the evenings. There is just no way. And I’ve griped about it all the way, day after day, week after week.

Of course, all this hasn’t prevented the periodic burst of enthusiasm at something new and interesting, from a technical point of view, that has led people I’ve worked for to be really impressed with my skills and initiative. But it doesn’t stay, and before I know it, it’s back to the same old grind. By and large, I think I’ve been dwelling in mediocrity for quite some time now.

Pretty much everything I experienced in my daily work life was experienced in terms of how it takes away from my own business goals.

It is also fairly certain, upon reflection, that the mental and economic phenomenology of this mental disposition contributed to what ultimately got me fired. Besides, I’ve even expressed to myself and those close to me the occasional yearning to quit, be laid off or fired so that I could get the necessary kick in the pants to start pursuing what truly makes me happy. I just never took the steps. Laziness, security, inertia — let me just flip my excuse calendar here.

I’m done with employment. Another job — more of the same sort of thing — isn’t what I want. If you believe everything happens for a reason, then consider that I’ve had six jobs at five companies in the past three and a half years.¹ Surely there’s a reason for that. It’s just not the cloth from which I seem to be cut, my increasing self-awareness in this area tells me.

I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, to so speak. This is what I’ve been wanting. I just never had the cajones to take the leap, and now someone’s kicked me off the edge.

I’m going into business for myself.

I’ve got a few things going for me.

For one, I leverage a good bit of quality relationships and industry contacts. I’ve become increasingly adept at selling myself at a high level, and have earned some respect and acclaim in doing that.

For another, a great deal of the preparation for this eventuality is already done. I’ve set up a great deal of business infrastructure for Evariste, including plans, documentation, specifications, procedures, and other information. I have learned a good deal of what is to know about accounting, taxes and finances relevant to small business, and have been doing the accounting for quite some time. On the technical side, I already have and/or lease services and equipment such as colocation space, servers, VoIP, etc.

Third, it’s what I really want to do with myself. There’s nothing like doing what you want to do. It produces results, it really does. In fact, I’m pleased to report that in my first few days of unemployment, I have already made enough money this month (on an accrual basis, at least) that I do not anticipate having to dip into my savings at all to pay my bills. And it’s only the 6th. I’m shooting for much more. That’s a lot better than the first-month stories of most people I know who have traveled this road.

I will save extensive discussion of my goals with Evariste for another time, but it suffices to say that its mission as a software vendor and service provider doesn’t have the sort of time-to-market that allows that mission to be realised in a time frame that would allow it to monetise my existence by the time that becomes necessary. In the mean time, it’s going to have to be freelance consulting - a business unit of Evariste I intended to build up all along in the form of Evariste Professional Services.

A little note about going into business. One needs to go into business for the right reasons. It is not a redeemable decision in and of itself.

Unless it is something of trivial complexity, don’t do it unless you are looking for a career change from ${the substance of whatever the product/value creation is} to management and business administration. I cannot possibly count the number of people that start a business of their own — and fail — thinking, “Well, it’s always more profitable to work for yourself, and I do XYZ well, so I’m going to start an XYZ business.” No!

If you’re a good programmer, that does not mean you should start a programming business. You may not have any ability and/or interest in what it takes to actually run a business. Even if you do, the most you’re going to end up doing is carving out a possibly decently-paying job for yourself, except you’re going to incur all the ineffiencies that come with the anxiety of not knowing where your next paycheck is going to come from, and working 90 hour weeks to ensure it does when you do. You would be much better off pursuing a career development track that finds you in a well-paid, sufficiently senior development / engineering / architecture role somewhere. It is quite possible to do that and make far, far more money for far less work than you’re going to do on your own, and lead a suitably happy life.

If you want to start a development company, it is because you want to do business as your next career. There needs to be a point — and that point needs to come as quickly as possible — when your coding ends. Businesspeople that started out as programmers pull this off because they have the right combination of personal qualities; among other things, including a certain extroverted nature and excellent people skills and political acumen (in a broad sense), they have a strong competency and abiding interest in economics and managemen. That is why they build business processes that can be replicated, scaled and delegated at decreasing marginal cost. If you are not knowledgeable and passionate about all that stuff, you shouldn’t be in business.

The second point is about growth, and applies especially to anything that falls in the province of “consulting.” Growth is the expression of successful business, and growth requires economies of scale and replication of process. If you do not properly plan and bring your goals into focus, you are going to simply end up reinventing the wheel every month with a one-off project that, however lucrative, cannot be reused in a strategic or cost-effective way. That is not a growth-oriented strategy. You’re just going to hit the limit of what one person can realistically do, get burned out, but be stuck in a position where you can’t get off this ride because you need to pay the bills. And you’ll be stuck there in perpetuity, in perpetual frustration, misery, and economic uncertainty.

I feel that I’m going into business for the right reasons. I’ve got a lot to learn, but this is what I truly love to do.

A part of me still twitches with anxiety and fear at my present situation, acutely conscious of the economic significance of every day that goes by for which I am not paid a comfortable salary. But no matter. I’m not looking back. It’s time to face this situation with courage, determination, and the best of the American “go get ‘em” entrepreneurial spirit in which this nation’s mythos rightly invests so much pride.

Besides, as I said above: failure is not an option.

^{1 As some of my close associates have rightly pointed out, this resume pedigree — combined with lack of a college degree — also conspires to somewhat disadvantage me when it comes to seeking employment. No, it’s not an insurmountable hurdle in an industry that values skills way, way above all that, but it’s a strike against me to appear to be this kind of job-hopping “loose cannon.” Unless it’s on a fixed contract basis, employers want employees as a long-term investment. I have averaged a new job every six months.}

As I age and develop more and more pragmatic realisations about engineering project management and what it takes to make a task not only technologically, but economically viable, I find that I am growing more successful in my battle with a syndrome from which I suffer more than most people — Not Invented Here Syndrome, otherwise known as reinventing the wheel.

NIHS is a particularly bad disease to have concomitantly with strong purist sensibilities toward programming as an art and a discipline, not merely a tool for accomplishing certain ends in a functional, utilitarian kind of way. (The latter, with some notable exceptions, is the dominant conception of it in the world of business. It’s “programming,” you see, not “software engineering.”) This leads to a basic intuition that does make business sense: the fundamental need for frameworks, libraries, decomposition, and code reuse. The reasons may boil down to a dilution of the economic facts with considerations of elegance, artfulness, simplicity and conceptual integrity on a detailed level, the result is the same.

However, the interaction of these sensibilities with a strong case of NIHS is particularly harmful in that it leads one to assume the task of developing such tools entirely on one’s own. I cannot recall how many ambitious open-source projects of mine have gotten bogged down in the need to fulfill a prerequisite gap with APIs, libraries, toolkits, utility routines, interfaces, hooks, etc., and thus never shipped — never saw the light of day.

So, I am currently working on EVA (Evariste Voice Arbiter), a SIP-based hosted VoIP billing / mediation solution based on OpenSER. It is most immediate in the Evariste software product pipeline. I conceived of it back in August and had spent much of the fall building the backend¹ (primarily OpenSER and PostgreSQL stored procedures) on top of my day job, taking care to provision decent business infrastructure to support it along the way, including a bug tracking/issue tracking/development workflow management system, a relatively detailed specification, and concrete, enumerated project milestones, and indeed, even some testing methodologies.

When I finally got to the part where I start working on the front-end - the GUI interface for the web application that binds the front-end to the backend, and the associated web services to provide those hooks - it was my natural inclination as an NIHS sufferer to conceive of building an in-house PHP/AJAX framework with high-level web service interface capabilities using JSON as a transport. I began to develop it slowly and aimlessly, calling it EvPHPTK, and even meticulously documented the API and developed unit tests for every component.

Earlier this year, despite entreatments to consider it by Storm, I rejected the use of Symfony as a development framework for the PHP front-end. I also generally have taken a very sceptical view of dozens of toolkits with prebuilt PHP and AJAX widgets, such as Dojo. This has less to do with aversion to frameworks as such and more with the fact that I simply found them aesthetically displeasing from the vantage point of my purism on various fine points.

Long story short, I had some time to actually consider this in detail over the Christmas holiday and came to an epiphany that led me to throw away EvPHPTK and score a major goal against my NIHS. I am going to use Google Web Toolkit to build the front-end.

It’s a rather radical decision, all things considered, but I’d like to take a moment to elucidate why I think it is meritorious from a business and technical standpoint. It was not without considerable pain that I abandoned a darling premise of my software development methodologies and sold out to the exigencies of practicality.

The reality, is, however, that Evariste is not in the web application framework business. It is neither a product nor a core competency. And if EVA and the other ambitions I have for this business are to ever be realised, they are not going to materialise by sticking to my incumbent ways. I do not actually have time to write umpteen gazillion lines of JavaScript plumbing for XMLHttpRequest callbacks or intricate, application-specific DOM manipulation. I’m just way past any interest in that whatsoever. I don’t care.

For those not wholly familiar, GWT is a free web application development toolkit from Google that allows one to develop GUIs in Java, using API idioms and design patterns essentially familiar to those who have implemented GUIs in Swing or its legacy predecessor, AWT.

A cross-compiler then generates the appropriate JavaScript to perform all the necessary feats of “AJAXian” DHTML, DOM manipulation, and other interface mechanics. One of the key “selling points” of the framework is that this is done with a view toward the lowest common denominator of browser compatibility in this area, theoretically preventing one from worrying about the interoperation of the JavaScript with particular browsers or the handling of arcane browser quirks. To the extent that there is still room for incompatibility, it is going to be on the CSS side, as the framework requires all GUI elements to be styled outboard rather than nativising CSS manipulation via the DOM through its API routines.

The framework also implements a substantial subset of the core Java runtime environment (JRE) API, including support of most data primitives, collections, data structures, and associated manipulation classes. Thus, it is quite possible to accomplish many things programmatically within the GWT-powered application code apart from drawing the interface itself, to the extent that it is possible to accomplish anything of substance in Java on the application level.

In many ways, I loathe Java. What’s more, despite some experience with it (a large part of it in a second-level introductory CS course — the only one I ever took), I am not fundamentally a Java programmer by pedigree, and cannot claim any exceptional competency in it. However, I have come around to the persuasion that it is fundamentally good for one thing, and one thing only: building GUIs. This helps me see the value in GWT.

GWT does other neat things. It is very web-services oriented, and supports JSON readily and extensively. This makes it possible to readily couple it to a web services backend in another language; I certainly do not intend to do the web services backend in JSP (yuck!). Most likely the backend mediation will take place via a Perl dispatcher (with mod_perl). Thus, I have the satisfaction of knowing that neither the resulting generated code for the front-end nor the backend RPC callbacks will ultimately be in Java. The Java code ends up being more of a dialect - a descriptor - for the GUI than a runtime determinant of it.

Clint inquired why it is precisely that I do not consider using one of the PHP frameworks out there that accomplish similar things. The reasons are manifold; for one, I just do not like the frameworks that I have seen. They strike me as very incomplete in their functionality and design methodology, for one. I see one challenge of the development process handled very gracefully and artfully, and another one heavily stilted or left out in the cold entirely. A lot of them also seem very fly-by-night and whimsical, both in their essential conception and in their development history, and I am not endeared to the idea of adopting them as a dependency for a mission-critical commercial application.

Another big reason is that I am increasingly dissatisfied with PHP as a way to develop web applications. Rather unlike some of what’s been related to me in other jeremiads against PHP from folks like Brian or Jonathan, my reasons have little to do with its performance characteristics, scalability, its technical robustness, or compatibility issues.

It’s more that I just don’t see it in what is fundamentally a scripting language a way to design enterprise-worthy applications that appeals to me. If web applications are the new fashion, and nobody does standalone GUIs anymore, that’s good and fine;  please, sign me up for the revolution, rifle in one hand, constitution in the other. But in that case, I want to be able to harness the paradigmatic benefits of doing a standalone GUI inside a web application context, from the ground up, end-to-end. Why does the development process have to be reduced to scriptable particles inside HTML pages?  It’s high time I had my cake and ate it too.

In other words, I really shouldn’t have to write any HTML, use any templates, or provide bindings between static content and dynamic constructs at all if I am writing an application. That’s what appeals to me about using GWT; it lets me truly build a completely dynamic interface from scratch, and achieve a more wholesome, genuine separation of interface from underlying functionality — the ideal aim of all good programming.

It’s going to be a tough learning curve, for sure. Being neither a Java programmer nor experienced with GWT, I have little sense of design patterns or best practises or various other methodological intangibles that — unlike the basic learning of a programming language’s grammar and syntax — take years to achieve competency in. But I am very excited and optimistic about choosing GWT to drive my “web 2.0″ applications.

^{1 Yes, it is very sad that it takes me several months to do that. I used to be able to pull off such feats in a few days of solid, sustained work, but this isn’t high school anymore.}

While meeting up with Deanne (the marital complement to Jonathan) at the airport last night, I noticed that in the “Atrium,” the retail space and lobby between the North and South terminals, there was a sign advertising that the “SSID” of the airport wireless access point was such and such.

Is it a reliable indicator of market penetration and consumer acceptance of a technology when relatively arcane IEEE standard acronyms make their way onto glossy posters directed at traveling end-users?

I’m not trying to call anyone out, but, I got an employment solicitation from a recruiter a few days ago that may strike some of you, who heard me rant about fighting with the BroadSoft in a previous line of employment, as slightly ironic:

I would like to inform you that we have an opportunity to add additional personnel to our engineering staff. We are specifically trying to find a Broadsoft VoIP Expert. Are you the one?

Santa María, ¡que Dios me bendiga! No, I am not the one. I am never touching that piece of equipment again. Or hopefully anything else like it.