six to start

Or not - our good friends at Channel 4 Education held a press day yesterday resulting in a flurry of coverage: Channel 4 education focuses on web

Channel 4 has unveiled a slate of “high risk and experimental” projects based around social networking sites that it says will tackle the crisis of motivation in education.

“High risk and experimental” That makes us sound edgy. Which is good, I suppose!

And then we’ve got

Gaming projects include City of Vice by Littleloud, which invites the user to solve historical crimes from Georgian London and Six to Start’s project The Ministry, which explores privacy and identity online.

which is us! How exciting! And even divulges the codename for our project, which makes us sound terribly, um, edgy again. Brilliant!

Anyway. The beginning of the article starts like this:

The new commissions for 2008 - announced today - are part of the £6m educational budget for 14- to 19-year-olds which involves Channel 4 dropping much of its TV programming in favour of online projects.

New projects cover entrepreneurship, careers, media literacy, the transition form school to work and, later in 2008, political engagement and citizenship.

“The thing that we are concerned with, one of the ongoing crises in education, is motivation,” said Janey Walker, the Channel 4 head of education.

“At the moment, 14-19 educational content is not high profile because teens are in school when it is on. We feel we have found very good projects to take it a step forward. These are all high risk projects, but we know this is a good thing to do.”

“In all conscience,” Walker said, “Channel 4 could not continue to spend £6m on programming that is not engaging people.”

The channel had to find ways to be relevant to its audience, she said.

“We are experimenting with finding content that is engaging and entertaining as well as educational. And it is only by experimenting can we find ways to reach and engage this age group.”

and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that education projects are all that we do (not by a long shot), ARGs really do have the potential to educate in a more interesting, different and easily measurable way than tv programmes for some subjects.

Oh, and before anyone asks: no, we’re not making a Facebook widget.

We’ve just started on the first phase of a new project, step one of which (for me) includes deciding which technology platform we’re going to be using. We want something that lets us get working prototypes built quickly, changes to the system design implemented with as little pain as possible and, crucially, allows the system to perform and scale well after deployment (with the minimum of hand-holding).

Coming from the ((un)enviable) position of being mostly language-agnostic, I’m looking at a few different web application frameworks to assess their suitability.

There are a couple of obvious problems

• Very few objective comparisons exist of the different frameworks out there, using realistic sample applications.
• Short of implementing the entire application during the evaluation process, it’s nearly impossible to get an idea of the framework’s performance.

The contenders
We’ve yet to write any code in anger, so the comments below are based on books, examples, tutorials and entirely too long searching Google.

We’ve looked at:

Rails (Ruby)
http://www.rubyonrails.org/
From what I’ve seen so far, I like the Rails development process. I know a lot of people don’t, but I’m willing to step forward and be categorised as one of ‘those‘. I have some serious concerns however, mostly in relation to performance and deployment:

• The recommended method for deploying/hosting a Rails app sucks. Considering how much thought has gone in to the rest of the framework, the idea of having to set up and monitor individual Mongrel instances behind a proxy to run my app feels like it was borne out of repeated attempts from the Rails community to stop their applications dying under load; bear in mind that this isn’t something you do to tune your site, but something you do just to get it managing requests acceptably.
• I’m not entirely comfortable with ActiveRecord’s ability to generate well-performing sql (although I suppose this concern is one of ORMs in general). There are reports of people having to replace it with hand-written queries when going in to production, particularly in the case of associations. Is this true of all ORMs? Maybe …
• Twitter. Boy do they have a lot of downtime. This fuels worries about performance and the kind of day-to-day maintenance that a live Rails app needs.
• It’s trendy, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

We are going to be looking at:

Django (Python)
http://www.djangoproject.com/
The performance figures are encouraging for Django, and the fact that a memcached-backed caching layer comes as part of the framework indicates the thought that’s gone into it post-deploy. So far, a couple of things are bothering me:

• It seems geared up for use in publishing (understandable, given its background). However, the sort of sites we’ll be building will be very interactive, with a lot of two-way data exchange - I worry that Django isn’t going to help us much in this area.
• The whole Python whitespace thing is … well, I’m in the ‘hate’ camp on that one (although the language itself looks intriguing)

Catalyst (Perl)
http://catalyst.perl.org/
I need to do a lot more investigation here, but two people now whose opinions I respect hugely have told me I should be using Catalyst. It’s the least well ‘marketed’ of the three but word of mouth recommendations are worth a lot.

Information is a little light on the ground regarding real-world performance, but it’s Perl so it will be fast. The Perl community has been around for a little while, so there’s plenty of prior art in getting Perl web apps to scale.
For me, the one obvious problem is the very thing I like so much about Perl:

• TIMTOWTDI. One of Catalyst’s big selling points is the fact that, if you don’t like the default ORM, templating language etc, you can swap it out for a different one; essentially you get the whole of CPAN to play with. If I were an accomplished OO Perl programmer, this would be a big plus; as it is, I’m something of a Perl *scripter*, so this makes me wonder about the learning curve for Catalyst, and the maintainability of the code between different programmers.

So, the search continues. I need a coffee.

Lots happening at Six to Start HQ this week. We’re saying hello to:

• Ben Burry, who’s our new lead developer
• Naomi Alderman, who’s come on as lead writer for one of our projects

I say one of our projects - we’re actually working on two at the moment. One’s uber-top-double-super-secret, and the other is about the same level of secrecy (the concept doc has the requisite ‘read this, and we’ll gouge your eyes out with a spoon’ warning) but with Channel 4 and has us rather terribly excited because we’re working with Alice Taylor and Matt Locke over at Channel 4.

To give you some idea of why we’re so terribly excited about what we’re doing with Channel 4, the first time we met with Matt, one of the things he said he wanted to do was find out what our perfect project would be. So this is that.

Anyway. Back to work. More from us later, I expect, and Ben wants me to get on with publishing this entry so we can migrate servers.

Oh, and we can’t tell you about the other project. Too super secret, as I said, you see.