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I am in the planning stages of a web app that will most likely be PHP. Aside from the recent discussion frameworks, I have a general question for you experimented developers. This one really is language agnostic. Before you put your thoughts to code, how do you document and plan your projects? I will likely be hiring developers to help as things progress and want to be sure that there is clear communication and documentation of what needs to be done and how the web app will work. I can visualize it all in my head but wondered if there is a better way than putting notes to paper. Tell me how your company does it, or how you as a freelance developer plans a project before typing a byte of code. I really want to be able to share what I see in my head with others that will be involved in this project but I am not sure the best way to do that.
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May 8, 2013 22:29
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mooky posted:Amazing!!! This is most helpful! Doctrine isn't a "thing" to learn strictly. An ORM is just a method of querying the database that hews a bit closer to the MVC pattern. Usually a framework that implements an ORM have dead easy configuration and obfuscates the DB connections and input sanitizing so you can keep your code as concise as possible. Adding an abstraction layer on top of database commands lets the framework handle the database connections intelligently. Usually that means you can swap in different DBs without any headaches. There are limitations with every ORM implementation, but on the whole they're much better than the alternative, especially if you're conforming to the MVC pattern. Edit: regardless, if you want to be a better web developer you should probably understand how the ActiveRecord pattern works. That's the basic foundation for most ORMs. Blinkz0rz fucked around with this message at 23:16 on May 8, 2013 |
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May 8, 2013 23:06
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DarkLotus posted:I am in the planning stages of a web app that will most likely be PHP. Aside from the recent discussion frameworks, I have a general question for you experimented developers. This one really is language agnostic. Varies for every project. Some projects I will do a comic-book style storyboard on paper if UX matters. I almost always have a text-only spec doc for each big project that covers; technologies, architecture, interfaces, required dependencies, application flow, etc. I keep the doc updated throughout the project. README file should contain the exact steps needed to take the project from clone to running and make sure you in some way keep a functional base DB schema committed even on top of whatever migration tech you use. A new dev should be able to check out your repo, follow the exact steps in your README to the letter (however complicated they may be), and be ready to contribute code right away. Keep a spec doc that is up to date and make sure to document things from the perspective of someone who has never seen the app before. You'll even find yourself reading the docs and thanking yourself in the future. Build modular code. I know this is a no-brainer, but keep it at the top of your priorities at all times. I'm completely rebuilding the data model of a big app at work right now and though the original guys did a lot of fast shortcuts and hardcoding data, they did it in a way that exposes interfaces and functions to the core functionality so I'm able to go in and plug in new functions to replace the existing backend code. The end user would never notice a difference, even though the app has been nearly entirely rebuilt. When you know you're doing something hacky, recognize it and encapsulate it in a way that you can plug in smarter functionality in the future.
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May 8, 2013 23:33
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revmoo posted:Varies for every project. Some projects I will do a comic-book style storyboard on paper if UX matters. I almost always have a text-only spec doc for each big project that covers; technologies, architecture, interfaces, required dependencies, application flow, etc. I keep the doc updated throughout the project. README file should contain the exact steps needed to take the project from clone to running and make sure you in some way keep a functional base DB schema committed even on top of whatever migration tech you use. A new dev should be able to check out your repo, follow the exact steps in your README to the letter (however complicated they may be), and be ready to contribute code right away. Keep a spec doc that is up to date and make sure to document things from the perspective of someone who has never seen the app before. You'll even find yourself reading the docs and thanking yourself in the future. Good points, that's very helpful information. I've never done that type of documentation before so I'm really looking for some examples which I haven't had any luck finding on Google... Can you help me out in that area or point me to some useful resources? What if you dream up a new idea tonight and want to document it so you can build on the idea and start to plan the implementation, where would you start?
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May 8, 2013 23:46
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What is the saying? Perfection is the killer of good enough? It doesn't matter what kind of documentation style you use, it's important that you get down the important parts and how they work together. I don't have a spec handy since I'm at home, but the gist is; anything is better than nothing. Document how your software is supposed to fit into its environment and you'll usually find that you have everything you need. A lot of my specs look completely different because it's just dumping facts and ideas into a Word document. Record what is useful for you. I will usually write out a feature in the spec with a lot of details, which helps my thought process. I will then build out a feature, referencing the spec for things like function names, table names, array schemas, etc until I'm done. Then I go back and tidy up the docs for that feature keeping the stuff that really matters. It helps if you use a branching development methodology because each feature and discrete component is built and merged into the project separately. If you dream up an idea tonight, sit down with a pad and pen and storyboard each discrete 'page' of interaction with the end user. Generally successful modern web apps have a specific flow that the user follows to accomplish a task. You might not know how a password reset page will look but you know that you'll need to accept (at least) an email address as input. So draw that out. Flowchart each unique path that a user can take to interact with your site. Then you can refer back to these sketches as a rudimentary checklist when writing out the spec (or banging out the code).
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May 9, 2013 00:07
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mooky posted:Amazing!!! This is most helpful! Because once you understand ORMs they make life amazingly easy, because they basically abstract away the gritty details of databases into something more akin to having persistant objects that can be queried as a database. More to the point, you can *extend* the objects and fit behaviors to them to facilitate an approach to OO more about *modelling* behavior rather than simply grinding over instructions procedural style. I have a tendency to architect my code , starting with UML and moving stepwise towards a final product. Not very agile, but I'm a greybeard, I earned that right. You think in terms of entities and how they behave. Rather than just a "members" table, which you hit with SQL and then do stuff to it, you instead have "members" objects with properties and methods that are specific to that object. So rather than authenticate($member,$username,$password) you have member=>authenticate($username,$password);. It might seem to be splitting hairs, but its conceptually very powerful and is easier to reason about at a higher level than just code. That said, ADODB has an ActiveRecord implementation in it, thats surprisingly useful, if not a bit simple (Pro-tip: Just wrap your more complex stuff in Mysql views and treat them as tables). I dont really get why ADODB doesnt get more love then it does. duck monster fucked around with this message at 02:30 on May 9, 2013 |
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May 9, 2013 02:23
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revmoo posted:What is the saying? Perfection is the killer of good enough? It doesn't matter what kind of documentation style you use, it's important that you get down the important parts and how they work together. I don't have a spec handy since I'm at home, but the gist is; anything is better than nothing. Document how your software is supposed to fit into its environment and you'll usually find that you have everything you need. A lot of my specs look completely different because it's just dumping facts and ideas into a Word document. Record what is useful for you. I will usually write out a feature in the spec with a lot of details, which helps my thought process. I will then build out a feature, referencing the spec for things like function names, table names, array schemas, etc until I'm done. Then I go back and tidy up the docs for that feature keeping the stuff that really matters. It helps if you use a branching development methodology because each feature and discrete component is built and merged into the project separately. Thanks again for taking them time to answer my questions. Everyone Else: Does anyone else do anything different, or is this pretty common practice?
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May 9, 2013 14:20
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There's really no standard one right way of doing specs. It all depends on team sizes, client needs, type of project, presence of quality control departments, and so on. There needs to be -some- specifications documentation, at the very least. I make mine a big hierarchical list of the app's actions/functions/modules, with screenshots/wireframes/mockups, as many as possible. It seriously helps when the time comes for QA testing.
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May 9, 2013 16:57
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Are there any php lint tools that can reliably detect uninitiated variables? I'm trying to refactor some terrible code that is dependent on magical lala register globals (yeah, I know man, I know... I inhereted this mess, I didnt write it) and due to the sheer size of the code I need something to lint various files with to find these uninitiated variable horror shows. Any suggestions? edit: Trying to convince the boss of the need for a rewrite, I showed him the DJANGO code for a rent management system I just use to track me and my flatmates rent, that fits in under a page of code + model + template, and man you should have seen the dude. Gears grinding hard in his head as I said "This line verifys the form. This line saves the form. This line creates a new form". He was actually almost in disbelief..... Going to stick with a php one, but I think he's coming around, because the sight of a mid-moderate complexity web app in a page of code with validation, ajax and all the fruit kind of blew his mind especially after I explained theres probably a 1000+ lines of code required to rewrite it in the long-drop (code starts at top, proceeds to bottom, then the coder hangs himself in despair) style of mingled html, php and sql vs about 100 lines, including the models and 50 lines of dreamweaver generated template. duck monster fucked around with this message at 09:49 on May 10, 2013 |
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May 10, 2013 03:11
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Well, Eclipse, Netbeans, and all the major decent IDEs will detect uninitialized variables in a file. In your horrible, horrible case, you might want to write some shellscript to concatenate all the files together into a monstrosity, then open that up in your IDE of choice and run a validation on it. It will probably find thousands of errors and light up the file all red and yellow like a christmas tree though. Also, man I pity you.
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May 11, 2013 00:35
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Well I'm liking Symfony2 so far, but gently caress me does doctrine have the whiff of over-engineering to it. I'm tempted to put it in the "optional" category and drag in an ORM that isn't written by insane java victims.
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May 11, 2013 12:37
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duck monster posted:Well I'm liking Symfony2 so far, but gently caress me does doctrine have the whiff of over-engineering to it. I thought that's what Symfony2 was all about.  Seriously though isn't it influenced by Spring?
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May 11, 2013 15:00
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duck monster posted:Well I'm liking Symfony2 so far, but gently caress me does doctrine have the whiff of over-engineering to it. I've been using Symfony2 for 2 and a half years now, and Symfony 1.4 before that... I don't think Doctrine is over-engineered at all. I used Propel, too, and prefer Doctrine. Some people speak against ORMs, but I think they're neat. I usually work in huge multi-year multi-team projects with dozens of business entities and complex associations between them, though. If your projects all have 2-5 business entities or something like that, then yeah, you might want to look into Silex (sans Doctrine) or Yii or whatever.
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May 11, 2013 17:07
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Pochoclo posted:I've been using Symfony2 for 2 and a half years now, and Symfony 1.4 before that... I don't think Doctrine is over-engineered at all. I used Propel, too, and prefer Doctrine. The more I read, the more I think your right, however what it *IS* is poorly documented. I still cant work out how to get the doctrine command to stop bitching about some undefined variable, and whenver I google it, its either worthless stackoverflow "This means its not configured right" or not stackoverfow "This means its not configured right. Ok, well that was already clear but htf do I configure it right! Google that "CLOSED: NOT CONSTRUCTIVE" I might pass on it as I need something dead simple that I can explain to the boss and not spend weeks bashing my head around a minimalistic poorly written manual. To be honest, I'd rather just stick with easy old activeRecord than a complicated mapping ORM... unless that mapping ORM was django, but thats been taken off the table by my boss who insists we use PHP. Yii I'll pass on. Too clownshoes for my liking. I'm actually finding laraval really nice, though I'm not yet sure if I can get it to generate me an initial schema from the stupidly huge database the existing app uses that I can then push around with model driven migrations. But blam, 2 pages into the tute and I "get" this one.
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May 13, 2013 01:16
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Doctrine is over-engineered because that's what you need to do in order to actually achieve unit testing. Doing things correctly always creates overhead. It's just a data mapper. There are more lightweight alternatives in that realm, though few that are actually updated. Data mappers beat the hell out of ActiveRecord, by the way...
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May 13, 2013 02:55
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McGlockenshire posted:There are more lightweight alternatives in that realm, though few that are actually updated. Hey I like that one.. One line per field, much better. quote:Data mappers beat the hell out of ActiveRecord, by the way... Ehhh....... The question is "What does this do to my productivity", and anything that involves lots and lots of loving around with xml files and associated horseshit seems to violate what I consider a rock solid rule of development: Throwing hardware at problems is always cheaper than throwing labor at it. That said, given a choice between Djangos data-mapper and RoR's active record, I'll pick djangos one any day. The question is, whats its PHP equivilent. duck monster fucked around with this message at 13:14 on May 13, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 12:00
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Anyone here familiar with Zen Cart? My employer isn't really a web dev studio but for some reason we agreed to this project to set up a cart for this customer's site. They already have a log in else where on their site and if they're logged in there, they don't want to have to log in to the ZC cart because they get an extra discount... No idea where this code happens so I can check for an existing cookie though 
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May 14, 2013 19:39
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Looks like we'll be going with Laravel. Seems to hit that sweet point between lots of features and easy learning curve. I'm not totally sold on eloquent, as it seems to have the opposite problem of doctrine, its a bit *too* simple (I'd like *some* sort of mapping facility!) , but it'll do the job for now.
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May 15, 2013 00:18
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duck monster posted:Looks like we'll be going with Laravel. Seems to hit that sweet point between lots of features and easy learning curve. What exactly is a mapping facility?
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May 15, 2013 00:26
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Winter is Cuming posted:What exactly is a mapping facility? The db has a number of fields with German names and it'd be nice to have the benutzername field appear on the model as username. I guess I can always cheat with a MySQL view
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May 15, 2013 01:41
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duck monster posted:The db has a number of fields with German names and it'd be nice to have the benutzername field appear on the model as username. Yeah, okay, this has been on my wishlist as well.
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May 15, 2013 02:43
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duck monster posted:The db has a number of fields with German names and it'd be nice to have the benutzername field appear on the model as username. Would custom accessors solve that problem?
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May 15, 2013 02:57
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Depressing Box posted:Would custom accessors solve that problem? Welp, Laravel 4 is something I'm gonna be considering switching to, now.
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May 15, 2013 03:50
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I say go for it. The beta has been better than Laravel 3 stable for a few months now, and 4.0 stable is set to release by the end of the month.
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May 15, 2013 04:05
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I hope the Paypal bundle fork I did to utilize the Adaptive API still will work.
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May 15, 2013 04:11
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Yeah Laravel is pretty neat. Right now I pretty much choose Silex -> Laravel -> Symfony2 for projects in order of complexity. I've done so much Symfony though that I ended up being a moderator in the official forums, so all my projects must have been huge. Not always though. I've done nodejs once or twice. Cloud9 is pretty neat for nodejs devving.
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May 17, 2013 01:47
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Depressing Box posted:Would custom accessors solve that problem? Kludge. Still end up searching "benutzername" for username because I'll be a monkeys uncle if it can translate its getters and setters into search filters. edit: Looks like we are going with symfony. Spent the whole day in pitched violent combat with its auth system. Being told to use the app/console to generate accessors (why not just use public propertys you deranged java victims ffs!) only to have it poo poo itself for not having the accessors because they forgot to mention to comment out the protocol declaration (implements xxxxx) first, really sucks, but if it was documented, hey I could live with that. God drat symfonys documentation blows goats. Combined with "zend_mm_heap corrupted" because it turns out you can explode php and the server it runs on if you try and run a ->method() on an uninitialized object (php 5.4.something debian wheezy). Just give me an error message, dont loving segfault apache! aaaaa  But I could learn to love doctrine if it stops being a bitch. Or specifically if its documentation stops being a bitch.or it was in python, gently caress you management. duck monster fucked around with this message at 10:32 on May 20, 2013 |
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May 19, 2013 23:12
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I'll give you the auth system, it does suck. But there's a solid reason for not doing public properties, and that is doctrine hydration and proxy classes and poo poo. Also, I like encapsulation, keep in mind that the whole public properties vs. getters/setters issue is a holy war argument waiting to happen. The segfault thing never happened to me.
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May 20, 2013 18:11
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Pochoclo posted:I'll give you the auth system, it does suck. Yeah, I might well have stumbled on something a bit broken in the distros php. If it turns up again I'll get my mate whos a debian maintainer to file a bug report for me. Debian is usually pretty rock solid, so who knows whats up here.
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May 20, 2013 23:05
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We all excited for the official Laravel 4 release today? I bet you are.
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May 28, 2013 18:02
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What are some recommended extensions to install for PHP5 in a LAMP stack? I'm mostly working in a shared hosting environment hosting nothing but simple Wordpress/forum installs.
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May 28, 2013 19:11
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SimonNotGarfunkel posted:We all excited for the official Laravel 4 release today? I have a site in development on 3 right now. I wonder if it's worth converting the codebase to 4. Are there any huge benefits? nescience posted:What are some recommended extensions to install for PHP5 in a LAMP stack? I'm mostly working in a shared hosting environment hosting nothing but simple Wordpress/forum installs. php5-curl, php5-mysql, php5-memcache, php5-xsl, php5-xdebug, php5-mcrypt, and php5-imagick.
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May 28, 2013 20:36
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I barely used L3 buddy but L4 is great. Probably best checking the documentation to see if there's anything that you might find worthwhile.
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May 28, 2013 21:55
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I'd love to work with L4, but I can't get Composer to install. It's giving me an error that it can't find the Phar class, but I've tried multiple methods of installation (including PECL). I'm running openSUSE, so I don't know if that makes a difference. Does anyone have a definitive guide to installing PHAR so I can install Composer?
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May 28, 2013 23:09
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Does code:I don't really know how to install the Phar module so to speak, I thought it was bundled with the default PHP install. code:
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May 29, 2013 03:24
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Blinkz0rz posted:I have a site in development on 3 right now. I wonder if it's worth converting the codebase to 4. Are there any huge benefits? Huge number of design updates to the ORM is my main thing. Composer for dependencies. Just all around better. I'm excited. Reading Laravel: Code Bright right now.
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May 29, 2013 06:07
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Essentially, the API is returning this: code:In order to do something with those values, I need to parse them out. But apparently stdClass objects behave differently than arrays, and as such, are confounding me. I've tried lots of things based on searches, and I got half of what I needed by doing this: php:<? echo $response->checkout_id; echo "<br><br>"; echo $response->checkout_url; ?> So, the problem: $response->checkout_id returns the correct value and all is well. $response->checkout_url does jackshit. I am at a loss, and I'm sure it's something stupid I should already know. I would greatly appreciate a short education in how I can refrain from being a dumbass. Edit: Haha I'm a blithering idiot. i is not l. Beef Of Ages fucked around with this message at 22:39 on May 29, 2013 |
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May 29, 2013 22:31
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Looks like it should becode:
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May 29, 2013 22:38
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Depressing Box posted:Looks like it should be Yep, just saw that. I must be going blind in my old age. Thanks. 
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May 29, 2013 22:40
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SimonNotGarfunkel posted:We all excited for the official Laravel 4 release today? I think they cocked that release up actually. The documentation isnt finished (Seriously, where is auth documented? half the api isnt even in the phpdocs, or at least I cant find the drat stuff) and thats a real hassle when trying to migrate from 3 to 4. The "Just stay with 3" thing doesnt really cut it either, since its pretty clear its been completely dropped. This isn't how you manage a migration people! Dont just nuke all docs and downloads for the legacy guys (where legacy is defined as "yesterday or earlier") and then dont completely document the changes!!!!! I really do like laravel, and laravel 4 is great (pro-tip install that symfony style profiler bar, its great stuff) but they need to pay a bit of attention to how the other guys manage change a bit better. edit: Oh hey looking today, actually it looks like that stuff IS there. Time to read exactly what I'm doing wrong!
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Jun 1, 2013 04:20
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