March 2008

It’s been quiet on this blog lately, for which I send my apologies. However, it’s not without rhyme or reason. We’ve been working on a great new project called NoteCut. NoteCut is will be an online note sharing platform which allows students and teachers to easily share notes. The goal is to help students learn more effectively and serve as an learning aid, not a learning substitute.

There will definitely be more to share regarding NoteCut as it develops, however, what I’d really like to do is quickly evangelize some of the technology we’ve been using in its development.

First off we have CodeIgniter which an amazing PHP framework. If you’re familiar with the Rails approach, this is pretty similar. CodeIgniter has substantially expedited our development process thanks to its built-in functionality. Interfacing with a database really can’t get much easier, and it generates clean URLs for you (query strings, I won’t miss you). Of course it does more, but those are my two favorite niceties. However, what really rocks about CodeIgniter is the documentation. Learning basics of the system was a breeze with their getting started guide, but beyond that nearly everything is documented, and documented well. I’m a big fan of the PHP documentation, but CodeIgniter goes one step further with startlingly un-cryptic descriptions of its classes and helper methods. It’s TINY too. At the cost of sounding hyperbolic, I really haven’t found anything I don’t like about CodeIgniter yet.

That’s not all though. We wanted to incorporate a FlashPaper solution on our note pages, but we found the technology to be virtually dead. We considered rolling our own solution, but then we stumbled upon iPaper from Scribd. Aside from the cliché naming, iPaper hasn’t stopped wow-ing us in its simplicity and execution. The API is awesome - simple, sweet, and effective. Plus, the thing just works. It seems obvious, but if you think about your daily struggles with software, I bet you’ll start to realize how frustrating it can be.

We’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on all our developments with NoteCut, as well as the rest of the news from NPL Solutions. But please, someone send me a harassing email next time it’s been over 70 days since the last blog post.