Thursday, February 12. 2009
 It's long overdue seeing as the new site has been up for about two months now, but better late then never!
Somewhere in March of last year, we heard we might be doing the site NU.nl for ilse media. Readers not local to the Netherlands might not know it, but nu.nl is almost a concept in the Netherlands. It's the news site here, millions of people rely on it for their news throughout the day. So not very surprising we were all very excited about doing this.
Continue reading "NU.nl; the back-end"
Tuesday, January 27. 2009
"That's right! I've got a framework that can render CRUD screens with just 1 line of code. It can render web pages using the MVC model with the greatest of ease, and no matter how bad you mess up the HTML in the templates and the CSS in your stylesheets, with our make-pretty technology your website will always look sleek. In fact, it will even adapt the lay-out on each request to suit the personal taste of your visitors, while still having the best performance of all frameworks you've ever worked with."
If you're looking for a 'click here to download' link please stop searching, because such a framework doesn't exist. Although this is probably obvious from the example above, I still regularly bump in to people that are very seriously looking for that one framework that's the best in every situation. I have even spoken with developers that had to use Zend Framework for every single project they did because their boss was told that this was the best framework around. Zend Framework is a nice framework that will probably suit your needs in a lot of occasions, but for some jobs another framework may be the better pick.
Continue reading "My framework is better than all other frameworks"
Wednesday, December 3. 2008
The first day of december started well: It meant the release of the new symfony 1.2.0 version. Aside from the additions and improvements in the code, this new branch of symfony also reinstates an old tradition in symfony: It comes paired with a huge amount of documentation in many forms. Let's have a look at what symfony 1.2 has to offer.
Continue reading "symfony 1.2: It's not just about code"
Tuesday, July 29. 2008
The official stable release of symfony 1.1 is now nearly a month old, and response so far has been fairly positive. This is not surprising, as this new version adds a lot of flexibility to the already flexible system that symfony offered. Let's have a look at symfony 1.1, and specifically to the points that I feel are especially exciting in this new release.
Continue reading "Symfony 1.1"
Sunday, July 27. 2008
Among the standard object oriented principles is favouring composition over inheritance, and there are plenty of design patterns that work along this line. However, one of the most useful day-to-day facets of the idea doesn't seem to get a lot of attention from PHP developers, namely dependency injection. The general idea is, that if your class depends on some other object, that object should be passed in rather than generated internally or retrieved via a global variable or singleton.
Continue reading "Dependency Injection and Zend Framework Controllers"
Thursday, July 24. 2008
Occasionally, I have a maintenance task for one of my programs: something has to be done in the background every so often.
From rsyncing content between servers to importing data received from external parties into my application.
Most of the products we make run on Linux servers, so I use cron to make scripts run every x amount of minutes/hours/days/etc.
With most of these small scripts I want the following:
- Locking (so if a script takes particularly long time, it won't be running twice concurrently)
- Logging (Never blindly trust the machine, or a human for that matter, to always do the right thing)
- Cleaning up aformentioned logs (because over time they can grow very fast)
Saturday, March 15. 2008
ATK contains lots of hidden gems. Most of them are hidden because they are undocumented or because they are only documented in the API docs (which nobody seems to read...). In the past few years we've tried to improve the documentation for ATK. We've created a Wiki with lots of how-to's, the "Pizza Guides", a demo application and improved the API documentation. However there are still some features of ATK nobody seems to know about.
In this second iteration of the " ATK's hidden gems" series we will look at a largely unknown feature of ATK's record actions.
Monday, February 11. 2008
If you develop an ATK application but do not have the luxury of a separate test-database, and can only test against actual databases, it is not safe to run testcases that actually add records to the database. Even though testcases can be built to clean-up testdata afterwards, this is not without risk. For instance, when a testcase breaks halfway through the code with a PHP parse error, any testdata that was already added will stay there. Besides the fact that this can break any future executions of your testcase, the testrecord stays in the live database and possibly break the live site.
This is where the atkMockDb kicks in  .
Tuesday, January 22. 2008
At Ibuildings we highly value the principle of 'using the right tool for the job'. Of course: our own business framework ATK and our CMS WDE get our special attention, but we don't want to close our eyes for other open source frameworks or content management systems that are out there. Each of them excel at their own special field of expertise and it's just that what makes them suitable for the job at hand (or not).
Continue reading "Flexiblity regarding development requests"
Tuesday, December 11. 2007
On a regular basis, Ibuildings employees give internal presentations or workshops to share knowledge or present something they are enthusiastic about. Yesterday evening I was able to give a presentation to quite a nice group of my colleagues about the symfony framework. The evening was split up in two parts.
The first part was approximately an hour, in which I presented a non-technical overview of what symfony is. In the second part, I gave a short theoretical introduction into symfony from a more technical standpoint, after which those present actually got to work with symfony a bit.
Continue reading "Symfony workshop"
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