BlueFire Data Solutions

So recently I posted about how symfony has made the move to officially support Doctrine as the default ORM in future releases of my favorite PHP framework.  A lot of questions were raised, mainly because even though Propel is still going to be supported by symfony, it looked like Propel was dead in the water with not much active development taking place.

Interestingly enough, when I happened to look on the Propel website, I noticed a Propel version 1.4 and that got me wondering.  After some hunting, it turns out a blast from symfony’s past is now heading the development of the project.  That’s right folks, Francois Zaninotto is now working on revamping Propel (see here (groups.google.com) for more details).

I’m glad to see that a good ORM is getting someone with a lot of good ideas leading the forefront.  I’m very interested in seeing what will be coming out of the gate with the revamped version 2.0.

Tags: propel, Symfony

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.

Tags: doctrine, propel, Symfony

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.

Tags: Symfony

I pledged – will you? =p

Tags: Download Day, Firefox, Mozilla

So at work, I’ve started moving things into the 21st century tech-wise – implementing a software bug/feature tracking system and working on installing a subversion server (even if I am the only programmer there, it’ll be a big help I think….).

Something else I’ve been looking into for a while is programming frameworks, specifically with PHP. I’ve already found a Javascript framework that works well for my various projects (for those interested, it’s JQuery). I’m still looking around to find the just right PHP framework. Recently I’ve been toying around with CakePHP, but if anyone reads this I’m wondering if you may have some suggestions – so there you go.

As an aside before I wrap things up, the main site has been completely revamped, with more work coming soon to get the site truly polished up. That polishing will also include true blog integration into the rest of the site, but more on that coming soon.

Tags: CakePHP, frameworks, JQuery, php, programming