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Mar
11
More Symfony, thoughts on PHP

Just finished my 4th day of the Symfony tutorial. It does pack quite a bit into a one-hour (supposedly) lesson, and if you cut'n'paste the code from the web page, things move pretty quick. But it looks like a pretty well-designed project layout, with lots of small folders so that things are put in the right place, and lots of convention-over-configuration. I'll keep at this, get through the tutorial, and maybe I'll write that music management app I've been thinking about once I get a handle on this.

I actually touched some php today. As a long-time Perl bigot, I wasn't sure I'd like it, but if you think of it as crippled, purpose-built web perl, it seems okay. Perl 6 is still not here, so I'll live with what I have access to on the server (as I said yesterday).

Now for some Magento, then I have to prepare for a real-life interruption - a ski trip, just when I was generating some momentum with this coding stuff. I'll bring the MacBookPro, and we'll see how much bandwidth (and time) I get on the mountains (Fairmont, BC).

Categories: Software

Mar
10
PHP, Symfony, Magento

Welcome back to all of you who have missed me for the past 11 months :-)

I have done a few things - my house is now liveable (in the basement), and I have a GST # and a few clients. I am now working on a couple of proposed projects - I need to spend some time up front so that I have a demo to show them.

1) Magento - a free (to start with) e-commerce php package. Setting up at http://www.northcreek.ca/store, this will be a development web store. We'll see how far Magento can go.

2) Symfony - a PHP library that helps build web apps quickly and cleanly. I want to build a music management app for Onoway Baptist Church, where I am the worship leader, and possibly soon the webmaster. Symfony gives me a good starting point.

So why PHP? Well, I have a hosted server with GoDaddy (that you are reading this on), and they support PHP, not perl, java, ruby, or others. No root access. So I'll go as far as I can with this setup, then move to a java-supported server setup when required. In the meantime, I've installed the Entropy.ch php package from Marc Lyanage (www.entropy.ch) on my laptop, so that I can develop using php and mysql at home.

I will try to keep things updated - I'm currently on Day 3 of the Symfony trial. Lots of configuration headaches due to my laptop. However, with very little description of a model, I now have a database and a website that edits the database. Hooray for modern web frameworks, even in PHP! :-)

Categories: Software