• 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 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 !!!

“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 :)

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.

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 !

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