Back in September 2008 I got contacted by Backbone Magazine to answer a couple of questions about, well, corporate websites and business usage of the web in general. I forgot all about it, until my friend Laura in Ottawa was reading it and saw my name. It's apparently in the current issue (which I haven't seen the print version of). It's on the site as "Fixing a stale web site", by Andrew Rideout. Below are the original questions and my answers. I've added a few notes in parentheses and added links to things.

I had lunch the other day with Aaron Gladders from 2Paths. He bumped into me when we were doing a final walkthrough of our new 1 Alexander offices, and recognized me from the picture here on my blog.

2Paths is a company filled with biologists turned programmers. They started out as a PHP shop, but since they provide full ongoing 24/7 support, hosting, and ongoing maintenance to most of their customers, they found that straight PHP code had a tendency to get very spaghetti-like. They switched to doing Java development and have been building expertise. Aaron confidently says that 2Paths is likely the best lightweight Java web application developer in Vancouver.

In fact, Aaron says they started to look at Ruby on Rails as it began to gain hype -- perhaps they would use it for prototyping. But they weren't happy with some aspects of it, although in favour of many of its lightweight aspects. So, they looked around for a Rails-like framework for Java. Ultimately, they rejected existing solutions for a number of architectural reasons and ended up creating their own. I'll leave it up to 2Paths to talk about its cool factor -- they'll be open sourcing it and releasing it to the world sometime real soon now (there might be a presentation at BarCamp Vancouver about it).