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File this under inspiration and continuing education.

100 Ways to Paint

Some of these guys are just fantastic.

I’ve recently completed a website where I incorporated Yahoo’s UI and Google’s API for Maps. That isn’t too exciting, but it is a great example of how the web should work.

When we began building the site I was looking at some User Interface javascript libraries and some Flash components as the building blocks for the site. The site has a custom built ColdFusion 8 middleware tier for web services and data. The backend was a MS SQL database. Which, btw, reminds me to plug Fogcreek’s Fogbugz software. If you’ve ever managed a software/web based project and you failed to use Fogbugz then please check out this site for any future projects. It uses MS SQL as the backend and its very nicely done and easy to extend.

The site, which has now launched, was easy to develop mostly due to its architecture which separated the content, from the presentation, from the design. In this case the content was stored in SQL, retrieved and updated by CF8, and presented using Yahoo’s UI CSS and Javascript libraries.  Flash was also used to consume the web services and display within components, but the real beauty of the mesh came when Google’s API provided the data, which was presented using Yahoo’s UI. 

This is a great example of how Web 2.0 ’sharing’ can benefit developers and the ‘open’ movement.

If the sites being developed today can become service oriented and the code can be shared then the true symantec web can be relaized by the smallest staff of developers for non-profits and mom-and-pop-websites alike.