crinem’s notes

Well :) I have no answer for this question :P because I didn’t try no one of the PHP clones…
I only searched in the web some informations about these PHP framework, and I found interesting articles and comments with which I can make some considerations.
As a first thing, I can say that RoR is surely different from these framework, not in conceptual terms but in implementative terms.
I’ve read an interesting post talking about difference between RoR and PHP for a java programmer that had never used either before. In this article he talks about the page centric development that usually is used with PHP (even if there is an article here about mature design of web applications that I suggest to read) against the MVC approach of RoR.
Then I read some developers comments here ( Rails Clones: Bloodsuckers or Useful Drones?) and I find them very useful. Substantially programmers are developing Rails’ clones in many scripting languages…What will be the best one :P ?
Well, then i found some links of PHP clones, I give you some of them:

• CakePHP
• Biscuit
• PHPonTrax

But why I am writing this post ? Because maybe, in a very (hopefully eh eh) close future (depending on work and study schedules) I’ll do an experiment with a friend. Substantially we want to develop the same application, one of us with RoR (this is me eh eh eh) and the other with PHP (maybe with Cake) and make confrontation between the two framework !!!
I hope to write soon a post about this !!!

I’m reading the book I’ve talked about in the last post. Even if I haven’t code neither a line, I find this book very interesting for the way in which is written.
Substantially it shows a “story” in which customers and developers interacts to produce an application. Developers choose an agile approach (look this link: agile manifesto) , so there are many of these interactions with customers; after the interactions book authors show us how to implement functionality to satisfy the customer (obviously with RoR).
This book presents contents in a very complete way, it goes more deeply in details differently from the various tutorials I’ve tried, even if for me will be a little difficult start writing code on RoR for two causes:

• I don’t know Ruby as I know PHP
• I have to get confidence with the MVC “style”, usually (and badly) I use to develop web applications merging business logic and presentation…

However I’ll do my best to learn !!!

This morning, after a long wait, the book about rails is finally arrived. I’m ready to read it after the various tutorial i tried. That one which I talked about the last time, “Four days on rails” was a good reading and I suggest it to all of you that want to dive into the rails world. I think that I’ll start to read this evening… I’ll make you know something about this book !

I’ve setup this wordpress plugin (spama karma) against spam, then I have allowed comments for all my posts !!! Hope that the plugin will work good :)

This morning, during my usual internet surfing after work, I’ve found an interesting resource about Ruby On Rails, a site called “Four Days on Rails”.
This is a very interesting resource, because this is one of the first that make no claims about this MVC:

“There have been many extravagant claims made about Rails
…
While this is impressive, “real” web developers know that this is smoke and mirrors. Real” applications aren”t as simple as that.
…
Rails is well documented on-line; in fact, possibly too well documented for beginners
…
What’s missing is a roadmap …” [text taken from the home page of “Four Days on Rails”].

You can download there a manual about Ruby on Rail. I’ll read it while waiting the book I’ve bought online :)

Wow ! finally I’ve found this book on E-bay. I bought it in an english shop, and I received it yesterday. I’m very happy for this :)
I’ve already started to read it, it seems funny but technical too. Substantially, the aim of this book is to make you learn good web design looking at bad examples. In the first pages of the book I’ve read this sentence :
“ web design isn’t about matters of taste, it’s about communicating and making money“. I complete agree with the author !

I’m developing some webservices in these days for a class assignment; to develop them I’m using PHP and the NUSOAP library.

Substantially, first I develop a PHP page that do all I need from the webservices: calculations, database connection etc.
I name variables in this page like the webservice parameters, so when I want to try my webservice I write a dummy client like this

require_once("nusoap/nusoap.php");
$webservice_URL = "http://...."; // webservice URL
$webservice_client = new soapclient($webservice_URL);
$webservice_error = $webservice_client->getError();
if ($webservice_error ) {
echo 'Constructor error in client: ' . $err . '';
}

$output=$webservice_client->call('method_name',
       array('param1' => 'value1',
        'param2' => 'value2' .....
        'paramn' => 'valuen'));
if ($webservice_client->fault) {
echo 'Fault in client: '
. $webservice_client->faultstring;
}
else print_r($output);


and I do a “cut & paste” of my code in the webservice method body; in this body I make some substitution:

• all echo “something” become return “something”
• all errors i want to manage become new soap_fault

However, you can find some good tutorials and explanations about NUSOAP and PHP here.

I know, I arrive a little late to talk about this :)
but today finally I had some time to try it in a correct manner !!! And I enjoyed in writing code in this way :)

But what is AJAX ? you can find an interesting article here, in which AJAX was defined even with some schemas. Then here you can find an article about GUI and AJAX.

To write a few lines of code, I have used two tutorial about AJAX and i “merge” them. The first tutorial it is here, and it give to me an idea about how AJAX works. Then the second, that is in here, from which I’ve used the xml response (instead of the textual response).

However, if you have time, you can try this tutorial from ONLAMP.
Always on ONLAMP you can find a tutorial about ruby on rails and AJAX. I’ve to try it !

As you can notice, comments are not available at this moment. This because I want to be sure that I’ll continue to write ( and the only manner to discover this is that pass a week or even a month :P ) and in the meanwhile i don’t want to be a victim of spammers…
In the case I’ll continue to write in this blog, then I will change graphic settings and think something about a solution to avoid spam ( maybe this wordpress plugin can help :P ).

In the meanwhile, if you want to say something to me, you can write to this mail address: crinem at libero.it

Bye for now