Gareth Lennox

Looking Up

So, after much thought, I’ve decided to start posting more photos here. Hopefully it will force me to post more often!

This picture was taken on a yacht we went on for Saratoga’s end of year function.

Looking up

Learning Zend Framework

So, I’m playing with Zend Framework. My initial impressions are that it seems very cool. The database stuff especially. One thing, and this is not limited to the Zend Framework, is that it’s such a big system, there is a lot of stuff to get your head around, so documentation is critical. Unfortunately, the documentation is written on a per-component basis, so it gives you next to no useful information on commonly encountered problems.

There is a quick start, but it ignores common issues, such as: How do you create a link to another controller (i.e. another part of the system)?

Now, I just spent 30 minutes trying to find this out. The official documentation is silent on this basic task. After searching all over the place, I finally found this site, that tells you to use “the url helper”. There is nothing (or at least as far as I can see) about this url helper in the documentation.

Shouldn’t the documentation cover this sort of thing? Or at least a FAQ somewhere? (there is one on the wiki, here, but its about frequently encountered problems, not questions, and does not cover the above issue).

Maybe there is something I’m talking about, but if it does exist, its not easy to find on google!

The Future of Web Apps summit

You want to know what all the big guys are doing out there in the “web 2.0” world? Have a listen to the mp3s of the “Future of Web Apps” summit. There are guys from del.icio.us, Flickr, 37Signals, Google, Yahoo and others speaking.

I have yet to listen to all of them, but the ones I have listened to are top notch.

Editing magic

TinyMCE rocks! I have been integrating it into our content management system, and I must say its impressive.

Its very easy to use, and Just Works™, unlike some other web rich text editors out there. I managed to build a custom link screen in a couple of hours, with very little javascript. Another bonus is that it outputs nice valid XHTML, unlike other editors.

While using the editor., I have realised that I can write content much faster in our CMS using the default textile formatting, but people want the rich text editor, and it looks very impressive, so we are gonna give it to them 🙂