OpenShift Developer Spotlight: Morten Mathiasen

Welcome to the OpenShift Developer Spotlight where we get to know the members of the OpenShift community a little better and show off their skills as developers.

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• Name: Morten Mathiasen
• Hometown: Aarhus
• LinkedIn: Morten Mathiasen

What is your preferred Development Language?

PHP + JavaScript

What inspired you to be a developer?

My goal as a child was to build Lego as a job. Developing software is pretty close to building Lego. For several years I was developing huge enterprise systems using languages like Java and C++. But I felt that things could be more agile if more common standard frameworks were used. I searched for hosting opportunities and development frameworks. I ended up feeling comfortable with OpenShift and the usage of GIT as a deployment tool.

What programming language did you learn first?

First I learned C, Pascal, C++, Basic, C#, Java etc. Nowadays I am focusing on web and mobile programming languages like, JavaScript, PHP, ObjectiveC, C#, and Java among others.

What tools do you use the most often for development? (Operating system, IDE, etc)

Aptana is used for web development on OSX and windows. Xcode, Eclipse and VisualStudio is used for mobile programming. The important thing to me is that the development framework supports debugging by using breakpoints. That makes life a lot easier!
My development and testing server runs Fedora and when solution is tested to be OK then changes are released to OpenShift live system.

What is your favorite development stack? (OS/language/server/database)

I am focusing on getting an agile development framework and I needs a secure and stable live system that delivers high performance and scalability to my customers. An architecture with web client and a backend server fulfills general requirements for many administrative applications. My preferred development stack includes a development framework that makes it easy to program both client and backend server. At the moment I prefer using Aptana for web development.

Why did you choose OpenShift as your hosting platform?

The application is hosted at OpenShift.com because it provides you with GIT and SSH that makes it easy to maintain and scale the solution for many concurrent users.

What advantages does OpenShift give you that other hosting platforms don't?

OpenShift ensures that I have an up and running server 24x7 which is important to my customers. OpenShift also provides an environment that meets my requirement to get access to a server with a Linux prompt environment, which makes it possible to cron jobs etc. OpenShift also makes it possible to scale up my applications when more customers signs up. Such things are typical hard to get from standard web hosting.

What are the best features of OpenShift that some people might not know about?

The backend administration tool and web services are programmed in PHP with a MySQL database. These are quite common development platforms that many medium skilled developers can handle.

What are one or two things you think are missing from OpenShift that would make it better?

• Need to have: Higher performance. It seems that the performance is slower than simple (nearly free) host providers. The performance problem seems to be turn-around time of request-response rather than the actual execution time of PHP and database access to MySQL.
• Nice to have: It would be nice if you made a GIT web plugin that would make it easier to browse through all the committed changes.
  
  

Tell us more about your application currently hosted on openshift:

• Name: Workrecording
• What does it do? At the company 'IT Konsulenten' we have developed an cross platform mobile application. The idea is that the app provides companies with a tool that employees can use to register working hours and notes related to the work. Inside a web administration tool jobs, customers, tasks and users are maintained.
• What technologies were used to create your app? MySQL, PHP, JavaScript
• What motivated you to create this application and what problems does it solve? Customers have asked for the application. Making it a general solution running on a cloud backend makes it possible to scale the solution many customers.
• What new features do you have planned for this application and will they implement any new technologies within OpenShift? It is planned to standardize the Client-Server communication. The basic idea is to get a high performance JSON protocol between client and server. The communication must be based on a server running a scalable database with push functionality, e.g. MongoDB.
• If your application is Open Source, how can others contribute or get involved? At the moment the application is closed source. The standardized Client-Server protocol solution will become open source. People can contact me if someone wants to get involved in this project.