While I like to poopoo flash sites for their lack of SEO, difficulty of updating and breaking typical UI conventions, I decided to take a crack at a game with AS3. I'll be posting an update with scores and a couple of levels in a month or so.

Enjoy Greensweepr!

ln -s /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

This is all probably because I (like most developers) have a broken system. I'm also running on a mac which means that disabled versions of PHP and MySQL are lurking around from the Leopard installation. I'd still like to see the folks at Zend start encouraging the Rails practice of symlinking the htdocs folder. The htdocs folder isn't well structured in the mac installation to accomodate an application folder sitting underneath it (e.g. /Applications/ZendServer/apache2/myapp/htdocs instead of /Applications/ZendServer/apache2/htdocs).

I also had to create a symlink in the public folder of my Zend Framework application to Zend server:

ln -s /Applications/ZendServer/gui/UserServer ZendServer

And because I user mod_rewrite, I had to setup a special exclusion in my existing .htaccess file in order to make sure that Zend_Server didn't get angry:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/ZendServer
RewriteRule !\.(js|ico|gif|jpg|png|css|pdf|mov|mp3|swf)$ index.php

The payoff? Integrated debugging and speed! I'll probably put together a video tutorial of sorts. The only bummer is that Zend Server doesn't have integrated vhost support. I'm also looking forward to running some Java classes through Java bridge (Hibernate perhaps?)

 
/**
 * Runtime exception thrown when one tries to perform an access or
 * removal operation on an empty deque.
 *
 * @author Natasha Gelfand
 * @author Michael T. Goodrich
 * @author Roberto Tamassia
 */
 
public class EmptyDequeException extends RuntimeException {
  public EmptyDequeException(String err) {
    super(err);
  }
}
 

By making incisions in the raw beef and putting raw garlic and minced onions, the beef was rich in natural flavour.

I added the beef into a mushroom and spinach stir fry. Unfortunately the beef was overcooked (still edible) and the rice was too watery (I got distracted...):

meal 2 consisted of using merguez saussages (which already have plenty of flavor) and frying them up with a bit of dijon mustard before putting them into a tomato sauce with mushrooms, carrots and tomatoes. Adding the spinach and parmesan at the end really added to the presentation and texture:

Now this is where the clincher is: Rails is a Ruby FRAMEWORK and yet, the hosting provider gets to pick which version I'm running. Obviously, this leads to a forced migration in a production environment. If they decided to upgrade the Ruby language processor it would be a different story. It seems like the Rails team didn't take a hint from the abomination that was PEAR / PECL due to hosting providers bearing the responsibility of versioning what were essentially early extensions of the PHP language.

Why can't I run my own Rails instance? Well hosting providers are being sold on mod_ruby which is really mod_rails. That's like your hosting provider installing mod_zend_framework and then getting to pick the version as it comes out. Let's not forget that four years ago, Zend didn't exist and Rails was a pet project by an young, but innovative group soon to be known to the world as 37Signals.

What bothers me is that this application is a little over a year old and due to the naming changes in the Rails tree (without graceful failures for deprecated functionality) I'm stuck hunting down why each controller is failing. Thankfully, if you're clever in ASP.NET, you can include a lib/ folder with any binaries required for compilation, and the codebase has matured to the point that migrations only occur at the *.5 release. You have to give Microsoft credit for not breaking backwards compatibility as well. As much as they get burned in the browser wars for this reason, it does mean that you're not forced to unravel the cobwebs on a deployed application and spend a week debugging it after 13 months!

While PHP 5.3 is offering some radical enhancements (like namespaces!) to the PHP language, they're at least waiting until 6.x before dropping some of the painful design decisions (like magic quotes etc...) that were made what is forever (more than 2 years!) by web development standards.

Ultimately, having an Apache module design to work with a specific version of a framework sounds like a mix of concerns. Why does the webserver module need to know the details of how Rails handles it's templating engine, or how it dispatches requests? Why is it so bloody complicated to get standardized rails hosting? Why do people develop in webrick, deploy using FastCGI and then have to deal with mod_ruby.

My suggestion is either buy your own machine, get virtual hosting environment, or wait until the dust settles and a unified development / testing / production environment presents itself.

Topics Covered:

• Zend Framework Folder Structure
• Zend_View and it's relationship to Zend_Controller
• Zend_Controller and the management of form postbacks
• Zend_Db Insert and Fetching rows
• using Zend_Layout to build headers and footers using the Zend MVC model

I've posted the first video here. Comments are much appreciated!

Here's the full error:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Exception' with message 'Invalid controller specified (st)' in C:\wwwroot\library\Zend\Controller\Dispatcher\Standard.php:193 Stack trace: #0 C:\wwwroot\library\Zend\Controller\Front.php(911): Zend_Controller_Dispatcher_Standard->dispatch(Object(Zend_Controller_Request_Http), Object(Zend_Controller_Response_Http)) #1 C:\wwwroot\index.php(34): Zend_Controller_Front->dispatch() #2 {main} thrown in C:\wwwroot\library\Zend\Controller\Dispatcher\Standard.php on line 193