BlueFire Data Solutions

Well, as posted yesterday on the symfony blog Doctrine will now be the defacto standard for symfony’s ORM. To be honest, I’m not surprised at all with this move – it makes sense seeing that the Doctrine team are on board at Sensio. Sensio Labs was looking for something that fit with their overall strategy from what I’ve read on the forums and on the blog, so by hiring the Doctrine team they can now help shape the ORM to work well with the rest of the framework.

Not to worry Propel fans – Propel is still able to be used, it’ll just take a bit more configuring on the developer’s part. The thing I’m concerned about is what’s going to happen with all those plugins that are Propel only? I have a feeling that Propel will eventually be phased out a little at a time as Doctrine begins to overtake it’s capabilities.

Looks like I’ll be hitting the books again….

Sensio Labs has also gone in the book publishing business by the way, with the standard books that were already available from Lulu.com now for sale at other book sites (Amazon.com) and the new Doctrine documentation both on the doctrine site and available in dead tree format.

I’m noticing that quite a few folks are posting about how MySQL is going to die a slow and painful death now that Sun has been purchased by Oracle.  As I commented on one site – I have to politely disagree.  The MySQL franchise may very well go away or be rebranded (which I think would be a dumb move on Oracle’s part, given the large community, and significant market share that MySQL has), but the code itself won’t be able to be locked away, at least in the most current form.

Already there are two main forks of the MySQL server:

• Drizzle – which is focused on cloud computing and web based applications
• MariaDB – which is the MySQL server code upgraded with the Maria storage engine, headed by Monty.

Now having forks can cause significant rifts within any Open Source project’s community, but on the bright side no matter what happens with Oracle, the MySQL community does have alternatives that are in some way compatible.  The same goes for many of the other projects that Sun has worked on and has been open-sourcing, most likely in preparation of being bought out.

I’m cautiously optimistic that Oracle won’t do anything too rash to the Sun/primary MySQL iteration and will work work to strengthening the ties to the MySQL community.

My apologies for being away – things have been rather hectic.

Anyway, today marks a new evolution to the site. I’ve cleaned up the site and now have set up the capability to show code, which has been one of the things keeping me from posting. Now that that is set up, I’ll be catching up on all the partial posts I’ve been saving in draft and releasing them next week. I’ll be starting with some MySQL posts and then coving some stuff with Symfony.

So today marked the culimnation of my first webinar production experience.  Over a week of preping off and on for a 45 minute conference (of which my part was about 15 mintues) sure made for a fun time.  I haven’t listened to the recording yet, however I think it went well overall.  Now if only there had been a little more participant feedback along with a couple of practice runs, I think it would have been near perfect, as far as presentations go.

Anywho, I’ll take today’s experience to heart when I start making some podcasts for the site ^^v

So I’ve been playing around with a few new recommended programs I’ve found through lifehacker (two of my current favorites are RocketDock and Emerge Desktop ), but I hadn’t given Dropbox a shot until this morning, and boy I wish I had of started using it sooner.

You see, DropBox is a cross-OS app (it works on Mac, Windows, and even Linux) that allows for file synching with a web-based storage host.  Currently you can only sign up for the 2GB free account, but there will soon be options for subscribing to larger storage amounts.  When you install the app and create your account, Dropbox integrates into your computer’s file system, which keeps synched up with the web-hosting as long as there is a network connection.  Whenever a change is made to a file, any other PC connected to that file will be alerted to the update.  What’s even more fun, you can share files with a development team or family members, for example.  Think of this as a very simplified version of SVN, with some basic change control.

Anywho, give it a shot and see what you think.  I know I won’t be using my USB sticks as much as I used to lol.

Just wanted to make a quick post about some recent work I’ve been doing with the end goal being my first plugin for symfony.  A customer recently requested an event calendar for their site, so I figured what better way to build one that with symfony?  Currently, the calendar has a month view.  I’m working now on integrating the events into the calendar.  Once that has been accomplished, I’ll release the first beta.

My ultimate goal for the plugin is to have a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly views with events viewed based off of user security level (which I am using the sfGuardPlugin for user security).  I have been working off and on for the last week or so to get the calendar into shape.

Once I get the event system integrated, I’ll post some pics.

In other news, I’ve been working on various tutorials that I really need to finish up.  I’ll try to have one out on symfony AJAX integrations soon.

Had the roughest time getting this one going – so therefore I’m posting just in case anyone else gets stuck.

Today, I started adding user security to the training database I’ve been developing in Symfony 1.1.  One of the great things about a strong framework like Symfony is the ability to create/distribute plugins to increase the core framework’s functionality.  A very popular plugin, that I decided to use for my project, is sfGuardPlugin.  This plugin handles security with groups and a bunch of other features that I haven’t played with yet.

There’s a real good instruction set for installation/configuration with the plugin.  However, one thing not mentioned in the instructions is the fact that you have to update your schema.xml file.  Otherwise, propel will throw this nice error:

No package found for database “propel” in schema.xml.  The propel.packageObjectModel property requires the package attribute to be set for each database.

So you’ll need to update your schema file from this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<database name=”propel” defaultIdMethod=”native” noxsd=”true”>

to this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<database name=”propel” defaultIdMethod=”native” noxsd=”true” package=”lib.model”>

The reason why is due to when a plugin has a schema of it’s own.  Symfony/Propel will attempt to merge the plugin schema with your application schema.  Your application schema though is not initially setup to handle this kind of merger.  Adding that one variable should take care of that!

Edit:  I originally had the change to be:

package=”model”

This was incorrect and will result in your forms and models being stored in the primay folder for your symfony project – which will result in you wondering what the hell happened (as has been my problem for the last two days =S).

Update

So, have you been having the interesting problem of your schema not updating your schema.sql file, like I have?  Well, I found out why just now.  Due to the added line in your schema.xml file, a lib.model.schema.sql file is created.  When I deleted the schema.sql file and renamed the lib.model.schema.sql to schema.sql, the database updated properly.

So at work I have been developing my symfony skills by rebuilding some of the database systems I’ve worked on in the past (first up:  update the Training Database….).  I know that with symfony 1.2, javascript will be uncoupled from the framework to allow for each developer to work with their favorite javascript framework (jQuery here =p) instead of being forced into Prototype/script.aculo.us helpers.

I’m excited to see what javascript development this will bring in with seperate plugins for each of the major javascript frameworks – with this making the symfony project even stronger than before.

What does this all mean for BlueFire?  Well, for starters I’m changing direction with the example software for the site and working with symfony as the primary framework for my projects.  Look out for some samples up in the coming weeks =D

Seeing that there’s been interest with Magento, I figured I would write up my experiences since the last time I published about it.

First off, Magento does a fairly good job about documenting the basics about the program.  As I found out last time, it will take a bit of digging to get into super-specific problems – mine just happened to be a host issue that had to be worked around.

So basically, to access the administration side of the system, you need to go to the root directory of where you placed Magento and add /admin to the end of the address.  In my case, I actually created a store folder to keep it separate from the rest of the website so the address would look similar to:  http://somesite.com/store/admin.

Now during the installation process, you created an administrator account.  Using that will get you access to the backend – which happens to be a nice sales dashboard (one of the features that really sold me on Magento is the reporting capabilities build in, not sure if other OSS e-commerce solutions do something similar.  Feel free to post a comment and let me know what’s up with the other solutions.  Heck, if you have a good review of any of them, send it to me too =p).

One of my big quips about Magento at this point is that even with my broadband connection, Magento seems to take it’s time loading initially, which I sincerely hope they work on in future releases.  Also at first brush, it seems a bit complex to build addon modules for Magento, which I have also seen comments about elsewhere when reading reviews about php|architect’s Magento guide.

I do like how the menu is organized, with the ability to create promotions for a particular date range, newsletter creation, and the ability to create personalized themes for stores (haven’t worked on creating one yet, but I do like that they give the option).

Anywho, I’ll keep playing around with Magento (when I’m not delving into symfony =p) and see what else I can come up with.

So I’ve spent the better part of a week and a half/two weeks working on getting up to speed on Symfony, the PHP framework I finally settled down to using.  If you haven’t heard about it, I strongly suggest you check it out.  It’s a very user-friendly framework, with the ability to build on the base code and extremely easy to get into.

Symfony Project

There is some excellent documentation to read – including an open sourced copy of the printed manual, which is updated with the latest and greatest data about each version (currently running at 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2).

I decided to start running through the Askeet tutorial – which is currently just for version 1.0, but stubborn as I am, I’ve been working with the latest version of 1.1, with the intent of moving to 1.2 when it becomes fully stable.  If you are up to the challenge yourself, feel free to drop a line if you have any questions, or check out the community forums – you’ll see me up there, mainly in the Askeet forum atm (DBA_Alex, just fyi =p ).

I have gotten up to day 11, which is where I’ll be picking back up tomorrow.  I’m truly looking forward to when the project team finally updates the askeet tutorial for the other symfony versions.

Anywho, tonight I’m getting back to work on updating the blog’s design to match the rest of the site – something I hope to complete before the week is out.  Once I finish that, I’ll be pushing out a few tutorials that I’ve held onto which I’ve been polishing up – one on Pentaho report creation, and another on using the php sparkline program.