In the initial entry in this series, we took care of the UI-aspect of our Twitter-clone, called Ribbit. Now, we'll begin coding the application in a number of languages. This lesson will leverage standard PHP (with homegrown MVC), but, in future articles, we'll review other implementations, such as with Rails or Laravel.

They provide all the code you'll need, the database table structure to power it (MySQL) and the examples of a model, router and basic MVC stack to handle the requests. They help you make a user creation and login system as well as a few other pages ("buddies", "make a post" and a few others). You can also download the source from their Github account if you want it all in one shot.

Bootstrap is a well known and powerful front-end framework for fast prototyping, it uses LESS and it can be easily integrate in your Symfony applications with the help of assetic. In this post I'll show how to: Install bootstrap in you Symfony application, load it using assetic, and compile bootstrap LESS files with lessphp.

Using Composer, creating a new Symfony2 project is just a single command away. The just update the "composer.json" and run the install to get the other needed libraries (LESS and the Twitter Bootstrap). They help you set up some Assetic filters for LESS and provide a simple page to output the Bootstrap in your header.

Unfortunately the Symfony documentation does not provide any details on how to configure Assetic to use LESS. There is a blog post by Dustin Dobervich that gives some pointers, but after following the instructions, Assetic issued the following error: Cannot find module 'less'. We searched around without much success. After several tries, we nailed the configuration.

It's an easy two-step process: first you be sure you have "npm" (the package manager) installed on your system, then you modify your Symfony app.yml file to point to the Node modules path.

In a nutshell, Less CSS is a tool that lets you simplify your CSS style sheet and allows you to extend limited CSS functionality by introducing variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. The original implementation is written in Ruby; however, there is a PHP solution based on LESS CSS called lessphp.

He mentions the good and the bad about using LESS - it can speed up your CSS development time by making it more familiar but it also comes with the caveat that the CSS files have to be generated each time an update is made. He covers some of the basic features of lessphp including variables, mixins, nested rules, operations (improving on already defined rules) and being able to use multiple .less files. He includes a XML snippet that can be dropped into your Ant (or Phing) build to run the generation at deployment time.

During a sick day a few weeks ago, I got around to something I've been meaning to look at for about a year: LESS. If anything web technology is worth a look, I promise LESS is. In this article, we'll look at the amazing power of LESS and its ability to streamline and improve your development process. We'll cover rapid prototyping, building a lightweight grid system, and using CSS3 with LESS.

They use an output buffering trick to handle parsing and executing the ".less" CSS-based files through the library and spit the parsed version back out the other side. There's plenty of examples of how to use the LESS syntax ending up in their previously mentioned grid system using mixins, some cross-browser CSS3 and the CSS3 Pie tool.

Everyone says "I could build that in an afternoon/weekend/marathon session of caffeine-fueled code-debauchery" but to actually do something well, unsurprisingly, it usually takes longer.

He gives an example of this forum script that's under 1KB of code (949 bytes or so) and has some of the basic features of any forum software out there. Keith talks about the software - the features included, the included security, how it uses quotes to its advantage and how it only uses the basic functionality of PHP to make it all work.

Keith also includes a few criticisms of the code like how it uses short tags, the lack of linebreaks, using $_REQUEST and a few more.

To be blunt, it's not pretty and doesn't have many features, but honestly, I fluctuate between terrified and impressed by the feat. [...] More than anything, it's refreshing and fascinating to see what someone can do when they set clear, simple, direct priorities and focus exclusively on those.

When scripting in PHP, we often restrict ourselves to a limited number of API functions: the common ones, like print(), header(), define(), isset(), htmlspecialchars(), etc. [...] The PHP API actually offers a lot of functionality, some useless and some useful; often seldom used. I have been looking through the available functions and was interested to find some really cool functions that I should have known about.

Here's his list of functions, some of which are more on the "special needs" list than the "never use" list:

• sys_getloadavg
• pack
• cal_days_in_month
• _()
• get_browser
• debug_print_backtrace
• metaphone
• natsort
• levenshtein
• glob

This tip is useful to "lazy" developers who do not even think about variable names. They may prefer magic names like ${0} and 0 is good enough variable name, why not...

His list consists of:

• Use || (or) and && (and) operations instead of if.
• Use ternary operator.
• Use for instead of while.
• In some cases PHP requires you to create a variable. [...] To handle all these situation you can create a set of small functions which shortcuts frequently used operations.
• Explore the language you use.
• When it is better to write more and then read the code easily, do not be lazy.

Check out Vidyut Luther's response to Alex's comments as well as one from Richard Heyes.

According to his results, the Zend Guard optimizer actually dropped the effectiveness and speed of rendering an image with his package - up to a 30% drop!

I enjoyed Friday's pro::PHP podcast interview with Andi Gutmans. With a name like pro::PHP how can I not like it? This was a less formal presentation than the Zend Framework webcast. Perhaps surprisingly informal for Andi, at least at the end. I thought Marcus Whitney did a great job selecting and asking questions. There were some technical difficulties in the live version. I hope those are worked out for the next broadcast, which I am looking forward to.

Now, the question is early February, or late February?

If you're confused about that last question, check out this post for the scoop. (According to a comment made by Andi, though, they're shooting for "mid-February")...]]> Tue, 31 Jan 2006 06:45:16 -0600