Getting Technical

As a follow on from the talk at PHPLondon last week David has now posted this announcement.

Hi everyone,

after more than three years of development, Agavi has finally reached the first 1.0 milestone: 1.0.0 beta 1 is out! Grab it now at http://agavi.org/

As you might already know, it’s fairly identical to the stable Agavi 0.11 series, which has been ready for production use for a long time now and enjoys widespread use across many sites already.

This new release introduces a new build system for projects, and features a new XML configuration subsystem that is even more flexible and ready for the future while maintaining full backwards compatibility. Several other minor enhancements are also listed below, but as usual, the RELEASE_NOTES and CHANGELOG files know it all.
Please also pay special attention to the UPGRADING document which explains the changes to the configuration file formats (old configs will continue to work, however).

There will likely be another beta release before we enter the release candidates cycle as a couple of refactorings remain to be done, just like the new unit testing subsystem for applications. Note that use in production environments is not recommended at this time.

Also, I’m very happy to announce that a preview version of our new tutorial manual is up at http://agavi.org/docs/tutorial/. It covers the first couple of what’s going to be quite a number of chapters that explain the creation and improvement of the new official Agavi example application, which will also be used by other manuals, presentations and in trainings. Please have a look at it and let us know what you think; any sort of feedback is greatly appreciated!

But let’s talk about three important new features in 1.0:

- XML config subsystem with improved, namespace-aware handlers, support for multiple XML Schema (also using XML Schema Instance declarations), RELAX NG and Schematron validation runs in various stages of config parsing, support for XSL provided through external instructions and by <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instructions and convenient support for namespace versioning, which means we’ll have nice backwards-compatible configuration files in the future. Envelope and actual content of files are now separate, as described in the UPGRADING document.
- A completely new build system for creating and managing your projects. It features several wizards, as well as raw targets that work without interactive input. This allows extension and customization of build operations in your custom build.xml files.
There’s also an event listener system you can hook into for even more flexibility.
- Execution containers now have a request method. This means you can embed, for example, a slot with a login form, with the request method forced to “read”, so that this Action would never run the login operation even if another form on the page was submitted through a POST request. This should reduce a lot of request method related pains people have experienced when building heavily componentized web sites.

The rest is mostly refactorings and minor enhancements as explained by RELEASE_NOTES, CHANGELOG and UPGRADING.

Please test this first release thoroughly with your projects and report any issues you find on the mailing lists or the bug tracker!

Thank you all for using Agavi, it’s an absolute pleasure to work with such a great user base!

I am not a user myself – I am focusing on Zend Framwork. This is just a PSA.

If you have been following along you may remember an Agavi advocate Mike haggled Symfony proponent Ian P. Christian at the PHPLondon conference in February.

Last night at PHPLondon, David Zülke said the correct quote was “I don’t want to call anyone a criminal …” David was presenting an very thorough account of the Agavi framework. Agavi has been round a while and I am not going to try and repeat or even summarise the talk my take away was that Agavi’s strenght is multiple representations of the same data with zero coding change. Everything is setup in config and abstracted and if you won’t json or soap or html or even irc you can have it.

If you are really keen the talk will be online at the PHPLondon wiki at some point in the very near future. Hopefully the new toy – the microphone / amplifier / mp3 recorder will have worked and there will be an mp3 for your listening pleasure. 

Of course this sort of talk brings out the testosterone and the one upmanship. I was refreshed to hear a couple of people say in converstion later:

1. I like to have the url map on the the file system
2. I think we are getting a bit drunk on frameworks

Both are valid points. The beauty of PHP is you can use a framework if the application lends itself to it or not. There is no one true way. There is no silver bullet. Once you get past the wow factor of the 90% of your app being build in 5% of the time from the commandline the realisation comes that you still need to build out the rest of your scaffolding into a real application. Sometimes the overhead is not worth it and sometime it is. As Laura Thompson blogged recently (okay it was last year) there is no one true way.

I am frequently irritated with the mindset that there’s One True Way of solving any kind of software problem, be it web platform, database choice, operating system, or methodological approach.  It’s been irritating me since I was an academic and I would present two different algorithms (let’s call them A and B) to solve problem X.  There would always be a student who wanted to know “which is better?”  Typically I would respond “In a situation such as […] A is better, but if you are looking at something more like […] B is better.”  Most people would be happy with that but there are always people who insist that one must just be The Best Way.

So if you use a framework – great and if you don’t – that is just as great. I will assume that you have thought through the reasons of why or why not and made the right choice for your situation.

Photo credit: kevindooley - thanks.

If you are involved in the web then head over to A List Apart and fill out. their second annual survey of web professionals.

If you are interested in last years results then look here for a nice pdf. There is also raw data for further analysis for if you want to do a Flowing Data and produce some reconstructed graphs.

For the record, just in case you are using the new cuil search engine, I do not look like this:

Linked in Search Result

The text is right but it is from my start of my career, nothing recent. I have no idea where it is getting that photo from.

Oh well everyone’s gotta start somewhere.

At least for the search ‘Nigel James’ it put me front and centre.

It seems they cant even find themselves!

Everybody and his dog has had a comment about cuil in the blogo-echo-chamber.

While now you think I only search for myself – it was promted by a tweet from Elizabeth Naramore.

She doesn’t look like Sebastian Bergmann at all.

I am all for competition to Google but at this stage Cuil have a way to travel.

For a while back there I was “out of work” which means my company was short of a client to invoice. Not the best situation.

Long story short is that I have remedied that predicament and it all worked out very well given the current economic climate etc etc.

I have been meaning to blog a little about recruiting 2.0 or recruiters or that sort of thing as we all have a love hate relationship with that. We need to recruiters to find people but they can, on occassion be annoying. I tend to take the good with the bad and forge direct relationships with clients where possible. I can usually pick a bad recruiter as he has no idea what he is talking about when he reads a spec to me. It usually his first day and I am flexible and usually tell them to go to SDN to learn the lingo.

Anyway thanks to all the people who provided me with leads and support recently. While blogging or twittering didn’t directly to an offer it sure didn’t harm my cause.

My new gig – well I can’t tell you. I have signed an NDA which prevents me from telling you, dear reader, in this public forum. No matter – that’s how some big companies operate so I will happily toe the line.

[It is a great project though]

The rise and rise of ESME is something I have watched with interest in just the past couple of weeks. At the SAP London Community Day, Darren Hague showed off Scala and Lift and push messaging. It looked pretty cool. A few weeks later he puts this page up on the SDN Wiki and then showed a couple of SAP Mentors the initial progress he had made with Scala.

Well in the last couple of weeks ESME has gone a little nuts. All sorts of guys have come to the party to produce the demo that is below and entered it into Demo Jam – the annual SAP contest to find innovation from within the ecosystem. I think they are the first in the history of the jam to publish their submission video before the competition.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1dPAV8C0Tw]

At last weeks nanomonk there was several of the core team present. Giving demos and explaining the proposition.

My original concern was that what does this add that you can’t get from enterprise instant messaging?

The immediate response on twitter was:

With IM you have to know whom to ask and requires mutual adding to contactlists. #esme works like Twitter #

@njames #esme tag clouds, group concept, integration of different corp. back-ends, etc.  #

So it’s all about getting what you want without having to know where to get it from. It’s about breaking open information silos and sharing information with colleagues to create solutions quicker and get the job done.

I am very much looking forward to what these guys, who I am happy to count as friends, pull together. The thought that in about 5 years time I might be using a ESME like tool is exciting. I am saying 5 years as some of the large enterprisey type clients can be a little slow on the uptake. I would love it to be Q1 09!

For other information about ESME check out the following series of posts:

• Abesh on SDN
• Richard Hirsh on SDN
• Yojibee
• Yojibee taking it to the next level
• Dennis Howlett on SDN
• Dennis Howlett on AccMan
• Hashtags
• Summize (Twitter search)
• Roebot (MindTouch) and again
• Ustream

Whilst on the phone with Vodafone sorting our some email delivery issues with my BlackBerry I learned a new trick.

If you put ‘<confirm>‘ in the header line of an email you send to a BlackBerry you will get a delivery confirmation when it has been delivered to the BlackBerry.

Of course you can send PIN message to a BlackBerry as well which is an ‘instant’ way to communicate with other BlackBerry users. They always get a delivery receipt – a second tick appears next to the message. The only downside it that the PIN is the handset ID which will change when you change handset. This means you have to update everyone. This is easy because there is a handy shortcut to generate the pin in a message. Type mypin and it gets replaced with a link that is another BlackBerry user can pin you with directly.

What other BlackBerry hacks do you know?

Photo credit BBCool_Wes – Thanks.

As always the London PHP meetup last night went off.

I met a whole buncha new people. Some of whom were from bluhalo.com and others were from iBuildings.

Ian Christian presented a great talk on doctrine (rhymes with whine not win apparently but I guess that depends on what school you went to or what country you were born in)

Doctrine is a ORM tool for mapping your classes into databases tables. His presentation went well even with offline google docs!

I later got into all sorts of conversations with the afore mentioned new iBuildings guys and aparently the are an international company now because they are in two countries. Well judging by the nationality of them they are a global company! Other people drifed into the conversation and I mentioned I was a SAP consultant by day and someone (not the iBuildings guys FTR) had decided that SAP was all proprietory and was not into open standards blah blah blah. I tried to press him for evidence for his assertions but none came and someone else conventiently came along to rescue him.

I could go on here about how you could connect with SAP dozens of ways including SOAP, REST, Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby with connectors some official and some open source (how’s Zend Core for SAP coming along guys hint hint ) but if you have decided that SAP is not open then I guess your mind is in a similar state.

A small group of Symfony guys found a table and started doing the symfony thing and I managed to see Ian was getting prepared for the Agavi presentation next month. (Backstory here)

At the end of the evening I saw Marcus giving a one-on-one with someone so I came over to see what was happening and ended up getting a personal tour through simpletest and intro to TDD.

Thanks Marcus.

Thomas Jung has been working on some amazing stuff. I love the power of adobe flash interface to produce slick looking graphs. He twittered yesterday that he was making some new screen casts of what is coming soon to the Netweaver Stack. Although my current gig is not running that sort of rig and I twittered back that I wouldn’t likely get near it until 2011, I was interested to see what was going on. Tom kindly sent a preview of the cast and this screen shot is of a flash graphs generated from within Web Dynpro for ABAP.

I am a big fan of visualising these kinds. Flash is a great way to deliver this sort of data as they make data more usable. This kind of innovation is what keeps me excited about what SAP is doing in the market place even though I may not get to work on them for a while.

These screen casts are going to have voice overs attached and appear in the eLearning section of SDN soon.

Bonus Link: If you have not heard, James Governor is running an Adobe SAP Nanoconference on July the 11th Adobe’s new offices in Regent’s Park, London.

Most importantly is the SAP London Community Day which is Saturday the 26 April 2008. If you haven’t signed up you may well be too late.

We have some great people coming and some great talks scheduled. We are going to do our best to make sure the lions share of it is recorded and put up for the SAP Community at large. If you are coming and taking photos or blogging or twittering then use the tag ‘SAPLondonCD08‘. I should plug EventTrack at this point because this is exactly what it is designed for.

The other event is SAPPHIRE Berlin 2008 in Berlin on 19 – 21 May 2008. Every time I see the word SAPPHIRE I really see saPHPire, because I would love to see closer PHP integration. Word on the street is that Zend and SAP are working on it but that is all unsubstantiated rumour. So take it with a grain of salt until is announced.

Last time I want to one of these events I got to ask a question to the CEO, Henning Kagerman. (Now Co-CEO with Léo Apotheker.)

[YouTube = http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=GSxc0X3l5lc ]

This time I hope to be able to ask many more probing questions to all sorts of people. In particular, I too would like to know why SAP is cutting R&D spend.

I am also keen to talk with some of the CRM people and learn more about what others are doing with SAP CRM and get some more details about the new version 7.

Many thanks to Mike Prosceno and his team for the invitation. I am looking forward to meeting up with Sig, Dennis and James and also meeting a few people I haven’t yet met.