Building on Platforms

July 8th, 2006

When writing a script or a program you’ll probably develop it on a platform - you could develop it using a certain programming language, for a specific operating system or by using a certain API. The stability and future of the platform is important.

I can think of three specific examples where this has affected me:

Invision Board used to be a free PHP forum software. The developers said it’d always be free (or implied it). It was a fantastic script so was a perfect platform for building a whole site or community on. For such reasons, I begun the IPB SDK project. After spending probably over a year writing the script (which essentially meant writing a whole bulletin board based around IPB), debugging and supporting it, it went paid meaning myself and others could no longer use it or develop it. This was really frustrating and was a bad platform choice.
Messenger Plus Live! has been trying to establish itself as a platform for Messenger related scripts and plugins, especially with the recent addition of the scripting API. I experimented a little with the scripting and produced some scripts but I’m reluctant to develop any more scripts on the platform because of the inclusion of the spyware sponsor program. Of course it’s optional and it funds the development of Plus!, but I don’t really want to develop software on a plugin which has the option to install spyware. For an end-user application, it’s acceptable but as a platform to run other people’s stuff it’s not.
Companies like Alexa and Google have released open Web APIs which can allow you to interact with their product but they do not guarantee they will be free once they leave the beta. This is a bit frustrating especially if you spend ages developing a script on a platform and then suddenly discover no one can use it any more because they decided to take the API offline.

It’s important that platforms have a clear direction and are preferably open source and free. The World Wide Web is a great platform for information and products as it’ll always be there and it’ll always be free and accessible to everyone. Firefox and XULRunner are a fantastic framework for web-enabled applications as it’s open source and free, and many people have it. Languages such as PHP, Python and Perl are great as they’re cross-platform and free unlike proprietary languages such as Visual Basic.