Willowgarden is an application platform/framework for PHP 5 that I started work on towards the end of August 2005, with serious development progress starting around the beginning of the year. On April 28, I released Developer Preview 1 of Willowgarden, and while that was a good start, I knew that the project still had a long way to go before it would resemble the level of quality and scope of functionality that it really deserved.

Well today, I’m so pleased to announce that Developer Preview 2 is ready. This is where the project is really starting to solidify and settle into a cohesive whole that can be used for hands-on development. I’ve been working on several Web site and applications using the DP2 codebase, and it has made my life as a PHP developer so much more fun than the bad old days of cobbling together scripts nearly from scratch.

Along with DP2, I’ve set up a new wiki that houses the partially-complete Users Guide as well as areas for future tutorials, how to’s, and more. I’ll be spending a lot of my time in the near future working on that end of things rather than code. You are most certainly welcome to contribute content to the wiki as well, so be sure to check that out.

And now I am going to make a bold statement: I am asking the cutting-edge PHP 5 developers reading this — and I know you’re out there! — to consider joining the Willowgarden project if it piques your interest. I would like to start moving interim versions out there at a more rapid pace, leading towards a stable 1.0 release of Willowgarden, and to do that I need the help of people with many different environments and expertise in fine tuning installations. I also have a huge number of ideas in store for future versions, and I’m sure you do as well. This is the time to get on board while the project is still young! To contact me, feel free to send me an e-mail (remove everything after jared before the @ sign).

Thanks for reading, and I hope you download Willowgarden DP2 and give it a thorough look-over. This release is stable enough that I encourage you to start using it for your experimental development efforts, and your feedback and ideas are very much appreciated. Also, I’ll be posting a lot here now about DP2, so check back soon for more information as well.

In the past (before this incarnation of The Idea Basket), I’ve blogged about what the “next-generation” desktop user interface might look like. My hypothesis was that neither Microsoft nor Apple could afford to throw existing UI concepts out of the window because it wouldn’t make immediate financial or business sense. I also said it was unlikely the Linux crowd would jump to the forefront in UI innovation because they were too busy cloning Windows. No, I said, if there were to be a quantum leap ahead in the GUI space, it would come from a totally unknown source with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Well, even though I had no idea what that source might be, I basically wasn’t too far off the beam. It looks like the death of the standard “WIMP” (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) GUI is actually starting to appear on the horizon, and a new paradigm is coming into view. And what is this new paradigm, you ask? Why, nothing less than the venerable Web page.

WHAT?!?! That’s no paradigm. Web pages have been around for years now, and they’re just interactive documents with fancy graphics. The more they act like apps, the closer they get to the “real deal” — desktop software with a traditional GUI.

Nope, that’s not what’s happening at all. Sure, lots of Web apps over the years have tried to emulate traditional GUIs, complete with desktop-like icons, menus, windows, etc., but you know what? They all sucked, big time. The era of sluggish Java applets and pixelated, battleship-grey interfaces is over, and everyone knows it. The new era is everything we love about Web 2.0.

User-focused design. Big, happy fonts. Descriptive text that helps you learn your way around. Simplicity. Less features (as the grammatically-challanged 37signals folks would say). In-place editing and in-context actions via the power of Ajax. Tagging. Links. Striking visual effects via cutting-edge CSS and Javascript. The list goes on. And you know what virtually none of these awesome new apps use? The old paradigms of WIMP. There’s no menu bar. There are no windows (or if there are, they’re just tiny pop-up dialogs). There’s no pool of icons. Only the Pointer of WIMP is left, for the most part.

What’s replaced all that is the evolution of three components: attractive graphics design, intelligent copy and typesetting, and the hyperlink. Who knew years ago that the separation between application and document would virtually disappear as the concept of software platform shifted from a window-centered one to a page-centered one?

Now some would argue that the familiar, repeatable consistency of a WIMP-based GUI with the OS and all applications sporting the same kind of interface is far superior to the Wild-West-anything-goes world of the Web. I say otherwise. People generally learn new Web apps far easier than they learn new desktop apps — because the UI is tailored to the content. Certainly there are plenty of recognizable UI elements that you find in most Web apps. Patterns are emerging, designers are following competitors’ leads. But the main strength of this new Web 2.0 world is in its very inconsistency. We’ve all had the displeasure of living in the “everything’s the same” WIMP world with the OS telling apps how to look and feel. It stank. We all ended up with confusing, bloated, and unreliable software. On the Web, people expect stuff to Just Work. And if people can’t make it work in 1 minute, they’ll go somewhere else. Confusing, bloated software withers on the vine.

If you think the WIMP GUI is just fine, thank you, and is totally unrelated to the explosive growth of Ajax-style Web apps, that’s your prerogative, but I maintain there’s a definite comparison here. Imagine Backpack, Flickr, Amazon, Google, Wordpress, del.icio.us, etc., done WIMP-style using a traditional Mac OS X or Windows XP interface. It’d look boring as hell and be damn hard to use. Seriously.

I, for one, welcome our new Web 2.0 overlords. I enjoy my time on the Web as much as I ever have using any desktop app. And that, my friends, is where the real UI innovation is happening. Microsoft, Apple (yes, Apple), Linux distros, and virtually everyone else are adding features to their interfaces that the Web has had for years. Ironic, isn’t it — a few years ago, people were trying to figure out how to make Web pages look like desktop apps. Now people are trying to figure out how to make desktop apps look like Web pages.

I love it.

Hey folks, if you’re developing Web apps with PHP (4.3+ or 5+) and have been wondering how to take full advantage of all that Ajax has to offer, you owe it to yourself to check out xajax! 0.2.4 started out as a quick big-fix update and ended up containing a few really neat new feature that will make your life easier, the biggest of which is the new addScriptCall command for the response object. Now you can call functions in your client scripts (or other Javascript functions/objects including script.aculo.us effects!) using a simple PHP method that automatically converts your PHP data structures to Javascript data structures. No, it’s not using JSON, but a simple XML format we were already using for passing Javascript data structures to PHP. One cool thing about this is that I didn’t write the bulk of the code for this feature — it was submitted as a patch by Luis Fagundes to Sourceforge and our community forums. Open source in action! I love it!

So be sure to check out xajax and let us know how you like it!

Yay! That was pretty easy! I just upgraded The Idea Basket to the latest 2.0.2, finally, so I’ve caught up with the blogging Joneses. In addition, I installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, so now I’m tagging my posts and have a pretty tag cloud on my sidebar. I’ve tagged some of my recent posts, but I’ll try to go through all of my posts so far and tag them so the cloud is more useful. Very fun stuff, and oh so Web 2.0 to boot!

You know what? Microsoft is really starting to fire on all cylinders. Maybe buying Groove and getting Ray Ozzie was a bigger event than I realized at the time.

Ray’s come up with one of the most brilliant technologies ever to hit the Web in my opinion: a standardized XML format describing clipboard data formats that can be used for site-to-site, site-to-desktop, and desktop-to-site copy & paste. Whoa. Let that sink in for a minute: with this technology (pure Javascript that works in IE and Firefox to start with), you can now right-click on an image on a Web site, select “copy”, right-click on another image somewhere else on that page or on a totally different Web site, select “paste”, and the data is transferred through structured XML and inserted as customized HTML into that page. Even RSS feed URLs can be brought along.

Check out the screencasts and the code, which is still in its infancy so it can only get better from here. This is big, folks. Really big.

The 37signals guys never rest: not only do they have five awesome Web apps in their stable, but they’ve written a new e-book to boot. Called Getting Real, it’s available for $19 as a PDF download, and I have read it in its entirety. Buy it. Now. (That is, if you plan on releasing a Web app or any piece of agile software.) It rocks.

Here’s what I wrote at the Signal vs. Noise blog:

I bought the book. I read it in three chunks today…only took around 2 1/2 hours total.

I got more out of reading this little e-book than just about any other computer-related book I’ve ever read on any topic that I can possibly think of. Whoa. I think you applied Getting Real to the book. And that’s fine — when I want verbose frills, I’l l read James Fenimore Cooper. When I want a brain supercharge, I’ll read something like this.

Way to go guys. Well worth every penny of the $19 I spent.

And lest you think I’m just a mindless Jason Fried or DHH fan or something, I used to be quite jealous of their company a couple of years ago when Basecamp first came out. I totally didn’t get it: I thought uncustomizable, hosted, pay-per-month Web software with a “childlike” simple interface was a complete joke. Boy was I wrong! I’m now a paying Backpack customer (And I do like Basecamp now, though I don’t use it.) The times they are a-changin’….