Initial thoughts on trying to work with the Cake PHP Framework (read: Ruby on Rails in PHP)…
- The documentation sure is lacking
- Why doesnt the ‘bake’ script have a ‘–help’ (or any other help type switch)?
- I refuse to name my db table primary keys as ‘id’. In my opinion it should always be singular-table-name+id, i.e. ‘Users’ table → userid (or user_id), ‘Books’ table → bookid, etc. Is this an normal “Active Record” thing (it seems thats how RoR does it too)? I see that Cake may support the defining of primary key names, but I’m somewhat concerned this will complicate the association magic of it’s ActiveRecord implementation. Again, it’d be nice to have some clear documentation on this.
- The rd11 programs are interesting resources for fully functioning Cake apps, but so nearly completely uncommented it’s unfortunate (at least, rdBloggery is).
- I really wish it had some sort of drop-in user system. RoR’s Login Engine looks really nice, and as a ‘rails engine’ it is “a way of dropping in whole chunks of functionality into your existing application without affecting any of your existing code. [Engines] could also be described as mini-applications, or vertical application slices – top-to-bottom units which provide full MVC coverage for a certain, specific application function.” (Introduction in Rails Engines)
Anyways… Overall, I’m not completely dissatissfied with the experience, but the above are really making it more of an uphill battle than it needs to be, especially since, after having read several different cake reference resources for days, once I finally had my ‘Ah-ha’ moment, I had something working after only an hour of work. One of the beautiful things about PHP is it’s online documentation. I’ve pretty much earned my living for the last few years using a language I learned almost entirely through the online documentation (plus a good 10 years of computer programming experience to build-upon, but still! :P )
Programming, Projects, Technology
So when we were searching for houses one I thing I kept an eye out for were electicity outlets and phone jacks. The house we ended up purchasing was fairly well taken care of for the first point (it had had it’s electricity completely updated a few years ago), but extremely deficient in the phone-jack department.
In fact, it actually only had 1 jack in the entire house, and it was in the living room (despite the fact that whoever ’staged’ the house for showing had placed a phone in the master bedroom, we noticed on our second showing that it wasn’t connected to anything. Sneaky!).
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DIY, House, Projects, Technology
The process of buying a house has been an interesting one. There’s the excitement of starting to look, the despair of feeling like you’ll never find anything, the thrill of finding something no one else has seemed to find yet. It’s all very rollercostery.
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DIY, House, Projects
No, that’s not a typo in the post title. This is just a quick post to let anyone reading my blog know about one of the many projects that have been keeping me from actually blogging.
A few months ago I was looking for a site to easily manage my to-do lists. I found a few but either they were a) crippled in order to entice me to buy a full-featured package, or b) they weren’t very good.
Furthermore I was looking for a project to test out some DHTML+Javascript (known by some as AJAX) interface-goodness.
So without further ado, I introduce you to the latest apathyant empire member:
www.tdoos.com
Try it out and let me know what you think. I appreciate any feedback, and I’m currently gearing up some ideas for the next iteration of the site.
Projects, Technology, apathyant Empire
My first greasemonkey script-writing experience has prodouced the ‘Wikipedia Inline Article Viewer‘ userscript. The script appends a little icon after internal article links inside wikipedia articles. When you click the icon it will open the article in a little dhtml frame. Allows quick sub-article skimming without having to leave the context of the original article. Check out the screenshot below (click the thumbnail for a larger version):
Download/Install | Project Page
Projects
