You could look at Noostr (http://noostr.com/). It's been stalled for a while now, but will eventually see a 1.0 release :)

Big missing feature is paging...

Edit: It's a PHP app that uses MySQL.

PHP is easy to learn and the documentation is extensive. But it is very easy to do things wrong in PHP, mostly because people learning PHP do a lot of copy/paste coding without really understanding the domain they're coding for (in this case, a web browser over the internet).

There are a lot of sites that give information on working with PHP correctly (including http://appwithphp.com/ and http://planet-php.net/), but expect to do a lot of reading and experimenting before getting it right.

I personally didn't care much for Perl as a web language, although it's great for system-level scripting.

I'd add Python to your list of potential languages too. I've been having a lot of fun with it lately :)

PostBooks (http://www.xtuple.org/) is a fairly capable replacement for Quickbooks on OSX (and Win/*NIX), and has both OSS and Commercial versions.

GnuCash (http://www.gnucash.org/) is another I've used in the past and had good results with. It's more of a Quicken replacement than QuickBooks though.

I might be remembering incorrectly, but 2x and 2(x) are totally different things in algebra.

2x would be expanded as (2 * x), whereas 2(x) expands as 2 * x.

In this case, since the equation is 2(1+2) which results in 2(3), it's final DMAS form is 6 ÷ 2 * 3 = 9, instead of 6 ÷ ( 2 * 3 ) = 1

I enjoyed the bit at the end where the writer managed to use the wrong (IMO) formula to arrive at the correct answer.

Using BEDMAS as I was taught, so many moons ago:

6 ÷ 2 ( 1 + 2 )

6 ÷ 2 ( 3 )

6 ÷ 2 * 3 // because 2(3) is not an exponent or algebraic construct, it's straight multiplication

3 * 3 // division and multiplication are in left-to-right order, no precedence

9

Update: after reading the article at http://www.matthewcompher.com/posts/trouble-with-semantics-t... , the writer used the ÷ as a line operator, not a natural division operation.

I would maintain that since this is not taught in any school I've ever attended, it is at least questionable. I've never seen a math textbook use the / symbol for natural division either.

I never knew about the distinction either. But if interpreted that way

    6 ÷ 2 (1 + 2)

should then translate to

    6 / (2 * (1 + 2)) = 1

I guess this only reaffirms the fact that the expression is ambiguous.

that seems wrong to me too, either I lost my math or I don’t see how he went from

   6 ÷ 2 (1 + 2)

to

   (6 * (1 + 2)) / 2

You may reorder factors arbitrarily

  *a /b *c = *a *b /c = /c *b *a  etc.

  so 6 /2 *(...) = 6 *(...) /2.

Right. Silly me. What a weird way of doing it though.

Highcharts (http://www.highcharts.com/) is pretty darn good.

Would you say it's worth the cost of a full license?

Edit: I should specify we'd need to obtain a multi developer license, and that comes with a large cost

I admit their licensing is stupid - why would I pay based on the number of developers I have working on my application?? It would make more sense to pay per-domain or per-site it's actually being deployed on.

That said, no, the price is too high for sure.

Just wanted to let you know I used your boilerplate for my first jQuery plugin recently - https://github.com/indyarmy/jQuery.awesomeCloud.plugin/

Thanks a lot, it saved me a pile o'trouble :)

Direct to demo page: http://indyarmy.com/awesomeCloud/

Does the action call really say "while supplies last" when referencing a downloadable PDF file??

I am both a PHP and Java dev, and have found that PHP is far faster, leaner and more maintainable for websites than Java is.

The last hard-core (ie. expensive) Java dev we had working on one of our back-end projects turned in code that was so abstracted and made such heavy use of dependency injection, it was not only difficult to read through, but took over 30ms to respond to requests. Maintainability was a nightmare, mainly because by abstracting things so thoroughly he effectively (and inadvertently) made the platform so tightly coupled that changing low-level code became very difficult.

Our current hard-core (ie. affordable) PHP dev spent almost exactly the same number of hours re-implementing the Java system, retained the extensibility requirements, and the framework returns responses in about 1ms. We have extendable objects for everything (models, controller, extensions, etc.), but without the 5 to 10 layers of abstraction.

As an added benefit, with PHP we don't have to worry about recompiling every time a change is made (during development, at least), we aren't running any memory-hog VMs, and it's far easier to find good devs when we need them.

That said, PHP takes a lot of crap because of its low barriers to entry. It's easy to learn the basics, it's very easy to learn bad habits, and it's too easy to write insecure code. A good PHP dev knows how to write fast, secure code, but it is hard to figure out who is a "good" PHP dev and who is a "copy/paste" PHP dev.

It should be noted that the Java dev obviously over-designed the system, and that a different dev may have delivered something much more "keepable".

However, my experience over the last 20 years has shown me that this is pretty much the way of things - expert Java devs love making things complex by layering more complexity over things in order to make them simpler. Expert PHP devs tend to remove complexity and turn in far more intelligently organized code.

I've seen exceptions to both generalizations, but not very damn many. It's depressing.