Just wanted to help get the word out about this ORM for PHP. It’s one of the smoothest I have used so far. Very straightforward.
Very brief Slideshare:
April 29, 2011
August 16, 2010
Django dev with one file and Flask which inspired it
I dig Django. I’ve even been using Hyde to develop static sites especially when working on PSD > XHTML conversions. It lets me keep things DRY. You want that same block on 20 pages? Cool, no prob. Oh now you want to change it on those 20 pages with a little tweak to each? OK still cool, no prob. Anyway, I’ve seen some nice bits of code to get a dev environment up and running quickly and this post on minimal Django is cool. But I also really like what I see in Flask which inspired the search.
Minimal Django – Olifante’s Lair
Flask is a new microframework for web development. Created by Armin Ronacher, it grew from an April Fools’ prank into an elegant, usable tool in a very short time, mostly thanks to its clever leveraging of Armin’s two other babies, the Werkzeug webserver and the Jinja2 templating language.
I work daily with Django and love it, but after reading about Flask I got a small case of microframework envy. Why can’t Django development scale down as well as it scales up, and let a beginner have fun with single-file web development without becoming swamped in the full complexity of modern web development? It turns out Django can easily scale down.
Will have to elaborate in a bit… 
August 13, 2010
Simplest, cleanest singleton
This is the simplest and cleanest singleton patter I have seen to date for AS3. Let’s you set it up and get right to coding. The author does make a request for a singleton metadata tag to automatically make classes into singletons. Well we sort of have that with RobotLegs. With the injection rules you can just tell RobotLegs that any time you inject an instance of a particular class just to make it a singleton and it’ll do that in the background for you. Sweet and simple. But this code linked below is the closest non-framework solution I have seen that gets close to that in its simplicity.
ActionScript 3 Singleton Redux – darron schall
It was actually a combination of other factors (and personal preference) that made me revisit the singleton pattern. The singleton technique that I prefer was developed to address the other issues I was running into and to reflect my personal coding style. While I was at it, I figured I might as well address the private constructor issue too. After all, we all love being smacked around by the compiler sometimes.
The technique I prefer has the following highlights:
- Usage of static instance read-only property instead of a static getInstance() function. This is somewhat a matter of style and personal preference, but I prefer the succinctness of the read-only property. This is especially obvious when the singleton is used in binding expressions. Plus, getInstance() is so 1990s Java which ActionScript is most definitely not. I kid, I kid. But seriously, “.instance” is cooler.
- Usage of a private lock class to prevent outside construction. While this is a common theme in the above links, my approach is slightly different. Instead of passing an instance of the private locking class to the constructor, I just pass the Class reference itself. This does two things. First, it clarifies the conditional check in the constructor. The test for the proper locking Class reference communicates the code’s intent better than the traditional check for not null. Second, it encapsulates the private locking class itself. The constructor’s argument is simply lock:Class which doesn’t expose the name of the private locking class to the outside world, but still communicates that the constructor is locked.
- Removal of ‘Unable to bind’ warnings in Flex 2. When you use a singleton in a binding expression, it’s typical to have the Console log flooded with warning messages indicating that binding to the instance property will not be able to detect updates. My singleton version fixes these warnings.
- Use of const instead of var for the instance storage. This one is pretty obvious, but using const here communicates intent better. The variable storing the singleton instance is not allowed to change so const is the better choice.
August 12, 2010
F*CSS is more than just CSS for Flash
I had seen the author’s original writeup on Camouflage and that was already very cool. This goes beyond that and again just beyond CSS properties. The idea that any public property can be set via an external file and it’s not XML, that’s much cleaner. But even the idea of just changing positions, sizes, etc., in such a clean and fast way and with inheritance as well? Merging?! Very nice.
F*CSS is a custom CSS parser for Flash based on the PropteryManagement System in Flash Camouflage. The main class called StyleSheet (found inside of the com.flashartofwar.fcss.stylesheets package), goes well beyond the native StyleSheet class by supporting style inheritance, pseudo selectors, and merging styles on the fly. The goal of the StyleSheet is to make styles something you can apply to any of your classes instead of just TextFields. CSS is a great way to define your class’s properties in an external file and F*CSS helps convert these css styles into property/value pairs you can apply to any Object.
Simplest css based sticky footer I have seen
And apparently all the code is semantic as well. It’s clean and light on hacks which is always good.
New CSS Sticky Footer – 2010 – HTML for Bottom of Page Footer
This sticky footer solution is working in all major browsers, including Google Chrome and IE 8! It works with
floated 2-column layouts and we don’t get overlap in resized browser windows unlike older solutions
you find when you Google sticky footer. You don’t need an empty push div or cleafix hack. Here is how to use this sticky footer code.
February 4, 2010
TyZ » Blog Archive » Cache and preload Gaia pages
I am looking at using Gaia for an upcoming project but not being able to use the cache might be a bit of an issue. I do wonder why it’s not caching at all if the browser is set to cache though. I’ll have to try it out and see what is being requested.
I use Gaia a lot. I think it’s a great and powerful framework to create page-based Flash sites. But there is a problem: Gaia creates a SWF for every page. And every time you visit a page, the SWF is loaded again. Even if you already visited that page. Also it is not possible to preload pages you are not visiting.To make page caching and page preloading possible, I have created the ‘CacheLoader‘ and ‘CacheURLLoader‘ classes.
Hmm… gonna have to get used to Flock, too. Looks like I can’t add categories…! Must use tags.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
