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Left on the Web v4.0.1

November 18, 2007

leftontheweb
I just deployed version 4.0.1 of Left on the Web to the server. It’s a minor update, a bugfix release. Just wanted to share some findings:
- Caching of Flickr and Ma.gnolia has been improved. I am using the sfFileCache class of symfony to do the caching, and I was not manually setting the lifetime of the cache (assuming a reasonable default value was set). But it seems there was no time out on the cache, it just kept on living. Thinking back, this actually makes sense: Let it live until the cache gets cleared if you don’t specify a lifetime. But my change has been now to specify a lifetime, so that you actually see some new photos and links pop up.
- To save a bit of bandwidth, I have changed the header image from a single header.php that streams from a directory, to a little css magic in the header. I’ve done this because the header.php could not be cached (else I would not get the wanted random header effect) which causes quite some bandwidth usage. With the css magic, I now inject a random image filename from the same directory into a css rule in the header of each page. This will allow each image to be cached by the browser without losing the random header.
There’s some bigger chances that I want to implement, but they will come some where in the near future.
Zend Platform JobQueue

November 17, 2007

jobqueue, php, zend, zend platform

I guess I don’t really have to explain what JobQueue does, as the name basically says it all: Using this, you can queue jobs that need to be performed. I usually use cronjobs for this, but that is especially useful for jobs that you know will need to be done. If you want to dynamically queue jobs, it’s getting more complicated: You’ll then have to have a cronjob that looks into a custom built queue (probably a database) to run certain tasks. Nice, but can be annoying, mostly because the whole queue and execution logic needs to be developed by you yourself.

In the case of Zend Platform’s JobQueue, all this is taken care of by Zend Platform. It even provides some nice classes to connect to the queue and add jobs to it, or even manage jobs. For a project I’m currently working on at work, we use this technology, and even though I’ve just been working with this for a very short while, I’m very impressed at the ease of use of this.

So why is it useful? Well, as I already mentioned, aside from simply planning recurring jobs at specific times, you can aso dynamically add jobs to the queue. This is especially useful if you need to do resource-intensive or time-consuming processing that you don’t want the user to wait for. You simply add the job of processing to the queue, and the user page can load with an acceptable speed. The job will do the processing (you define the script which does the processing). You need of course to take into account that depending on the length of the queue or the load on the server, processing can take a while, and not depend on the result of the processing in any scripts without ensuring that things can also work without the result.

The JobQueue is not a key selling point for the platform, but if you have Zend Platform available, then it’s well worth your time looking at using it if you need something like this.
Symfony Lounge: Second Life Symfony

November 11, 2007

second life, symfony

I present to you: The Symfony Lounge, a place to hang out for symfony enthousiasts, and also a place to get information on symfony for those that dont know it yet. In the future, we even want to start hosting presentations on symfony in our Symfony Lounge. So let me introduce to you, the Symfony Lounge:

The Symfony Lounge is located on the Free and Open Island , a special Second Life island dedicated to open source. Symfony is now represented there in between projects like Kubuntu and Debian. 🙂

On the ground floor, panels give information about symfony. There is also “the book” which links to, well, the symfony book. And you can get the special symfony t-shirt for free.

Upstairs, we have a special lounge area, where you can sit and relax together with other enthousiasts (or alone of course, if no one else is there). Laidback music plays in the background to be able to relax easily.

You can easily find the Symfony Lounge by searching inside Second Life for “symfony”. You can then easily teleport to the lounge and hang out with all the other cool guys. 😉
First workday, a long day

November 1, 2007

ibuildings, jobs, personal

I only got back home at about 8PM, but that was because I had a car on my way back and was somehow able to avoid all traffic jams. I must’ve had some kind of lucky trip today. Let’s hope this continues for the coming two weeks or so that I will actually be working in Vlissingen before starting to work from home.

My first impression is that Ibuildings is a pretty cool company to work for. Aside from a fantastic team of developers, they have some good ideas and are well-organized. Even though in my previous job the lack of organization was one of the challenges I really liked, it’s pretty nice to again work for a company where things are already arranged in a good manner.

Today, I’ve already been playing a bit (or mostly reading myself into) the ATK framework that Ibuildings has been developing. At least until Ibuildings is able to get some symfony work in, I’ll be assigned to a project where they use ATK and so I’ll need to know it. This may result in some nice posts comparing ATK with symfony, which I may write for this weblog or for the Ibuildings weblog (or both of course). We’ll see.

For now, I think I’ve made the right decision to make this move. Time will tell if I still feel the same way in a few weeks or months 😉
Creating a tag cloud in Symfony

October 28, 2007

symfony, tags
As you can see, I’ve created a tag cloud implementation here on my website. For this, I actually started writing a plugin, and I’m actually still working with that one here. But since the functionality was already implemented in another plugin as well, after a short discussion it was decided that my more limited implementation (just the tag cloud) would be moved to the snippets part of the symfony website as a helper.

So now, my tag cloud is available as a helper, here . Feel free to use it if you want, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s a simple call to the helper class in your template:
```
use_helper('Tagcloud');
TagcloudHelper::showCloud($tags);
```
```
 
```
Where $tags is an array with a predetermined format, being tagname => weight, such as this:
```
array('tag1' => 10, 'tag2' => 15, 'tag3' => 4); 
```
```
 
```
A simple stylesheet then determines the size of the various steps in the cloud. It’s easy, and it works 😉
Welcome to the new Left on the Web

October 27, 2007

leftontheweb, symfony

It’s not that Textpattern is bad or anything, but it just doesn’t use the coding structure that I like and am used to, and so adapting it to my wishes was a bit hard. And since finding out about symfony, the problem maintaining software is gone, since at least in my experience maintaining a symfony project is simple (at least for applications like this site 😉 )

I’ve made some changes to the site as well. I’ve implemented Flickr integration using the Phlickr library (with my own custom caching… which was a bit hard to get worked into the site… I might write another post on this topic somewhere in the future) and am now also using Ma.gnolia for link management, you can see my 5 most recent links on the homepage and a slightly bigger archive in the links section of this site. It’s currently used as a sort of linkdump, but the links page might end up becoming a complete archive. I’m not sure yet about this.

So yeah, there already is a bit of doubt about the site now. I’ve been changing quite a bit of stuff and that usually means I have 100’s more ideas. But for now, I wanted to deploy this version of the site because I feel what I have here is stable enough for that. There might be some future changes/extensions though, I’m just getting started! 😉
Mijn eerste project

October 4, 2007

askeet, php, symfony, tutorial

In a terrible spur of symfony community productivity, I just also finished the dutch translation of the My First Project tutorial for symfony. For people looking to get introduced to symfony, this is probably the best starting point. After that, Askeet will get you more in-depth into the framework, but the one-hour tutorial is the best place to get introduced. I hope that by translating this tutorial, dutch developers will have an easier time getting to know the symfony basics.
symfony-framework.nl launched

October 4, 2007

netherlands, php, symfony

Ever since I came in touch with the symfony framework I’ve been wildly enthousiastic about it. I’ve been preaching symfony since I got to know it. I’ve started translating the documentation to dutch, and really want to promote it in the Netherlands.

To support that effort, I’ve just launched the first beta of Symfony-framework.nl, a website to promote symfony towards developers and management alike. It’s only the first version, but I want this to grow. Eventually, I might even want to make this more into a local community than just an informational site.

On this site I’ve implemented the first (very rough) version of the sfFeedAggregator plugin that I’m working on. I am aware that sfFeed2 does do some kind of aggregation, but it doesn’t save the aggregated data anywhere. sfFeedAggregatorPlugin is using a database (using Propel at the moment) to save the aggregated data, so that an archive of data is built. I really need to refine the plugin before even releasing a public version, there’s still even some design decisions to make before actually doing anything. For now, you can at least view it on symfony-framework.nl
Changing jobs

September 30, 2007

ibuildings, jobs, personal, php

Ivo Jansch from Ibuildings and I have had contact over the years, and I think he mentioned a few times over those years already that he was interested in getting me aboard at Ibuildings. Every time I said no, mainly because the travel time to Vlissingen or Sittard is way too long.

My response to this post prompted Ivo to try again. I received an e-mail offering me to work on the Zend Professional Services, and combine this with my PHP love of my life: Symfony. I would be able to combine my symfony work with a very cool job as Zend Professional Services consultant! Now, how cool does that sound?

But, the travel time was still an objection for me. Luckily, Ivo had a solution this time: I would be able to work from home. Now, you can’t offer less travel time than that!

Over the past weeks, Ivo, Tom and Joni from Ibuildings and myself had two very interesting talks, and we decided we could agree on everything. And so, starting from November 1st I will be joining the ranks of Ibuildings.

This does mean I will be saying goodbye to Dutch Open Projects, a company where I’ve worked for a year with lots of fun and great achievements, such as the recent SymfonyCamp event. It’s sad to say goodbye, but I’m looking forward to something very nice. A great new challenge for me!
Symfony and PHP 5.2.4 may be a nono

September 24, 2007

php, symfony

Last week, I automatically updated my PHP installation to the latest version dotdeb was offering me (which usually poses no problems). However, this time around I ended up with two problems:

* Most of my models started throwing errors: Error populating ”x” object [wrapped: Unable to convert value at column ”x” to timestamp: 0000-00-00] (or 0000-00-00 00:00:00)
* My PHP CLI broke. No more pear, no more symfony cli.

The first problem has been solved now, luckily, by following the instructions in this article (and extending them a bit, see the comments to the article). Since Creole isn’t developed actively anymore, bugfixes like this will not be implemented into a new version. So you’ll have to fix it yourself.

Now onto tracing the second problem: Why my CLI was killed.

Update: The problem for my CLI was the fact that I had the Suhosin patch installed. Not sure why exactly this became a problem (as I’ve always had that installed in the past without any problems) but I’m just glad I can now continue working again.