Posts Tagged ‘atk’

Over time, I've had several requests to replace the ATK and Achievo mailinglists with a forum.

I used to favor a mailinglist though, mainly for the convenience of receiving everything in my inbox, in other words: not having to visit something on a regular basis.

I still think that is one of the main benefits of a mailinglist, but on the other hand, a forum has a much lower threshold. It's easier to access, and you don't have to subscribe to anything to read it. So last week, I finally took the time to install phpBB (which turned out to be a lot easier than I thought).

Peter suggested to add the RSS syndication plugin to the forum, which was a very good idea. With Firefox's 'live bookmarks' feature, the RSS feed makes keeping track of new postings very easy. But if you use Thunderbird as a mail client, you can even subscribe to the forum RSS feed and turn it into a mail folder. This way, you can read the entire forum as if it were a mailinglist. Everybody happy.

So now we have forums. The mailinglists will continue to exist for a while, but I've removed the subscription instructions from the site. From now on, the forums will be the main communication method.

One thing I was a bit disappointed about though: phpbb's architecture. I can live with the fact that it's not object oriented (although that would've made extending the software a lot easier), but what I find particularly disturbing is the lack of functions. It's mainly a set of long scripts. Functional decomposition would be a Good Thing to do here.

The architecture makes it hard to maintain. This is reflected in the 'mods' that you can download for phpbb. These are not really plugins, but 'modification instructions' telling you what lines of code to modify. Applying many mods makes maintenance and upgrading difficult, and the forum itself can't apply any restrictions on the installed mods.

Fortunately, the code seems to be good. I've not encountered any bugs, and given the amount if installed phpbb forums, code quality probably isn't an issue.

The administration backend could use some work though. Managing forums and users takes a lot of clicking and is not very RSI-friendly. I'm thinking about contributing an ATK backend for phpBB. atkPhpbbAdmin. If only I had the time...

Ben Ramsey started a discussion on "enterprise frameworks". He mentioned ATK in his blog, which is nice, because Bens' article is also featured on sites such as PHP|Architect. This could make ATK somewhat wider known within the PHP community.

I used to call ATK an 'application framework', but actually the term Business Framework or Enterprise Framework is a better fit, because of the focus on the business logic. So as of now, ATK is an Enterprise Framework.

I'm going to release ATK 5.2.1 soon, there have been some important bugfixes tot the atkOneToMany relation, and I've added proper Oracle support to the demo. I'm also working on a guide to the demo, much like the pizza guides, only centered around the ATK demo application.

Love..
I fell in love. I was doing some post-conference reading this morning, and came across SAJAX. A wrapper that makes AJAX extremely easy.

I'm going to experiment with this. If it works in the common browsers, I'm going to put it in ATK. Dynamic contents for listattributes, recordlist paging without reload, frameless application with dynamic menu loading, I think the possibilities are endless, or, as is the slogan at Ibuildings, 'even the sky is no limit'.

Conference wrapup
The PHP Conference was nice. The second day had a lot less traffic than the first, but we still had some nice conversations. Several people came around for a second chat about ATK or more questions.

One of the features that people particularly liked in the demo, was Peter's atkMetaNode. The one-line employee admin mini application came down to:

[code]
class employee extends atkMetaNode
{
function employee()
{
$this->atkMetaNode(array("type"=>"employee", "table"=>"lesson1_employee"));
}
}
[/code]

(Ok, that's 7 lines, but I only count the ones that matter )

This was a very nice part of the demo, after first showing off with the 10 line demo. I should encourage Peter to finish his howto on the metanode. Sandy already created a 'lesson6' about the atkMetaNode for inclusion in the ATK demo application.

Near the end of the day, I had a short chat with IBM's Dan Scott. He suggested adding IBM DB2/Cloudscape support to ATK. It shouldn't be too difficult. I'm thinking about setting up a test server to create the drivers. atkDb2Db should not be hard to create, and creating an atkDb2Query for the SQL query abstraction would require some experimenting, but sounds doable. It might bring us a whole new set of users, and give DB2 users an easy way to start a web application.

Today was the first day of the International PHP conference, where we have a booth for ATK.

I look back on a very fruitful day. Many people saw our demo, and reactions were overall very positive. What I particularly liked was when people visited us, then went away to attend a session, and afterwards came back with more questions. It's nice to see that the demo got them thinking about ATK during the sessions. This happened 3 or 4 times. I hope we can welcome many new users in the near future. Several people told me they would join the mailinglist. I'm looking forward to meeting them there.

Our neighbourws at the exhibition where the people behing the Dutch PHP User Group. This was a nice opportunity to become a member, so I did.

Our other neighbour was Oracle; they showed me a PHP plugin for their JDeveloper java IDE. It looked very interesting. Tomorrow I will try to give them a demo of ATK. I'm very curious what they'll think of it, as it runs on Oracle databases too. I've not yet visited the booths of Weaverslave, PEAR, Xoops and Maguma. Both Weaverslave and Maguma have a php-editor/IDE. I'm wondering how they compare to the Zend IDE I'm using. Will have a look at that tomorrow.

During sessions, when there were no visitors at the booth, I've worked a bit on an atkExportHandler for ATK. By setting the flag NF_EXPORT in a node, the user will see an 'Export' link in admin screens, to export records to a CSV file. It's a bit rough, but maybe I have some time tomorrow to finish it.

Tomorrow is the second and last day. I'm already looking forward to it!

Goodmorning all,

Stewart James has been kind enough to set up a Wiki for the ATK community. Its purpose is to have a place where the community can help eachother with ATK issues. I invite you to create an account and contribute to the documentation.

We will have a booth at the International PHP Conference Spring Edition, in the Amsterdam RAI on May 3 and 4. If you're visisiting the conference, you're welcome to stop by to talk about your ATK experiences.

Finally I need to make a correction to a previous entry. Two entries ago, I talked about the Zend IDE and its template feature. I said that there was a free personal edition. A reader told me he couldn't find it on the Zend site. Well, there actually was such an edition once, but it doesn't exist anymore. The 'Standard Edition' is a good alternative. It's only $99 and that's well worth it if you code a lot of PHP.

People who develop extensions for the Achievo project manager, or even applications in ATK, use the pizza guides as a first introduction into developing using the ATK framework.

I often get the question where Part 3 can be downloaded. Problem is, I never found the time to finish it. I've got one chapter, and an idea what the rest of the document should contain. Since it doesn't seem to get finished anytime soon, I'll post what I have so far here:

Developing Achievo Extensions, Part 3 (Advanced)

The chapter talks about node modifiers. This is a method to change nodes without actually touching their code. This is a powerful way to extend ATK modules.

The first two guides should be revised sometime for ATK5, they were written in 2002, and ATK has come a long way since then. But they still have some use as the basics have not changed much.

I do accept incentives to complete the series.