Monthly Archives: January 2007

Symfony book released and codebase tagged 1.0 RC1

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Symfony, the PHP5 framework that I’ve firmly adopted at work for any new bespoke projects went to version 1.0 RC1 this week.

Symfony is great, not just because it allows developers like me to get on and build complex, easily maintainable apps but also because the documentation is superb.

When I picked it up 5 months ago it was on version 0.6 and already had:

To build on this already great work, today the printed book was released – which I’ve ordered. They’ve also gone one better and released the whole thing available to read online under the GFDL licence. I happen to think that this is a pretty shrewd move and hope that it will cement Symfony’s place as one of the top PHP frameworks out there along with Cake and the ZF.

If you’re a web developer and have not yet jumped into bed with a particular framework – whether self-rolled  or community led – then I would strongly urge you to try out the Symfony offering. It’s the dog’s danglies.

Related

Vending Machine supplier

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Just a quick plug for a project that we put live today: Caffeica. It’s something new for us as normally the build of something like this is a very simple affair and once it is built we’ll deal with the client now and again for updates. For Caffeica we’ll be marketing the site and using it to cut our teeth in the Search Engine Marketing arena; we have a versted interest in getting people to the site and them then converting.

Here’s some more info:

Caffeica supply hot drink machines - either as tabletop dispensers or larger floor standing units; for coffee vending they provide Espresso, in cup and bean-to-cup options. The range also encompasses snack, can and bottle vending plus many water cooler options. Caffeica also provide servicing options for all of the machines that they supply.

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DMOZ category

Lino is The Man

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Casey Cole, my energetic, overachieving and inspirational friend recently moved to Italy full-time with his wife Tessa and their little boy, Henry.

We’ve not seen the house (yet) as our twins were < 1 yr old when they got married so for the reasons obvious to anyone that has more than one newborn at the same time, going to their wedding – which was at their not-yet-rebuilt Italian house, was a non-starter.

Anyway, Casey’s finally got a blog; he’s been wanting one for a while but his web developer mates are lame. Needless to say the blog is already full of quality postings. I’ve not gone though the backlog yet but the newest one was pretty entertaining: Telecom woes

I shall also be keeping a close eye out for pictures of The Kitchen.

Symfony job going

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Sensio, Fabien Potencier’s company yesterday announced a great sounding job right up there in the ticks all the boxes category:

Whether you currently live in the US or in Poland, if you know symfony well enough, we’re interested. The positions are in Paris, France, and we are willing to do the necessary paperwork and look for accommodation for you. The job description is a mix between web development and project management. Prerequisites for working at Sensio’s are simple:

* You must be an experienced PHP developer (you should know what OOP, MVC, ORM, and unit testing mean and how to apply them)
* You must be able to manage a small web project (you should know a bit about XP programming, trac, svn, and scheduling)
* You must be able to handle the relationship with a client (not necessarily with a tie, but at least with a smile)
* You must have already developed an application with symfony (askeet doesn’t count – you must have made the askeet tutorial anyway)
* You must be willing to move to Paris, France (who wouldn’t?)
* You must be available full time and soon enough (this is a real job)

French is not compulsory, since our teams speak English and the projects we work on come from all over the world. Salary is attractive, working conditions are nice, the team is fantastic, projects are fun. Plus, this is a unique opportunity to work in Paris.

If you’re interested, send a email to Fabien at fabien.potencier [at] symfony-project [dot] com. Interesting profiles will be contacted by phone during the week.

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Symfony, the PHP web framework

Debugging Javascript in IE7

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Broken Javascript in IE *really* sucks as one gets really obscure error messages and alert(); becomes your only friend, or so I thought.

I’ve recently done quite a lot of javascript DOM work for a site including some AJAX stuff and whilst it was a pleasure to develop in Firefox using Firebug, I’m now getting “it doesn’t work” errors with IE 7 and I need something more. A bit of Googling comes up with a couple of useful links here and here which looked like good advice, so I followed it thus:

Fire up IE7

Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced: Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer) is ticked, untick it.

Restart IE.

Right click on the menu bar area and enable the Menu bar (mine was hidden anyway) then go to
View -> Script Debugger -> Open.

If you don’t get a pop-up asking you to choose a debugger (I didn’t) then you need to install the Microsoft script editor which comes with MS Office (weirdly).

Just to check, Windows-key and F should bring up a search, look for MSE7.exe if you don’t have it (I didn’t) put your office CD in and run setup. Under office tools -> HTML Tools -> Web scripting -> Web debugging, right click and select “Run from my computer”.

Restart IE.

View -> Script Debugger -> Open should now give you your pop-up, yay!

Now you can open your page in IE and make it break, when it does you shoudl get a “Do you want to debug” message. Yes we do so a press of ‘Yes’ gives us the same pop-up, selecting the Script editor allows us to do things other than just adding alerts() everywhere. For example we can pause the interpreter, step over each line, add watches and other normal debug things.

In conjunction with the View DOM option in the IE 7 developers toolbar IE almost doesn’t suck so much now.

Using the debugger doesn’t automatically fix your code, though.

Refererences:

http://erik.eae.net/archives/2005/07/04/21.49.50/
http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2006/01/howto_debug_jav.html

p.s. I only tried the other debugger option once, it didn’t look all that so I stopped using it.

Tis the time for lists

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It’s new years day 2007 and I’m sure I’m not the only person getting a few goals noted down for the coming year.

As a bit of a break from forward thinking, here’s a quick review of 2006.

Biggest happening

The combined selling of Exponetic, moving from London after 8 years, downshifting and the setting up of Siftware. Everything is going very well, too well if truth be known. I’m getting fed up of 15hr days, 7 days a week and the focus this year will be on profit rather than volume.

Book of the year

The Baroque Cycle trilogy by Neal Stephenson, specifically:

Music of the year

Anything by Bauhaus. After hearing some of their stuff on 6 Music I got hold of a few albums and was immediately hooked. I was lucky enough to see them live at The Forum in London too.

TV/Movie

Since getting rid of Sky+ I don’t ever watch TV and I’ve never been one for the cinema. I have however watched a few shows on my computer, 24 series 5 was excellent, Battlestar Galactica is easily the best Sci-Fi show ever and Cathie and I both enjoy watching The West Wing together; we’re onto the tail end of series 6 at the moment.

New years resolutions

  • Buy a camper van
  • Make my work time more profitable
  • Continue to do loads of interesting Javascript