Horses are terrible people

In working to optimize Framewerk to run on a site as large as myYearbook.com and our related sites, we've found several bottlenecks which we're now working to resolve. Some of the bottlenecks can be attributed to our hardware; for example, on our very cool Isilon NAS setup, there is a NFS penalty for file stat operations, and the Framewerk engine does its fair share of file stats.

As part of the cleanup we’re doing the following:

• Adding a base level fFile class which will allow for transparent engine level caching using Shared Memory functions (shmop).
• Unifying as much of the XML subdirectory into one file. fRegistry has been completely rewritten to allow for nesting and arrays of nodes to support moving configuration.xml into registry.xml
• Caching maps of file locations that are used both at the base level class location and at the fTheme XSL, CSS and JavaScript auto-location detection routines.

In part of gearing all this up, and wanting to get Framewerk to a releasable state, the development team decided that we would pare the distribution down to a core framework without applications and to remove any database dependence for the core framework. The applications are not going away, they are just being moved to a satellite project level. As part of the base installer, the user will be prompted for their requirements, such as should database support be installed, what kind of user backend should be installed, if any, etc.

In addition, one of the ideas being tossed about is to add a function hook mechanism to fObject and fSingletonObject classes.

As such, the trunk of svn is once again unstable, but should become stable enough for a beta real soon. Keep an eye out for updates!

Sure the acronym is cheesy, but I just committed to SVN an object that automatically builds administration back-end interfaces by passing a table name to it. Sure the screenshot is a bit simplistic, but it can handle 4 different types of fields right now, and I will be adding support for additional field types. It works by querying the table structure and dynamically building lists and forms. It is aware of the primary keys, non-nullable fields, and the like.

The TLadder object requires only two lines of code to use, though you can always use overrides to make things look nicer. To use TLadder one simply does: $ladder = new TLadder('table_name'); $output = $ladder->build();

Future plans include migrating the interface to use XSL for display, adding additional field type support, and adding support for foreign key auto-detection and turning fields with foreign keys into drop down fields with the contents of the dropdown populated from the foreign key data.

This new site is running the SVN HEAD version of Framewerk in it\'s near beta state. We have approximately 20 open tickets right now and are making progress daily. I\'ve been working on new Docbook formatted, XML based documentation using XSL:FO and apache fop 0.9.

I\'ll be adding more blog like capabilities to this in the near future with both the ability to comment and for trackback entries.

// Return a formatted user name and email
$user = new TUser(1);
echo $user->returnFormattedName() . "<br />";
echo $user->email.
unset($user);

// Add a new user
$user = new TUser();
$user->username = 'testuser';
$user->email = 'some@email.com';
unset($user);