Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-01-01 00:45:50 - Graham Ellis
"Making Business a Pleasure" - a spoken logo for Well House Consultants for 2006.
Whether you're attending a course, staying as a guest at Well House Manor, working for us, or simply visiting our web site, we want you to enjoy the experience.
We don't know exactly what 2006 will bring, but we have some plans and can make some educated forecasts.
Well House Manor
When you book a course, you also book somewhere to stay? The majority of our customers answer "yes", as we provide niche courses and have customers from far and near. In 2006, we'll be bringing "Well House Manor" online - accommodation for the business visitor to Melksham. All rooms will be double or twin, en suite, but willingly let for single occupancy. They'll include wireless and (probably) wired broadband internet access, plentiful desk space and power outlets, and access to printing facilities. Continental breakfast will be provided, and you'll be very welcome to bring in your own take-away for your evening meal - knives and forks, plates, bowls and glasses provided.
Booking a place at Well House Manor if you're attending a course couldn't be easier - we'll simply include it with your booking. If you're not attending a course, we'll be taking bookings online once we have a firm opening date, and also taking advanced bookings by phone. We're looking to provide business accommodation during the week, and a base for adult tourists at the weekend. We'll ask you to guarantee your booking and pay by debit or credit card.
Inevitably, there will be a few changes to the schedule and course content but our policy that we NEVER cancel a course that has a booking remains. We know you need a guarantee that your course will run.
So why do I say there will be "a few changes"?
In the last couple of months, Apache httpd 2.2 was released and although takeup may be slow, our Deploying LAMP and Linux Web Server courses will be revised shortly to include more coverage of the production release.
Perl 6 is also on the horizon - and not so far on the horizon as it used to be. In 2006 we'll certainly see more mentions of the new syntax in our current Perl courses, and there may very well be additional conversion courses announced. You may spot in our schedule that our Perl for Larger Projects and Using Perl on the Web courses are scheduled only for a few months ahead - the OO aspects of Perl 6 will inevitably move into the more regular "Perl" or "Perl 6" courses and the advanced topics courses may need to be lengthened or shortened.
Ruby has been a bit of a "sleeper". No huge call for training and we've been running only private courses in Ruby. It seems the topic is huge in Japan, quite big in the USA and really hasn't made it to Europe yet. However, there's a great interest in "Ruby on Rails". Rails provides a modern, easy to use system for putting interactive web sites together quickly. Embedding code within the HTML, very much in the way that JSPs and PHP does, it lets developers put systems together fast. There's good technical reasons why it scores - in the right circumstances - over both JSPs and PHP. At this stage, I've not scheduled any public "Ruby + Rails" courses ... but PLEASE ASK if you've a group of even just two or three people interested.
Looking further into 2006, we've got one eye on a number of other topics as diverse as Ajax (client side Javascript accessing server side XML data), Applescript (Mac's scripting language) and LDAP (Shared directories for common logins, etc). And we're continuing to watch Open Source web applications from Plone to SMF to OSCommerce.
Coming full circle, we're also looking at Open Source on line booking and reservation software - not only for courses, but for Well House Manor too. We could well end up writing and publishing something under a GPL license ... and that'll open a whole new business facet too.
Whatever 2006 brings, we'll enjoy what we do - and we'll provide services that let you enjoy learning or staying with us - "making business a pleasure".
Happy New Year!
Update - September 2008 - I have added a simple Ajax Example here, and Ajax is now covered on our PHP Techniques Workshop