Carl and Richard talk to Grant Skinner about Pirates Love Daisies, an HTML 5 game. The game runs on all of the HTML 5 browsers including IE 9 Beta. The conversation also digs into Easel JS, an open-source library that Grant helped create to make Pirates, simplifying the animation process on HTML 5 canvas.
InfoWorld has put together a review of some of the top PHP frameworks out there and have shared their results in terms of capability, ease of development, documentation and ease of installation (and overall score, of course).
You can arm yourself with one of the PHP-based Web development frameworks covered in this article. In the following pages, I’ll look closely at the Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, and Symfony. I’ll also give quick overviews of Qcodo, Lithium, Seagull, and Yii. All are open source frameworks, and all implement to one degree or another the MVC (model view controller) architecture pattern. In addition, all purport to help you build a more scalable and more easily maintainable Web application than you could otherwise create from scratch and, most importantly, do so in less time.
The introduce each of the frameworks at a pretty high level and start with their “Test Center Scorecard” showing their overall ratings of each of the four they tested. They link to a few other articles that talk more about the features of each in-depth and give an “at a glance look” as well. The list shows the minimum PHP version required, licensing, level of documentation currently provided and some of the general pros and cons.
On PHPClasses.org today they’ve posted their latest “Lately in PHP” podcast covering topics like expectations for PHP in 2011, Chrome OS and bug fix releases.
On episode 8 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert review the most important happenings of the PHP world in 2010 and what they expect for 2011. They also comment on the latest PHP bug fix releases and discuss why Chrome OS matters to PHP developers and Web application developers in general.
You can either listen to the episode via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly. The full episode is also transcribed in the post.
The day has finally arrived for the CodeIgniter fans out there – EllisLab has officially released CodeIgniter 2.0.0 in two versions – the Core and Reactor branches.
Today EllisLab and the CodeIgniter Reactor Engineers are proud to announce the first official release of CodeIgniter 2.0.0, which is being released in two flavors.
The “Core” version will be the branch that EllisLab uses for their internal applications and will be a bit slower moving. The “Reactor” branch, however, is more community-powered and headed up by a set of Engineers that will guide the framework and work to make it its best. Also mentioned as new in the post are the upcoming ability for users to contribute directly to the user guide, the creation of a standardized Authentication library and a more object-like model setup. If you’re interested in the Reactor branch and want to try it out or contribute, head over to the bitbucket account for the project.
In his latest post Daniel Cousineau talks about a good architecture decision (involving the Zend Framework) that allowed his company to stop on a dime and shift CDNs.
Only a few hours before our event and our CDN was failing probably 80% of the SSL handshakes for our requests to publish files. There is no need to name names as it was a difficult and obscure bug to diagnose in an extremely short amount of time. We needed to get it working, our CDN provider wasn’t going to be able to resolve the problem in the extremely short timeframe we required, so the decision was clear: we needed to switch providers for the new content.
Normally such a switch would take quite a while (2 weeks by his estimate) but because of their use of a Zend Framework-based setup and the API libraries that they’d written for it, the switch over was as easy as creating a new FileStore abstraction for the new CDN and changing some configuration settings. Thanks to the implementation of the Adapter pattern, his company was able to make a big change in a matter of minutes, saving them and their content.
So let this be a lesson to us all. Abstraction and design patterns sometimes feel like an “enterprisey overcomplication” but they aren’t there for everyday needs. [...] So suck it up, use them, and thank yourself when you find yourself in such a situation.
In a new post to his blog today Cal Evans mentions a new API wrapper he’s developed to work with the Klout website (a site showing your “clout” on twitter).
In a previous tweet about playing with Klout and Twitter I talked about a project I am working on that mines Klout for interesting people. (Well, interesting to me) The main body of code remains procedural because…well because it works and it’s not something I’m going to share so why bother cleaning it up. However parts of it may be useful to me in other projects. So I abstracted the Klout API into a class and have posted it for anyone who wants to use it.
His Klout wrapper for PHP (a github project) is largely procedural but gives you a good idea of how to talk to their API. Cal mentions some other things he’s wanting to do with the script, but notes that it’s ready for use now without any other changes. You can find out more about Klout on their website.
Maarten Balliauw has posted a new announcement to his blog today – a new contest that Microsoft is hosting surrounding building PHP applications on the Azure platform.
The PHP on Azure Contest is a coding competition run by the PHP Benelux User Group supported by Microsoft. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s Cloud platform with tools and support for PHP. Participate to win a ticket, airfare and hotel to visit MIX2012 in Las Vegas, a Windows Phone 7 or other great prizes! The contest runs from February 1st 2011 to May 15th 2011.
Participants will build their application, blog about the progress and talk about what they think of the Azure platform as they go. You must enter before February 28th and have the application completed by May 15th – the winners will be announced at this year’s Dutch PHP Conference. Other prizes include an Samsung Omnia 7 (Windows phone), a Microsoft Kinect sensor for Xbox 360 and another Samsung Omnia 7 for the top blogger participant.
Rob Allen has happily announced that he will be updating his popular “Zend Framework in Action” book for the release of the Zend Framework version 2 in the upcoming months.
I’m delighted to be able to announce that Ryan Mauger and myself have agreed with Manning to write a new book on Zend Framework 2.0. to be called Zend Framework 2 in Action! It’s very early days, so we have planned the Table of Contents, but have very little manuscript. The current plan is to cover the major components of Zend Framework 2 in the context of a long running application that we will start in chapter 2 and then build upon as we go through each chapter.
The book will cover topics like creating Zend Framework applications, bootstrapping, modules, Doctrine 2 integration, caching, making and consuming web services and migrating your application up from the world of Zend Framework version 1.x.
Latest PEAR Releases:
On the Stubbles blog there’s a recent post that talks about a feature they introduced into the framework – annotations – with high hopes it would give them more flexibility in how things worked. As Frank Keline says, though, “it’s not such a good idea at all”.
The most simplest reason for this is the idea that annotations are markup. They mark (or, to keep the notion, annotate) code as being special or to be treated in some special kind of way, depending on the scenario where the code is used in. [...] From a design point of view this makes it clear why annotations should not contain logic. If annotations contain parts of such logic, it becomes splitted and possibly cluttered throughout different classes.
He goes on to talk about a second reason why he doesn’t think they should be considered first-class in an application – it doesn’t promote code reuse. For example, if you define them on a method, there’s no way to use that method without them. He puts this into the perspective of the Stubbles framework that currently uses them and how he’s changed the logic to live in special classes instead. He considers other changes like places annotations can be used and having different annotation classes.
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