Ibuildings - Ibuildings blogs

Wednesday, December 3. 2008

symfony 1.2: It's not just about code

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.

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Posted by Stefan Koopmanschap at 10:38 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: doctrine, documentation, framework, release, symfony

Tuesday, July 29. 2008

Symfony 1.1

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.

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Posted by Stefan Koopmanschap at 09:45 | Comments (8) | Trackback (1)

Defined tags for this entry: doctrine, forms, framework, propel, release, symfony

Sunday, July 27. 2008

Dependency Injection and Zend Framework Controllers

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.

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Posted by Ian Barber at 17:02 | Comments (7) | Trackback (1)

Defined tags for this entry: dependency injection, design patterns, framework, mvc, use at will, zend framework

Thursday, July 24. 2008

My little cron Bash framework (locking and logging)

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)

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Posted by Boy Baukema --> at 10:21 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: bash, framework, linux, locking, logging, maintenance, open source, scripting, shell

Saturday, March 15. 2008

ATK's hidden gems, part 2

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.

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Posted by Peter C. Verhage --> at 23:35 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: atk, development, documentation, framework, hidden gems, php

Monday, February 11. 2008

Using the atkMockDb

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

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Posted by Dennis Luitwieler --> at 11:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: atk, framework, mock, test, unittest

Tuesday, January 22. 2008

Flexiblity regarding development requests

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).

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Posted by Ruud Alberts --> at 11:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: cms, codeigniter, framework, open source, rapyd, wordpress

Tuesday, December 11. 2007

Symfony workshop

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.

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Posted by Stefan Koopmanschap --> at 13:33 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: framework, ibuildings, symfony, workshop

Thursday, November 1. 2007

ATK's hidden gems, part 1

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 my next few blogs, starting with this one, I will write about some of them.

Continue reading "ATK's hidden gems, part 1"

Posted by Peter C. Verhage --> at 16:31 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)