Entries Tagged 'development' ↓

The last few days I’ve been spending my time on creating a website with Zend Framework. A lot of it I liked but the Zend_db stuff is is a complicated piece of crap. I’ve worked with a lot of ORM’s and db api’s but the Zend_db stuff is really the most awfull I’ve had till now.

I really, really don’t want to work with it ever again and I regret that I chose ZF for this particular project just because of the db layer.

http://www.nicksays.co.uk/2010/03/fool-proof-magento-upgrades/

./pear upgrade --force magento-core/Mage_All_Latest

I saw that there are python bindings for libindicate. They’re called “python-indicate“.

There’s also a wiki about this new feature from Ubuntu. I thought about creating a plugin for weechat that uses this library. Especially because the notify-plugins is useless if you’re away and somebody mentions you on irc. Libindicate would be perfect for this. First have to find out how the behaviour of the applet would be.

[update]
I asked my question on the libindicate launchpad so I’m very curious about the answer(s).
[/update]

For php I use Zend Studio for Linux. We have a license at work for it and it is in my opinion the best editor for php. It’s relatively fast and you can use it to quickfix php over an ftp connection.

For Ruby I use netbeans. I would also like to use it for php but it doesn’t allow to quicly open a file via ftp/scp or whatever. And it can sometimes be sloooooowwww. I’ve  seen netbeans used on a Windows platform and there it is much faster.

When I right-click on a project in netbeans for the first time, it takes 5 seconds (not lying!) to render the popup-menu. Come onm take forever!

And because I was now developing with Python I decided to try a new editor. Something more hardcore and lighter. Something nerdy So ofcourse I only have two decent options: Vim & Emacs.

I already had try them with Ruby. But I found good Ruby (& Rails) support rather lacking by both of them. I believe that the python comminity is more hardcore and therefore are using more arcane editors And maybe because they aren’t afraid to hack away in another language than their own (lisp, vimscript).

I think I have been comparing the two editors for nearly two weeks now. I have spent hours and hours comparing, trying and browsing for blog posts about the two. At the end, I really didn’t know which one to choose. I really suck at deciding something So I made a little list of what I find to be strong points of each editor:

VIM:

• Better syntax highlighting/theming supprt (wombat ftw!!)
• Faster/smaller
• No weird handling of new buffers like with emacsclient
• No daemon like: emacs –daemon
• Better python integration
• Easier to make extensions
• Preview of docstrings when using omni completion

EMACS:

• Better python-mode
• No commandmode/normalmode
• Directory browser/editor
• Debugger (better integration with external tools)
• easier to begin
• Everyting is a buffer™

And now I have chosen to be the editor with which I am going to work is…… (drum roll please) …….:

Gedit!

No, it’s (g)Vim

And while writing this article I was looking for a WordPress/blog plugin for Vim and Emacs. At a glance it looked like the wordpress plugin for Emacs was a little bit better. So already I was doubting my decision… So it could be that I switch editor in the next few months But I’m first going to really use gvim to see if it fits with my workflow and is really useable for me.

As cherry on the pie, a nice screenshot of my gvim in action:

[update]
I’ve installed Netneans 6.8m2 and it feels a lot faster than 6.7 but python completion is as bad as in 6.7.
[/update]

[update2]
Found out about Vim’s netrw. So Emacs no longer got “Directory browser/editor” as a strong point.
[/update2]

I’ve ditched Ruby for my mpd project and started using Python. Not that I like python that much more but the Gstreamer library for python is much more complete. I really wanted gapless playback and the Ruby Gstreamer libray just doesn’t support that. If it does by the time you read this: please let me know

The new Pmpd project (looking for a better name) can be found on github. The hardest part so far is having to restructure the sources. Python is not a difficult language to master at all but I’m very picky on how everything fits together. My ruby project felt right on that part. But the python equivelant has some things I just don’t like enough up to now.

Recently phoogle broke because of some Google maps update. The original creators of Phoogle haven’t updated the code (yet). And when searching online for newer, fixed versions all that showed up were crappy hacked Phoogle files by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

So hereby I present to you: a fixed Phoogle files which is hacked decent.

I’m now developing a flexible car database for a couple of hours per week. Our first customer, a Beemer dealer, has a lot of fancy requests. Well, the hired-in Flash developer has these requests actually.

One of them is that they want to save a field in the database that contains a unique identification number for the secondhand cars they sell. But this number is set-up in a way that is unique to BMW’s. So actually, I didn’t want to add this column to the database, ’cause that will mess up my clean database tables.

But then I came up with the idea to add functionality to the website where users (dealers in this case) can add custom columns to their cars / profiles.

Instead of creating this functionality from scratch, I first wanted to know if there are any plugins that have this functionality already. I found these three:

1. acts_as_free_form
2. has-magic-columns
3. acts_as_customizable

I haven’t decided (yet) which is best.

And if you want to roll your own, here’s a nice article about choosing the best structure for dynamic fields.

I realize that the story above is written in truly horrible English. But I really didn’t have the energy to make something nice of it…

Very easy to do:

sudo aptitude install ant openjdk-6-jdk
cd ~/src
svn co http://svn.codehaus.org/jruby/trunk/jruby/
cd jruby
ant
bin/jruby --version

I think you all noticed my fabulous new sidebar widget: My projects

It shows all of my github projects. I directly turned it into a plugin for you to enjoy. You can download and read the documentation in the wordpress plugin directory.

This will be a short post: I like merb/datamapper better. It’s cleaner and faster.

But, I have to finish a project this week and merb/datamapper is not just stable yet, has less documentation, less plugins, less helpers and less features.

For example, the “has and belongs to many” association in datamapper isn’t fully implemented (look a the tests). There are some nice backend generators for Rails. And if you have to finish a project in too little time, it’s a quick decision.

I know, I could also make/fix this stuff for merb and datamapper myself and I would love to. But there just isn’t enough time! Aaarghhh…