PHP, Zend Framework and Other Crazy Stuff
Archive for December 7, 2007
RubyConf 2007 Videos Online
Dec 7th
For those who find some level of enjoyment out of watching Ruby talks, most of the RubyConf talks from the past week are available online at:
http://rubyconf2007.confreaks.com/
Marcel Molina’s look at “What Makes Code Beautiful?” is always worth watching, if only to constrast with PHP for a little deeper insight. Both IronRuby and JRuby have their own talks – as does Rubinius.
Of particular interest since I’m developing the PHP port, David Chelimsky and Dave Astels presentation of “Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec” is also online. It’s Ruby specific of source, but the core ideals represented by BDD are worth being informed about.
Astrum Futura Redux
Dec 7th
For the cool folk who have followed the Solar Empire legacy through thick and thin since 1999, those cute .php3 file suffixes, Moriarty’s continuing denegration of all other developers, the revolution that open source brought, the sudden push towards OOP, and the…err…security and bug population… Working on anything hitting it’s 9th anniversary in PHP is really interesting – 9 times the fun and games 
.
Astrum Futura was envisaged as a desperately needed update to the long running open source Solar Empire franchise, where players engage each other across a galaxy of 500+ star systems mining resources, building colonies, and generally screaming bloody murder at each other. It’s not the most impressive or ambitious of online games, but it’s always been tenacious and attracted roaming users who like a quick dash of destruction in their daily diet.
In January 2008, the oft delayed development process will once again creak into action. The current tracer code was built originally using the Zend Framework 0.2-0.6 and famously led that Spring to my long running “Complex Views With The Zend Framework” blog series that gave birth to the Zend_View Enhanced proposal, and maybe gave Ralph Schindler a few headaches . Building anything more complex than a login page was pure heart ache previously.
Now that time is available, the Zend Framework significantly more mature, and we have a lot of legwork carried over from 2006 in the Quantum Game Library (thanks to Jacob Santos), it’s about time we got something concrete done. The usual suspects, if interest levels are high enough, can report to the shiny updated phpBB3 forums at http://forums.astrumfutura.com – same domain as this blog you’re reading.
And we will be applying XP this time – the random running process that usually prevails just doesn’t work out well. So get your Selenium gear in place.
