Archive for March 21, 2006

What’s worse than a Monday at work? A Tuesday at work with nothing to do, and no real activity to be found worthwhile. So being bored out of my skull, I’ve caught up on my reading list. After months of tracking Ruby progress I’ve come to the conclusion – perhaps belatedly – that although its a very cool general purpose language it’s not really all that comparable to PHP.

But seriously, besides Ruby on Rails (duplicate a dozen times in PHP by now with limited success), ActiveRecord (duplicated…yada, yada, yada – I dislike metaprogramming of that nature), and a nifty pure OOP syntax it doesn’t really offer anything truly awe inspiring. If you’re a purist, with strict OOP-Forever ideals go have fun – but PHP just works better in the real world whether its familiarilty, wasting effort on another language to duplicate what PHP already does well, hosting preferences, or some other reason why PHP is preferable. Maybe in a few years with some maturity under its belt, and more widespread adoption…

Important to note I don’t bash it’s non-web usage. It’s a very nice general purpose language off the web app area. I have

Anyways, I ramble…as usual.

Just saw Iamsure’s small mention of my doodling in adding Performance Management to ADOdb-Lite.

So, spurred on by news at Maugrims Blog, I’m becoming excited at the prospect of using adodb-lite for a few projects (Next forum possibly included). Some of the phrasing he’s using in his latest posts has me nervous around just how drop-in it will be (shades of prior discussions about adodb-lite come to mind), but I’m more than happy to wait and try it out once he’s had a chance to hack on it.

Being drop-in, as in “strictly no changes” is not possible. One would need to reference the module to load in an ADONewConnection() parameter. Apart from that though its intended that’s as far as the changes go interface wise. There are a few areas where maintaining backwards compatibility with prior use have been added. I’ve retained a tiny version of the adodb_perf class for the static adodb_perf::table() calls. ADOPerfMonitor() function will probably stay – although all it will do is return a reference to the ADOConnection object which would include loaded modules, and therefore perfmon. This will keep prior $perf->UI() etc. use intact. Not sure there’s too many (if any) other BC issues – could be wrong, I haven’t focused on it entirely yet.

I suppose one changeable area is deciding which modules to load for any given request. Since modules are loaded via a ADONewConnection() parameter it need to be setup before creating a database connection – not later on when perfmon is needed. This introduces some need to be able to set up a module list to load, before creating a connection, specific to a request or PHP file. I think that’s the biggest block to using ADOdb as a “drop in” replacement for ADOdb – but then again it’s a large reason why ADOdb-Lite works so well. It only loads what you tell it to. I’ve never seen it as a problem before because an OOP method for creating connections is easily adapted – might be more difficult to perform selective module loading in a procedural app where the connection code is static – not capable of being dynamically changed by individual requests.

On to other things in this general purpose post -

Sourceforge updated its Software Map design moving to its new layout for these pages. They’ve added some very nifty filter functionality which beats the prior incarnation hands down. It made finding an open source stock portfolio manager simple at least – even found one in Ruby which looks very cool if needing a more dynamic method of defining a portfolio than editing a text pf file – still it’s new and it’s beta and it works. Might try it out for a few days – my needs are pretty simple. Thumbs up to the improvement.

Back on something else I decided to have a go at installing Blacknova Traders. People keep wondering whether I’ll ever actually host any form of game on my server – so while QS is in development I’m thinking of offering a few open source space strats in rotation. Maybe a BNT game for a month or so, then AATraders, then on to Quasar. I won’t be hosting Solar Empire or QS2 – I can use each for so many XSS and CSRF exploits its almost frightening. The install went well, though I couldn’t locate the default password for my account. Using the password retrieval function it ended up being a partial string of my email address…hmmm. Maybe I missed something in the configuration to create a unique random password – never actually edited the config files other than db_config.php. I’ll put the game live in a few days perhaps and do a little exploring – been three years since I last played BNT with Genesis.

Whoa – this is getting long. Boredom breeds verbosity… Until next ramble!