Ben Maynard’s blog about anything

Recently, I had been invited to test out Xcerion new software called “icloud” after registering my interest a while back. To give you a little background, icloud is an OS that runs under your browser (IE 6/7 only at the moment).

Now to be honest, I can’t really see any benefits of having an OS running in your browser unless your on multiple computes through out the week and you want everything in one place. But on that note why not just buy a laptop or PDA? I think the idea is cool but for me it just do not see a place for it to succeed. After having a play around with some of the features, I found it to be really slow and could of done half the task on my own machine in half the time. And along with that, it uses alot of cpu and while loading some applications, it actually freezes up IE.

One thing that bugged me was one of its applications, a web browser. Now honestly why would you use the web browser inside this “OS” which is being run under a browser to start of with. To me is just a waste of time, and you loose half the features in your browser aswell.

Anyway thats my 2 cents, I’m sure there is some people who will benefit from this but as i said it has a limited market place, so best of luck to them.

After reading Jeff Atwood article “PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter“, this got me a little fired up being a PHP developer. First off, Jeff’s blog Coding Horror, is my favorite blog at the moment and hope he continues to write for a long time as his insight into a range of areas are amazing.

Now to respond to his article, first off I have to agree with him a little regarding php just being a big list of functions, but I think he failed to note the path PHP is going down with version 5 and 6.

PHP 5 is a big step forward in terms of oo with the reflection class and the use of camelCase naming convention. And with 6 coming along and the use of namespaces (which will be released around 5.2/5.3 i believe), I believe PHP is taking the right step forward to becoming not only the most popular web language, but the most powerful aswell.

So if your going to write an article about how php sucks, please mention the road php is currently taking!

Well I haven’t blogged for a bit, so im hoping to do some catch up today. Since working in the business world, I find you never have time to write libraries for everything you want your application to do, and why would you when there are excellent classes out there that do just what you need to, have community + developer support so you do not need to worry about any bugs within your system. Then with all this, it frees up your time so you can spend time working on the things that matter.

So with this in mind, i read an article about 30 useful classes and components, and I recommend checking out half these items. Personally my favorite is HTML Purifier as its a must have to prevent XSS injection attacks + cleaning up user submitted code.

Click here to view 30 useful php classes and components.

Over the last week Ive been testing out some php frameworks and seeing what they are like (mainly the install process and checking out the structure of the application).

The first one i tried was symfony. First off, having a php web application that has to be created via command line sucks! (I think you can install it without having ssh access but it is a bit of a mission). After following the instructions step by step, the program just kept throwing errors when creating a project. I may have missed something or my server wasn’t set up quite right but overall i just wasn’t impressed with the installer, IT IS JUST TOO HARD! In the end I had to install it straight from the svn which worked fine, but the styles didn’t come through so looking at the pages was very plain.

When I say the installation is just too hard, I am talking in the fact that I should just be able to copy over some files and expect it to work for a php application, and if it needs some type of installation, then have a web install page. I believe that if you have no linux adminstration skills then you are pretty much screwed if you wish to use the symfony framework.

The second framework i tried was cakephp, now cakephp is how you install a php framework. All i had to do was copy the files over and it was up and running.  There is not much more i can say on cakephp because the setup was very easy and took me 2 mins not 2 hours.

As for the coding aspects of the frameworks, I didn’t really get my hands too dirty and they both to seem to work in the same manner with following the MVC architecture. I’m sure both frameworks have there advantages but based on the install process i would be swinging to cakephp.

As a developer who sucks at anything that involves design, I love buying ready made icons I can just plug into my application. The guys at glyfx have done a brilliant job with their latest vista network set, so go check it out:

glyFX Vista Network I Icon Set