jQuery

Well I've been using jQuery from quite some time now, and I must say they have a great product. It is a extremely easy to use as well as makes things such as alternating row colors in a table so easy, with two lines of code you can have alternating row colors on a table. The plugin support is great and pretty much anything you can think of you can find a plugin for.

Andromeda is rocking along and from what I here from Ken there may be some news coming in the next couple of weeks or so.

Andromeda SVN

Well now that Andromeda has had SVN support built in for about two weeks I must say it makes pushing updates from dev to staging ALOT easier also has allowed for cooperative development of Andromeda even more possible.

I would say keep your eye on the Andromeda site in the coming weeks for more exciting news.

And for those of you who have yet to try it...just do it already!! It will change your world.

Busy Week

Well this past week has been extremely busy both @ work and after work with Andromeda. Which is funny because both are connected. The e-commerce project I have been working on for the past ~5 months now uses Andromeda, so a lot of the bugs, most in my custom code not so much Andromeda lately, that I find keep Ken a little busy.

But besides that Ken has been busy this week getting SVN(subversion) working for upgrades of Andromeda, and also deploying Andromeda applications. We will hopefully be announcing the AndroPage feature this week, it is currently available in the most recent releases of this week we just haven't announced it. I am working on getting the LIPHP site wrapped up so we can get that out there.

I have a couple of extra that I am going to work on this coming week for Andromeda which include report back features this way we can start to see how people are using Andromeda as well as where in the world people are using it.

I can actually say that I finally have used a framework that I would use for anything. And it does try to separate the code into all sort of sections and folders, my worst experience with something like that was fusebox(Coldfusion) or Mach-II also coldfusion. Drupal and Joomla have way too much stuf to sort through to find anything, and then when you have found it you havent it something that just has the title that you were looking for.

Andromeda make creating an application with logic easy, and even just a website is easy to throw together with Andromeda and is even easier since the introduction of AndroPages. I am going to also start working out my idea of creating a google chart plugin for AndroPage which will bring reports to the next level.

Well that also for now, happy programming everyone.

Upcoming Andromeda Feature

About three weeks ago I was working on a project for work, that is using Andromeda and for some reason got to thinking about reports. And I thought to myself why couldn't we use YAML to define reports. So I sent an email to Ken Downs and suggested that we should get together and hash this idea out. So we got together about two weekends ago, and I presented this idea to him, and then showed him Smarty and showed him a couple of things that could be done with it.

Basically the whole "concept" comes down to the following

• We already have our tables defined in the application YAML file
• A report is just how to display the data
• Smarty Gives us a way to have some logic (Looping, Alternating Row Color)
• WE just need a filter for the data to display (WHERE CLAUSE)
  

So over the course of the rest of the weekend Ken coded up the concept of an AndroPage, which literally passes off the data to a another class that handles either turning the data into a Report(PDF) or a page(Smarty). After he was done with that I put into place the code that loops through the sections, and assigned the row(s) to the appropriate Smarty Variables named after the section they are in.

The definition of page looks like this:

options:
  title: Reviews

section review:
    onerow: "Y"
    table reviews:
        column name_book:
            compare: = @book
        column review:
        column ts_ins:
        column ts_upd:
        column uid_ins:
        column uid_upd:

uifilter book:
    description: Book Title
    type_id: vchar
    colprec: 50

template: p_review.tpl

options: Allows us to set things such as page title.

section: Allows us to litterally pull as much data as we want and place it in different sections around the page, such as maybe client information in one area and then ads pertaining to this clients industry in another area.

onerow: Specified that we only expect one row back for this page(This is done so that we do not need a foreach loop in the smarty template)

table: Refer to tables that are specified in the application YAML file. Multiple tables can be specified and Andromeda will attempt to join the tables based on primary_keys

column: The columns to be used for display from the tables.

uifilter: Tells Andromeda that we need to filter on something, and if its not specified display a page so the user can enter it.

template: Tells Andromeda that this is a Smarty Page and to use the specified template.

Each section get assigned to a Smarty variable with the same name, then you just have to create the Smarty template.

An example of a Smarty template is this:

{* Smarty *}
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
  <tr>
         <td><h3>{$review.name_book}</h3></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
          <td>Review:</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
          <td>{$review.review}</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
          <td>Reviewed by: {$review.uid_ins} on {$review.ts_ins}</td>
  </tr>
</tbody>
</table>

There as still a couple of minor bugs which should be fixed shortly and then there will be a release.

Blog Change

I have decided to go with Blogger instead of Drupal as there were too many options in Druapl and changing something took some digging. So now I am using blogger.

Engaged

Well after three years of dating, Melissa and I are engaged. We left for a cruise on October 11th so I figured before the cruise I would give her a Carribean Pirate Treasure hunt. I made a map with two X's on it, one was the location of the treasure chest with the ring in it and the other was the location of the scroll with the combination to the small luggage lock i used to lock the chest.

First Post

Well this is the first post on my new developer blog. I am looking to get more involved in open source projects, and maybe even some C based projects, as I do not really know C (haven't used it since school, and its use then was extremely basic), but would love to learn more. So if you have a C based project that you are working on and are looking for some help, I would be more than willing.