Floss weekly hosted by Randal Schwartz and Jono Bacon is kicking up some great shows. This week’s show is an interview with Mr. Linux - Linus Torvalds. As Jono Bacon said ‘…opinionated without being an ass..’. Not a deep insightful discussion on Linux, but a GREAT discussion with a leading software developer and some of what makes him who he is. A must listen to for anyone interested in IT.
Monday, September 28, 2009
WOW – Twit.TV/Floss Weekly with Linus Torvalds
Floss weekly hosted by Randal Schwartz and Jono Bacon is kicking up some great shows. This week’s show is an interview with Mr. Linux - Linus Torvalds. As Jono Bacon said ‘…opinionated without being an ass..’. Not a deep insightful discussion on Linux, but a GREAT discussion with a leading software developer and some of what makes him who he is. A must listen to for anyone interested in IT.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Alan Turing - hero
Thank you John Graham-Cumming for bringing Alan Turing's story to light and petitioning the government to do the right thing!Friday, September 25, 2009
Kent Beck on FLOSS Weekly
For those of you who don’t know who Kent Beck is, well its time to learn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck. Basically he’s one of the founding fathers of the Agile movement and the person behind Extreme Programming (XP) and all that goes with it…a real IT hero. Kent was recently featured on FLOSS Weekly a great podcast about the open source community: http://www.twit.tv/floss87. This is a must listen to show, topics range from his view on Agile, Test Driven Development (TDD) and open source…all interesting and controversial points. What really caught my attention and reenergized me was his comments about a programmers need to take responsibility and to be accountable – plain and simple, something that every developer should reflect about in regards their dealings with others. His focus was more on the soft skill arena (psychology) and how it plays into the maturing of a programmer…
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers
Part 6 – Wrapping up
I did not cover all the layers (not even thinking about down to the linux kernel) and did not go greatly in depth into any one of them…I just wanted to provide an overview of the layers I encountered/put-in-place in the development of a prototype that may someday become the next open source project management tool. My overall feeling is that frameworks FORCE you to code in a standard way providing FREEDOM/FLEXIBILITY to focus on the product being delivered and those corners of the code where 80% of the complexity is (which sometimes needs to be handled outside of the various framework/layers). I w as happily surprised overall with my ability to decouple and with the reduced coding required to accomplish what it is I desired to do…
I did not cover all the layers (not even thinking about down to the linux kernel) and did not go greatly in depth into any one of them…I just wanted to provide an overview of the layers I encountered/put-in-place in the development of a prototype that may someday become the next open source project management tool. My overall feeling is that frameworks FORCE you to code in a standard way providing FREEDOM/FLEXIBILITY to focus on the product being delivered and those corners of the code where 80% of the complexity is (which sometimes needs to be handled outside of the various framework/layers). I w as happily surprised overall with my ability to decouple and with the reduced coding required to accomplish what it is I desired to do…
Monday, September 21, 2009
Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers
Part 5 – ORM
What is it? I don’t think there’s any definitive answer, but basically ORM (Object Relational Mapping) abstracts data into objects (or attempts to) – so multiple tables providing data to represent a single project is treated as a single object with in the code: project name, project tasks, project notes, etc. each stored separately in the database (RDBMS) becomes a set of related objects within the PHP code…what my hope was, was that DataMapper would provide the interface to define the data layer and then kick back a hierarchical single object (Project) that would provide methods to access the underlying related data (project notes, etc.)…well, it did make accessing and manipulating the data easier – the top-down object hope was not there (could be my misunderstanding of ORM OR the difficulty in providing it). Once again following a framework forced me to setup the various data tables in a standard format and it did handle all of the underlying SQL/DB requirements and probably reduced my code by half (at least). Without having a LARGE database, its difficult for me to say what the performance impact is…I would assume there’s some impact…but I’ll leave that to others to provide the insight on…next, wrapping up
What is it? I don’t think there’s any definitive answer, but basically ORM (Object Relational Mapping) abstracts data into objects (or attempts to) – so multiple tables providing data to represent a single project is treated as a single object with in the code: project name, project tasks, project notes, etc. each stored separately in the database (RDBMS) becomes a set of related objects within the PHP code…what my hope was, was that DataMapper would provide the interface to define the data layer and then kick back a hierarchical single object (Project) that would provide methods to access the underlying related data (project notes, etc.)…well, it did make accessing and manipulating the data easier – the top-down object hope was not there (could be my misunderstanding of ORM OR the difficulty in providing it). Once again following a framework forced me to setup the various data tables in a standard format and it did handle all of the underlying SQL/DB requirements and probably reduced my code by half (at least). Without having a LARGE database, its difficult for me to say what the performance impact is…I would assume there’s some impact…but I’ll leave that to others to provide the insight on…next, wrapping up
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers
Part 4.5 – the PHP Framework
Before moving on to the data layer, I first need to discuss the PHP Framework. I’ve moved from no-frameworks to frameworks for everything – WHY? Simple, it forces you to code to specific standards making the code cleaner and more maintainable. Frameworks also reduce the amount of code that has to be done – the less coding the fewer bugs. The first real framework I’ve used since web coding was CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com/) – about a year ago I decided to try a MVC framework (Model/View/Control) and did enough research to determine that CodeIgniter was stable enough and flexible enough for me…so far I’ve been very impressed with it and the associated community (a very important thing to look for – without support the best framework is useless). SO, to move on with the story, without thinking twice I used CodeIgniter for the PHP framework, the one dissatisfaction I had was the data model layer, I wanted something more than creating SQL code and returning array bound data…I wanted ORM (Object Relational Mapping) which I was hoping to use to reduce the amount of manipulation to set up the arrays to feed to the json encoder. It didn’t take long to find DataMapper (http://stensi.com/datamapper/) – an add on for CodeIgniter providing the ORM layer I was looking for. ..next step – ORM
Before moving on to the data layer, I first need to discuss the PHP Framework. I’ve moved from no-frameworks to frameworks for everything – WHY? Simple, it forces you to code to specific standards making the code cleaner and more maintainable. Frameworks also reduce the amount of code that has to be done – the less coding the fewer bugs. The first real framework I’ve used since web coding was CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com/) – about a year ago I decided to try a MVC framework (Model/View/Control) and did enough research to determine that CodeIgniter was stable enough and flexible enough for me…so far I’ve been very impressed with it and the associated community (a very important thing to look for – without support the best framework is useless). SO, to move on with the story, without thinking twice I used CodeIgniter for the PHP framework, the one dissatisfaction I had was the data model layer, I wanted something more than creating SQL code and returning array bound data…I wanted ORM (Object Relational Mapping) which I was hoping to use to reduce the amount of manipulation to set up the arrays to feed to the json encoder. It didn’t take long to find DataMapper (http://stensi.com/datamapper/) – an add on for CodeIgniter providing the ORM layer I was looking for. ..next step – ORM
Friday, September 18, 2009
Dr. StrangeFramework or how I learned to stop worrying and love the layers
Part 4 – json
Json is basically a universal standard way of formatting data (http://www.json.org/) which provide some benefits over XML (still being argued somewhere)…why not XML? One reason was that jQuery directly handled json and another was that everyone is talking about json….simple as that. In Part 3 I discussed how I started the json approach using static json data pages, the next step was to move from static to database/code provided data. Creating a json output in php is relatively easy (depending on the PHP release that you are on) – there’s a simple function json_encode(data) where data is typically a series of arrays/sub-arrays containing the data you want encoded. So, json encoding was the easy part, the difficult part was getting the data in the the array/sub-array/sub-sub-array layout that you wanted…next step, the data layer.
Json is basically a universal standard way of formatting data (http://www.json.org/) which provide some benefits over XML (still being argued somewhere)…why not XML? One reason was that jQuery directly handled json and another was that everyone is talking about json….simple as that. In Part 3 I discussed how I started the json approach using static json data pages, the next step was to move from static to database/code provided data. Creating a json output in php is relatively easy (depending on the PHP release that you are on) – there’s a simple function json_encode(data) where data is typically a series of arrays/sub-arrays containing the data you want encoded. So, json encoding was the easy part, the difficult part was getting the data in the the array/sub-array/sub-sub-array layout that you wanted…next step, the data layer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
