rvdavid: A Web Developer's Blog

A periodical blog of experiences from the angle of an autodidactic, paranoid and narcissistic web developer…

Posts Tagged ‘Web Development’

Project Chronus: a Zend Framework/Dojo/Doctrine Project Quietly Launched

May 10th, 2010

It’s been a while since my last entry and this is due the dedication of my free time, when not working on client’s projects, to a certain in-house project.

Last week, I’ve quietly launched project chronus. A project which provides multi site administration system geared for collaboration. Project Chronus makes it easy for our website content admin people at DevProducts to keep track of numerous website projects placed under their control.

Project Chronus is the first project I’ve built with Zend Framework 1.8 and above (as in utilising bootstrapping with Zend_Application) that felt natural. I’ve built several projects with Zend framework 1.5+, but not as comfortably as I did with my recent project.

While Project Chronus is a project to be used for our own internal purposes, it served as a live project with enough real requirements to be effectively used as a sandbox for future projects we choose to undertake and in addition, set (and put to the test) standards for how we do things.

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Posted in PHP Programming

Tags: Web Development Zend Framework

5 things I do to get myself back on focus

February 4th, 2010

Well it’s the last week of my half week holidays and I had a blast. I found myself going from missing work to not thinking about work at all. I know though, that once I got back here at the helm at DP HQ, I’ll be needing some time to get back into the swing of things.

Of course, this is not the first time I’ve taken time off, so I thought I’d warm up my blogging again and talk about what I do to get my mind into gear. So here are 5 things that I like to do to get myself back into focus:

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Posted in General

Tags: lists Web Development

Is it important that Views pull data from Models on their own?

January 22nd, 2010

In my recent post regarding the Model Service layer, there was one query about me mentioning that the View is configured by the Controller which goes against the grain of traditional MVC idea of “Views Should handle their own Models / data”.

There is nothing wrong with Views being able to handle their own models, I’m not suggesting that this shouldn’t be the case. You can also do it this way. That is the “traditional MVC” way of doing things and it works fine which is why I’m questioning why I’ve moved away from it. I’m just typing as I go so hopefully by the end of it, we’ll have something that makes a point.

I used to Really love this sh*t!

I used to trumpet the sh*t out of this because I had it figured out and it made me feel smart . I thought hey, I can adhere to the traditional MVC way of things and make the View select it’s own Model (or models) and gather information on it’s own – all I need is a View Helper. Further along came the question “What about the times when the Model needs to be used by the Controller?” well I got a plan for this too, then there’s the “What about when the Controller and View need access to the same model?” case. I needed to create a strategy to make sure that the Model isn’t instantiated twice in these cases.

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Posted in PHP Programming

Tags: mvc php Web Development Zend Framework

My Zend Framework Model Layer: Part Service, Part ORM

January 20th, 2010

The Model Layer of the MVC triad: I’ve been thinking this over for the past few months since using the Doctrine ORM and I think I’ve finally made some progress to get this issue licked. In the past, I’ve agonised over this issue and blogged about my progress. Some weeks or days later I tried to probe the community on what they would do, Now I think I’d have an idea on what I would do.

After some more thought and lots of research on the subject, I’ve come to a solid point where I actually have something to try out which seems semantic aside from the naming of the class (Service Class) – but this is derived from what some people are talking about in ZF circles starting from Matthew Weier O’Phinney who was coining it as the “Gateway to the Domain” from early on, then later changing it to “Service Class”.

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Posted in PHP Programming

Tags: mvc php service layer Web Development Zend Framework

Client Gets Screwed by Under skilled and disorganised Developers

January 16th, 2010

Last week I received a phone call of distress from one of our clients. The were asking for some advice regarding issues they were having with a Web Application that was developed for them by another company and was released into production the week before. Now I’m not going to name names, or even mention what Web Technology was used – this is not what this rant is about.

Introduction

The plea for help was pre-empted with a light-hearted exchange between the Client and I where the client jokingly blamed me for the predicament that they were currently in.

“You said late last year that you had a full schedule and that you were not taking on any new projects until February (resulting in them hiring these guys) [...] so it’s your fault!”

I know the Client very well and they are very reliant upon the technical consultants that they hire to provide direction and complete the project as they have no technical expertise themselves or technical staff internally. This Client needs to be taken good care of (of course, as do all clients) since they put total trust into the technical consultants that they hire and have no real input into the direction of the development aside from the business rules.

The problem is, with the exception of the Web Development company I work for, it seems as though they keep picking the wrong Web Development companies when they are not with us.

From what I hear, the web development companies they hire are full of hype and seem to be stepping into the projects without covering the usual bases. Now, for a company whose average project consists of Mission Critical Web Applications as opposed to your run of the mill Joomla CMS, Sugar CRMs or E-Commerce websites, this is very dangerous.

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