08.10.06

Soa on Rails

Posted in Development at 10:32 am by Soabirw

Now that this deadline is out of the way I can start focusing on Ruby on Rails again. I have a blog mostly working with it. Just need to finalize the login scheme and polish up some features. Development time is just amazing with it. I got a complete WordPress replacement in a matter of days. And that’s with the learning curve and me redoing it several times. I wrote my own scaffold generator, so I just make the table and run a few commands and we have an entire MVC (Model-View-Controller) CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) backend. And not a completely ugly one either. I wrote my own so I could have very complex forms and such. It now takes me minutes to do what used to take hours in PHP.

Hopefully we’ll relaunch No-Homers on that platform in the next few weeks. Only thing really holding me back is the interface for the admin. I suck at interfaces. The frontend is looking good though, thanks to Template Monster. So if anybody has any grand ideas for a backend interface, don’t be shy.

07.25.06

Not Enough Boring

Posted in Development, General at 11:26 am by Soabirw

Been a while since I posted anything, to the relief of many I’m sure. Life went insane with all this moving stuff. Helped my folks do some moving the week after we moved into our new pad. Still a few rooms to finish putting together, but we had a productive three day weekend and got a good chunk knocked out. We even got all of our black-out drapes up. So worth the $300. Projector looks great now, even at high noon. Our computer room had French doors (or whatever), so they let in a ton of light and got that place pretty toasty. Not to mention the glare. So we have black-out drapes on that too. Doors are still usable, which is good because we have some BBQ potential in the backyard.

Other then that, the weekend was full of fun server and Rails stuff. Finally finishing off this last SoaTech client, so we can really focus on converting the entire biz to Rails. After our discoveries over the weekend, we are very excited about that.

06.14.06

Ruby

Posted in Development at 9:14 am by Soabirw

My Ruby book came yesterday. Much bigger then I expected it to be. The Ruby on Rails books is rather small, so I was thinking this would be similar. I guess it makes sense though. Rails is just a framework to aid the language, so can’t be too much you can talk about. I look forward to having time to be able to crack it open and get another great language under my belt. So I can join the masses and shout, “php is teh suxx0rz!”. And that is a big rant for another day.

I think I’ll be writing up my own blog sooner then I expected. This WordPress is OK, but already there are thing my fellow SGers and I are wanting that just aren’t here. Have been developing my own basic PHP framework, so it wont be much to get something up and running. Then I’ll work on a Ruby on Rails version as well as an AJAX heavy one.

06.09.06

Mommy, Wow! I’m a Big Boy Now!

Posted in Development at 3:56 pm by Soabirw

Despite being a programmer for such a long time, I still haven’t been able to get comfy with regular expressions. I know they are very powerful and can solve your validation woes lickity split (and that’s no shit), but good gravy that is some cryptic jarble. When trying to validation some international phone numbers, I.E. “+555.55555555555×555″, it was actually getting silly with how many various explosions and manual checks I was having to do. So I buckled down and managed to write this:

‘^[+]([0-9]{1,3})[.]([0-9]{1,12})([x]([0-9]{1,4}))?$’

No Google action or anything. That’s 90% from my keister, right there. I did read the first few pages of the O’Reily book though. Literally this means “First I expect the beginning of a line, followed by one + character, followed by 1 to 13 characters of 0-9, then followed by a dot, then followed by 1 to 12 chatacters of 0-9, then optionally a x followed by 1 to 4 characters of 0-9, then an end of the line.”

I can’t wait until PHP has a strtoregex() function just like strtotime(). So I can type that big sentence up there and it will magically make my regular expression. ;)

05.24.06

AJAX

Posted in Development at 9:14 am by Soabirw

My task for the next few weeks here at work is AJAX. Used five toolkits so far and some are pretty impressive and easy to use.

  • SAJAX - Not really impressed at all. Not easy enough for a n00b like me anyway.
  • Agent - I think this is what SAJAX is trying to be. Very easy, but gives no gui perks. Just makes your server communication cake.
  • Rialto - All about the sexy gui help. Just with commands you can build an entire interface. And with enough tweaking you may be able to change the appearance to fit your needs. But it is slow. Pages crank like crazy.
  • Scriptaculous - Fantastic URL. Impressive demos too, but I haven’t had time to really play with it.
  • Dojo - This is the one I am spending most time on. I think it fits my current project the best. It’s easy to use and provides a good balance between libraries and gui.

The Dojo book also has the best geek, nerd, and dork comparison I’ve seen:

Geeks, Nerds, and Dorks: A geek has a very focused knowledge of a subject (that guy that memorized the language of myst), a nerd is a master at many subjects (that girl you go to when you need homework help), and a dork is just plain socially inept (Napoleon Dynamite).

IDE of the Week

Posted in Development at 8:53 am by Soabirw

It’s not a secret that I am fickle when it comes to my editors. Let’s see if I can even remember them all. Notepad (I know, shouldn’t even count), EditPlus, Dreamweaver (not gui mode), Vim, Emacs, Quanta Plus, Kwrite, gEdit, Jedit, Eclipse w/Tru Studio, Eclipse w/ PHPEclipse, PHPEdit, and some others I probably didn’t spend much time on. Maybe I’ll quickly touch on my favorites.

  • EditPlus - Just a great text editor to replace notepad and do light work. Very fast.
  • Eclipse - Best cross platform editor. Not a lot of good PHP support yet though.
  • Tru Studio - Free version is decent. Pay version gives a lot of instant debugging and polish.
  • PHPEclipse - It colors you code fine, but beyond that it is pretty lack luster.
  • PHPEdit - My 2nd favorite as of last week. Has most of the features you would want and some unique ones I’ve never seen elsewhere. For example, you can toggle between HTML and PHP in a file that has both. When you cursor moves into PHP all the HTML fades to a light grey and visa versa. Making it very obvious what you are editing. Fine code completion and hints, but gets very sluggish when using code completion on medium sized or bigger projects.

Now for my most favoritist. Zend Studio. I’ve only had the joy of trying this recently because work paid for it. It’s pretty pricey, but you can see where that cost goes. This thing has every feature I’ve loved except for PHPEdits HTML/PHP toggle. But it doesn’t need it since code completion and hint works in both modes just fine with good color coding. Here are my favorite features:

  • Good project management.
  • Fast code completion, even for very large projects. And I mean shit fast.
  • Code folding. You can collapse everything from classes to comments with quick shortcuts.
  • On the fly debugging. If there is a parse error in the line you just typed, it will underline it. All debug errors are red lines on the right side of you screen for quick access.
  • Server side debugging. You can actually run your scripts through an intense debugger right from you browser. Both IE and Firefox and toolbars for this.
  • Complete server package. It will install PHP and Apache for you if you want to work right off your workstation.
  • Inspectors. Quickly updates a table of contents for all your files and objects. Makes for quick accesses.
  • SQL interface. Nice gui for database and table structures. Bottom of editor lets you run queries so you can test them straight from you code.

I’m sure there is more I’m forgetting or haven’t come across yet. I am running it at home as well. After it’s impressive performance I just couldn’t stand the sluggish PHPEdit.

Since I mentioned the complete server package I think I’ll make a better recommendation. I am running XAMPP on my Windows (normally I do Linux at work) workstation and I am very impressed. Very easy to setup. I prefer MySQL Query Browser to the interface they provide, but other then that it is working out great. If you need FTP and E-mail it provides those too. FileZilla for FTP and Mercury for E-mail. I don’t use either, so can’t tell you anything about them. I just needed Apache with PHP to work on my checkouts.

05.23.06

We Be the Maddest Back Yoable

Posted in Development at 6:30 pm by Soabirw

Site has been down for a few years now I guess. I kept wanting to re-write it myself so we can have all our rediculous and over the top features, but I just never had the time. Between full time jobs and two businesses it just doesn’t seem like an “anytime soon” project. So for the time being we settled on WordPress. So far I have been pretty impressed. This sort of thing has come along way in the past 2 years or so.

I’ll still do my own blog software since I like to use it to experiment. Make the usual PHP version to play with new OOP ideas, AJAX version to test a complete single page navigation, Ruby on Rails, etc. I am hoping to keep all versions up and functional so visitors and seemlessly switch between each version and get the same content. Then it can be up to you what version you want to stick with.

But for now, at least we have a functional site. I’ll probably look into making my own template soon too.