A Path Less Taken

In a recent post I touted the coolness factor of the Spot ORM. Based on a response to that post I prepared this short tutorial on how to get started. This is culled from personal experience and guidance that I received from the software’s author. I hope this is helpful to you if you are interested in giving Spot a try.

I have updated Formed, my PHP HTML Form Generator, to provide support for errors. The functionality is there, but I have not updated the tutorial yet to cover error handling. Setting errors is actually as easy as calling the set_errors method of the Formed object and telling it what errors you want to set. Below is a simple example:

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$myForm->set_errors (array ("Comment" => array ("You must provide a comment!", "The comment field must be at least 10 characters!"))) ;

This example shows setting 2 different error messages for the comments field element. That’s all there is to it. The DefaultTemplate and the black_and_white template were updated to incorporate the tags needed for processing errors. The others will be updated as time permits. You can make the edits yourself if needed sooner by following the example in black_and_white. I’m excited about this new feature and I have already used the functionality in my Your Brain site.

On a related note I always like to give a shout out where it is warranted. Although I have not used it, the PHPForms product looks pretty nice if you need to render static HTML forms. Although this is not the goal of Formed, I still think their form builder implementation is intuitive and well done. If you need to develop static forms you should give them a look. If you need to generate dynamic forms in your code then Formed may be more appropriate for your project.

It’s been a while since I posted about this and as I look for sliders I thought I would update you on some additional cool jQuery Plugins that I’ve come across. Enjoy!

• Nivo Slider – The worlds’ most awesome jQuery slider.
• arbor.js – a graph visualization library using web workers and jQuery
• Awkard Showcase – They call it a Content Slider, but as they state it can do more then just slide the content with tooltips, thumbnails, dynamic height and lots more.
• Nice & Clean Sliding Login Panel – Nice & Clean Sliding Login Panel Built With JQuery.

No, this is not about Doctrine and Propel, although I’m sure those are both really fine PHP ORM tools if you are willing to endure the learning curve. This is about 2 lesser known but notable ORM tools that deserve a nod of recognition. I’ve tried a number of PHP ORM tools over the last year and many of them had merit. In fairness, as you look at one attempt you begin to realize how much each of them owes to those that came before them. There are so many variations on a theme that you can easily get confused and give up in frustration. But my recent efforts have revealed two that I find very useful and note worthy depending on your project. Here is a quick run down on each.

At work lately I’ve been encountering a lot of Business Process Management or BPM tools in disguise. It got me to wondering if the open source community is active in this area. I found this blog post which suggests maybe. These do appear to be mostly free, but they have commercial companies around them which always complicates the issue.

Today my colleague pointed out a commercial RAD tool that was very promising. It’s called outsystems Agility Platform and it is worth a look if you are in the market for this kind of solution.

What does all this mean? Nothing maybe. Eventually it could spell the end to the software engineering profession as it exists today. I doubt that will be tomorrow, but it could happen. Wouldn’t that make for an interesting world?