Andy's Blog

Partial review of last year - php comeback?

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:19:10 +0200

In 2009 I did several php projects. The decision to use php was a pragmatic one - very cheap, available everywhere, easy to google for and I had a lot of experience with it in (its and ... mine) early years. I even used to teach it at SPHY.

So anyway, up till last year, thinking of php would always bring back memories of spaghetti-code (though I hasten to add, the worst spaghetti-like project i've had to work on was in Java/jsp and that was back in 2001/2002 - copy/paste was the emperor and reuse was an unknown word). But all those memories have since changed - php 5 can do OOP and apart from a few gotchas, it's not that much different to Java... and you do get instant productivity gains (due to save-reload workflow)

After doing a short review of the php web frameworks & libraries, I chose to use Kohana (ver.2) in my projects. Kohana has proven to be a very elegant and clean MVC implementation and its new version (ver.3) now implements HMVC (hierarchical MVC) which is awfully close to what component-based web frameworks are offering but with less magic and thus less complexity ( i'll need another post -or posts- to explain this further)

Of course, when you're back to the PHP land, it's worthwhile to take a look at some of the best (and most used) apps that are written with that, namely wordpress, drupal and joomla (FlatPress is also great if you can't afford a DB). I took a close look at the source code of wordpress and drupal and their architecture and found both straightforward - code is understandable, authoring plugins and extending default functionality is both easy and fun! And this makes you think... perhaps I can use any of those platforms as a base for my projects. Perhaps YOU should!

Anyway, i'll expand my thoughts in the following days. I'll close with screenshots of 3 greek blogs i was involved with this winter (onlybeauty.gr, ufoerotiseis.gr, grease.gr):

A new and wonderful Tapestry 5 blog

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 14:54:28 +0200

Igor Drobiazko (a Tapestry committer) has recently started blogging on Tapestry 5 and his entries are very interesting and informative... Take a look:

Having Fun. PS3's here

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:33:27 +0200

Well, that's just another kick-ass gift from Emi!

Here's what i'm currently playing:

Uncharted - Drake's Fortune Never heard of that, got it by accident, but GREAT!
Braid cool platform little indie game - had read the dev's blog (or was it a Gamasutra srticle) some months ago and wanted to try it ever since
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2
Killzone 2
GT5 Prologue

Anything else you'd suggest i should try?

Reading Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:11:43 +0200

Thanks to Amit Sharma (of Packt Publishing), I recently got a copy of Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation authored by Brett Porter and Maria Odea Ching.

The book has proven to be an interesting read so far (even for an advanced maven user), covering a lot of important (and sometimes little known) plugins. Its best practices chapter along with the real-life advices/tips that are found throughout the book are a must read. On the other hand, I would really have liked to see a chapter or appendix covering maven support in IDEs + I must admit don't have much of respect for Archiva (that's based on a few weeks interaction i had with it 3 years ago - perhaps things have improved?) which is covered in detail in the book, along with Continuum.

Anyway, expect a complete review soon.

del.icio.us links for 2009-11-09

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 12:04:56 +0200

kerkness's kohana-for-wordpress at master - GitHub

(tags: kohana php wordpress )

Streaming Schedule of ApacheCon Hadoop, HTTP Server, and Lucene Track

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 05:26:48 +0200

Starting in less than 24 hours and for the next 4 days there's ApacheCon. Don't miss the live streaming from http://streaming.linux-magazin.de/en/program-apachecon-us-2009.htm . Here's the schedule (times in UTC):

Wednesday, 04 November 2009: Hadoop Track

 17:00 Opening Plenary & State of the Feather
      William A. Rowe, Jr. & Jim Jagielski

 17:30 Apache Pioneer's Panel
      Moderated by Brian Behlendorf

 19:00 Introduction to Apache Hadoop
      Owen O'Malley

 19:30 2009 State of the Elephant
      Christophe Bisciglia

 21:30 Becoming a Pig Developer
      Alan Gates

 22:30 Apache Hadoop in the Cloud
      Tom White

 00:00 Practical HBase
      Michael Stack

 01:00 Apache Hive: SQL and Data warehousing on Apache Hadoop
      Ashish Thusoo

Thursday, 05 November 2009: HTTP Track

 17:00 Munging URLs with mod_rewrite
      Rich Bowen

 18:00 Hardening Enterprise Apache Installations Against Attacks
      Sander Temme

 19:30 Keynote: Standing Out in the Crowd
      Kirrily Robert

 22:00 Scalable Internet Architectures
      Theo Schlossnagle

 00:30 Recent Developments in SSL and Browsers
      Rick Andrews

 01:30 Lightning Talks!

Friday, 06 November 2009: Lucene Track

 17:00 Implementing an Information Retrieval Framework for an
      Organizational Repository, Sithu D Sudarsan

 18:00 Apache Mahout - Going from raw data to information
      Isabel Drost

 19:15 MIME Magic with Apache Tika
      Jukka Zitting

 20:15 Keynote: How Open Source Developers Can (Still!) Save The World
      Brian Behlendorf

 22:00 Building Intelligent Search Applications with the Lucene
      Ecosystem, Ted Dunning

 23:00 Realtime Search
      Jason Rutherglen

So, Apache friends, enjoy!

Maven and slow dependencies report

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 14:41:53 +0300

If the dependencies report takes too long to finish, it could be due to maven trying to determine (and generate a report of) which repository contains which artifact... and the network and/or repos being slow or unreachable.

In any case, here's how you can short-circuit that process:

mvn -Ddependency.locations.enabled=false site

del.icio.us links for 2009-09-28

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:23:48 +0300

Tornado Web Server

(tags: python webserver )
nginx

(tags: opensource http webserver )

Maven Presentation

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:45:01 +0200

On Feb 14 (yep, that was the Valentine's day), i did a Maven presentation for out local Java User Group, and it looks like it was very well received (which is great cause i was terribly nervous at the begining ).

Here are the contents (embedded from slideshare):

Using Maven 2

View more presentations from andyhot.

Java time @ 1234567890 via groovy console

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:17:56 +0200