On Friday I had the privilege of presenting at the Melbourne Facebook Developer Garage.
I’ve uploaded the slides for my Introduction to Facebook Development talk. I had to leave early due to some client commitments, but the talks were excellent and I met some very interesting people working in the Facebook space.
There is also a Melbourne Facebook Developer Group - I am keen to get another event organised really soon.
My favourite new plugin for Ruby on Rails is backup_fu.
backup_fu makes managing Amazon S3 backups really simple.
I have been running my own Rake Task for MySQL Backup to Amazon S3, but I’ve switched my projects over to backup_fu instead because it has much better control over your backups and will even backup stored files.
I’ve also created a patch for backup_fu that allows you to specify the mysqldump options. It should get rolled into an upcoming release, but if you would like it sooner, just contact me at toby…@info-architects.net.
The unfortunate tragedy of my life is that I don’t get to develop in Ruby on Rails all the time. No, unfortunately for me, a large number of my clients need work done in PHP.
Which, as already indicated in several previous nuanced discussions, I hate.
I mean, really really HATE.
But that’s not the point of this post.
After being seriously burnt by the twin miseries of CakePHP’s poor documentation and desperately misguided attempt to mimic Rails I went looking for a new PHP MVC framework for a recent project.
Crucial requirements:
I really wanted something that was pure VC, leaving out the M.
Views, Controllers and Models can go to hell.
PHP’s complete lack of dynamicism (and yes, I know PHP 5 has a crack at it, but whatever) means any attempt at Hibernate or Rails-style ORM is doomed to failure. And after screaming at CakePHP every time a finder returns an array of nested hashes of arrays of hashes and you can never work out how to just iterate through the records I’ve gone back to ADODB. You run a query and are returned a Record Set. I know this just reveals how long I spent in the late 90s hacking ASP, but if any language was still living in the late 90s, it’s PHP. And it’s actually quite good at it.
Where was I?
Right. Clean View/Controller mechanism. No Models.
Enter CodeIgniter.
It’s incredibly simple, the only assumption it makes is that you may never need most of the stuff it includes, so everything is an option, and it has great documentation.
CodeIgniter: I Don’t Hate It.
If you really have to use PHP, it’s worth a look.