A couple of weeks ago Friday, I shared lessons from my life in technology with a team of upcoming software developers, Life in the Tech Lane, and I got a number of follow-up questions like the one below. On reading the questions, it spurred this post as the responses needed to be long form
I am excited to have been hosted on the Voices of the Elephant podcast by Cal Evans
This is an idea that has been growing in my mind, and I seem to finally have a handle on it. I have been a professional PHP web developer for the last 12 years, and have gone through the learning and transition cycles from learning a new language from Visual Basic 6 and MS Access to Java/JSP/Servlets to PHP, and developing in the language from direct database access using mysql_query through a custom developed database class into Zend Framework for 2 years with Doctrine 1 and 2 ORMs.
Not all software development projects are treated the same, some have access to modern tech Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Zend Server (http://www.zend.com/products/server/), Memcached, Gearman and all the other goodies I can only dream of. You have a box with LAMP, and you cannot install anything else.
Well if you are following this series, then by know you are aware that we have the validators setup, and we are almost ready to go. Well not quite so. I ran into an issue with proxies and class loaders which took a while to resolve, but what I did was:
It is just Day 2 of my experiences in the trenches, regular work, had kept me from this but I managed to get some time to keep digging. As a followup to my Doctrine 2 - Day 1 - Commentary from the Trenches. The models are up and configured, and the unit testing is setup following steps from Michelangelo van Dam’s presentation (http://www.slideshare.net/DragonBe/unit-testing-zend-framework-apps).
There is just too much going on so I thought I should put these thoughts down so that I do not lose my mind from the excitement and anticipation that comes from things moving very fast and innovation being spured at a pace which is mind boggling.
The new year is here so it is time to get cracking on infrastructure for the year’s development projects. There are a number of things we have been putting off, but now that a number of our client hosts support PHP 5.3, it is the right time to move up the stack for our ORM from Doctrine 1.2 to Doctrine 2 (which feels more like Hibernate) than anything else.
Just wanted to share a Joomla (1.7) tip on how we were able to integrate custom content from an external web application with custom PHP code via the Jumi component and plugin (http://bit.ly/wWIQmz).
Seems that I have a radical approach to the need for PHP interfacing as suggested by Lucas Smith (http://pooteeweet.org/blog/2008/) then a rebuttal by Herman Radtke (http://www.hermanradtke.com/blog/please-do-not-interface-the-php-world/) and finally Lucas Smith again (http://pooteeweet.org/blog/2014)