Am I talking about another framework? Well yeah. I thought it will be real fun for web application developers to use orchid to build their apps. Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.
URL : http://orchid.phpxperts.net
Some of the core features of Orchid which I think are really helpful to develop real world applications, are listed here
1. Caching Engine with support of Memcache, MySQL and SQLite as Storage
2. MVC
3. RoR like Layout and segregated template components.
4. Partial Caching in Template
5. Very efficient object loading and dispatching
6. DAL for MySQL (Both MySQL and MySQLi), SQLite, PostgreSQL and MSSQL
7. Support for PDO
8. Builtin Unit Testing Library where you can write unit tests inside the controller without extra pain.
9. Internationalization using Language files
10. Session Manager (Regular and DB Based)
11. Bundled Google Map Library
12. Bundled Google Chart Library
13. Bundled JSON Library
14. Bundled Prototype, jQuery, Scriptaculous and SWFObject Scripts with on-demand gzip support
15. On demand gzipping for javascripts
16. Active Record
17. Excellent Benchmarking and Profiling support which you can use to profile your application
18. CSS based Button Manager (What is this???? — checkout)
19. AJAX Library
Beside many other features it also comes with an exceptional feature which is hard to find elsewhere 
which is the following one
20. Bundled “Colorful Moments”
Orchid is planned to release by mid januray, as I told. Currently some of us are working on documentation. But you can still check out the code and sample controllers.
Ifthese sounds interesting - you can visit the official blog of orchid at http://orchid.phpxperts.net
Categories: AJAX · Cool Webapps · Framework · PHP · performance
Tagged: Framework, orchid, php5
I just came across this article in Ajaxaian where Dion Almaer rant what you need to do when you code JS for living!!! Some says that pure JS is nothing, some says that just JS cant take you anywhere. I agree partially with Dion’s thought and wants to add something by myself.
Well, you can do pure JS for living as I am doing right now. Beside lots other tasks in pageflakes, I write huge amount of JS everyweek to develop flakes as a development engineer. Beside that I also maintain the community, study JS in the user submitted flakes and support them to write efficient JS. If you neglect JS as a language, you are doing a big mistake. JS is extremely powerful and you can do things beyond your imagination with it.
I want to add some tips beside dion’s suggestions. You also need to do the following if you really want to live by coding JS.
1. DOM Scripting is a Must, but not all, simple Node operations will do.
2. Interacting with CSS is also a must.
3. Manipulating JSON is more important than XML becoz its much more flexible and lightweight to transfer your data as JSON object.
4. Choose some popular libraries and stick to them. Personally I suggest Prototype (Its a must), jQuery, mooTools and Scriptaculous. I dont like Dojo becoz it seems too heavier to me. (I dont agree with Dino in this issue, I suggest DRY, Dont Repeat Yourself. Why do you have to reinvent the wheel?)
5. AJAX is also a must.
6. Being able to write JS in Object Notation format (he he he, its JSON)
7. keep yourself uptodate by visiting sites which inform you what’s actually going on in this sector.
8. Be aware of browser compatibility issues (Its a must)
And Finally
9. Love JS
Categories: AJAX · Cool Website · Javascript · idea
I have been working with PHP for more than 3yrs (I believe still I am beginner in this category) - I was present in several interview board. Which things disappointed me most is the “lack of eagerness” to learn what comes new. Sometime developers thinks that learning Only PHP will help them to get lucrative jobs!! OMG
Specially in BD most of the time PHP developers plays multiple roles in the companies, they are developer, they are template designers, they are HTML coders, they are DBA, they are PMs….what the heck. Only few companies have different people for these roles.
How far you can go just learning PHP (RAW code, in ancient style, that means PHP+HTML together, yak!!)? You have to have knowledge in CSS, JS, Frameworks, Multiple DBS
When it comes the question of CSS, you should maintain a list of websites where from you can get updates. Dont learn the CSS from book, but goto websites and see what is happening… If you are still using Tables to design (more…)
Categories: AJAX · Internationalization · MySQL · PEAR · PHP · SQLite · ZCE · interview
September 7, 2006 · 1 Comment
Yesterday Dhaka was a hot city due to political strike of opposition party. I was in home with new idea and works. I wake up at 9PM and started writing the pending and last chapter of my wordpress book, “developing widgets and plugins”. Ayesha and Afif went to a relatives house so that I was all alone in home and my work ran on full throttle. I completed around 13 pages yesterday.
At night I started my long planned project “Golpo”, the Unicode based bangla group chat solution for netizens. I was working with the DAO and I almost finished it. I was planning for this project for a long time and DB schema was ready, just needed to start the work.
From now on, I will publish my upgrade regularly on this project. I know that I will be stuck with UI part because I am not a good designer.
Lets roll the project - It will be finished soon.
Categories: AJAX · Bangla Computing · Cool Webapps · PHP · unicode
In ajax, there are several cases where you need to call a bunch of actions synchronously. That means one action must finish before another one called. You can do it by checking the status of ajax request of previous calls and if that was in finished state, you can call next action. This process may be resource extensive if you dont care for checking. So here is a simple actionChain object which will help to put numbers of actions in a chain (or you better say, queue) and call them one of after one smartly. I just demonstrate how it works
<script>
var actionChain = {
curIndex: 0,
actions: new Array(),
fire: function()
{
if (this.curIndex<this.actions.length)
{
alert(this.actions[this.curIndex]);
this.callback();
}
else
{
alert(”finished”);
}
},
increase: function()
{
this.curIndex++;
},
addAction: function(actionName)
{
this.actions[this.actions.length] = actionName;
},
initialize: function()
{
this.curIndex=0;
this.actions = new Array();
},
callback: function(){}
}
actionChain.callback=checkVar;
function checkVar()
{
actionChain.increase();
actionChain.fire();
}
for(i=1;i<11;i++)
actionChain.addAction(”hello”+i);
actionChain.fire();
actionChain.initialize();
for(i=1;i<4;i++)
actionChain.addAction(”hello”+i);
actionChain.fire();
</script>
so here you see, an actionChain object is created and then we add some actions. Then we call the fire() method. This fire() method simply invoke callback function with current action in queue. And the call back function just increases the counter. So when the counter reaches at final offset, it will terminate.
Here I show a basic demo, just modifying it a bit you can create your full fledged ajax action chain object ( i mean a proper object which stores the action, their url, parameters and response callback etc…)
Thanks
Categories: AJAX · Javascript
