The frontend of the project is going to just use the Zend Application MVC tool, but for the backend I’m using ExtJS. I’ve been a fan of ExtJS and used it for a few projects now but this time I’m trying something new – I’m using Zend_Json_Server to provide the data directly to ExtJS. I’m still working out how it works, but basically you create the objects on the backend, enable Zend_Json_Server and then your objects and methods are available right within the Ext.Direct and Ext.DataStore objects. Very slick. Once I’ve figured it out more I’ll post some links to the resources that helped me the most.

Also, it seems that everytime I log into WP there is a software update… maybe I need to post more.

I’ve been using that behaviour a lot in Windows 7 and it’s nice to have it on my Mac too. Check it out:

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/

1. Load up Terminal.app
2. cd [folder that isn't working right]
3. rm .DS_Store

That’s pretty much it. I suspect that the .DS_Store file gets a little messed up once in a while. Deleting it doesn’t cause any problems as it just stores some meta data about your files. Every folder on your Mac has one of these so if you are having problems, try this solution first.

Via 37signals.

A few things I learned:

• Allocate proper resources – I could have used some help on this project. It was a struggle to get things done in time and especially since my son was born halfway through.
• Don’t just use the client’s requirements for the build. Analyze the requirements and the client’s processes to see if they actually match up. Sometimes what they are asking for isn’t exactly what they need.
• If you are working on a festival and they want you to provide support during the festival, book that time so it is exclusive — tell your other clients that you are going to be unavailable during the festival, or find somebody to cover for you.

Now that CIFF is over, I can finally get around to doing a few things that I wasn’t able to during the festival:

• Clean my office
• Catch up on invoicing and bookkeeping
• Get back to studying for my Zend PHP certification
• Sleep

CakePHP

Not a huge fan. My understanding is that CakePHP spawned from a desire to replicate the Ruby on Rails movement in PHP. My experience though is that it is slow and poorly documented. They try to get you to do things their way and I’m just not a big fan of that. I can understand trying to standardize for the sake of rapid development, but then you are stuck with development methods which work for small scale projects and not large complicated ones.

Zend Framework

This is the framework I’ve had the most experience. It’s got great documentation and a very active community. It does have the biggest learning curve though. While it’s true that ZF was more of a library in the past, they’ve made great strides to provide an application framework and a pretty decent one at that. It’s flexible and extensible. You can quickly whip up a small project and the system is adaptable enough that you can also build out large scalable projects.

CodeIgniter

CI is a great choice for those who don’t want to deal with the learning curve of ZF. It’s fast, well documented and has a great development community. It’s supported by a great company who has done a great job developing and promoting the framework. After working with CakePHP it felt refreshing to work with CI. Things were cleaner, faster, and just made more sense to me.

Summary

You can probably tell that I’m not a CakePHP fan. If I hadn’t picked up ZF for a few projects earlier in the year I probably would use CodeIgniter for everything. It’s still a bit of a toss up.

First thoughts – great interface! The UI design makes it super easy to pick which font you want and assign it to the elements of your site. I just picked a couple just to test things out but I’m not a designer so it might take me a while to figure out what I want.

I can’t wait until there are more fonts – it would be great to see some there from some of the big foundries. Also, it would speed up things if they could use a bit of AJAX in the interface. I find that looking for fonts is a process where I need to scan a lot of them fairly quickly and speeding up the UI would be great for that. One last thing I think is missing, but isn’t a huge deal, is a search field. I think that is something which would be more important when they have more fonts, but it will be great if I have a specific font in mind to just quickly search for it by name.

I am very impressed though and I can’t wait to sign up my designer friends so they can start working with fonts other than the usual, and so they can stop using image replacement.

You are posting in a public forum and if you work online like I do, is your work life really separated from your personal life? I suggest that online, there is no separation. In the same place that your friends can find out info or read your updates, so can your clients and your boss. Bitching about your clients to a friend in a public forum is a great way to burn bridges and cause issues at work.

This is a bit of a privacy thing too, not just a reputation management exercise. I’m not suggesting that you be fake online and present a polished image, but rather do you really need to share all aspects of your life with all people? Maybe it is a good idea to keep some things to yourself.

This is just something I’m thinking through so I welcome comments and discussion.