I'm considering using the Agile Toolkit, ATK4 to upgrade a number of web projects that I'm working on. I really like the idea/paradigm that the Agile Toolkit presents, but I'm worried about documentation.
The agile website's documentation is sparse, in broken English, and seems to 'paraphrase' the symfony documentation.
The agile toolkit alleges to have been in development/production since 1999, yet there are only a handful of StackOverflow.com posts regarding agile, and next to nothing comes up in Google searches...
In short is it worth spending time learning the Agile toolkit, or would my time be better spent on a framework that has more of an active support community? I've tried a few other frameworks, but ATK's implementation really stands out...
Initially ATK was born as an internal tool from Agile Technologies (.ie) so that has been conceived in 1999 but it was recently launched as dual licensed framework.
That's why it lacks some documentation and has not a huge community nor appears Googling.
I was amazed at first sight by its working way proposal so that I engaged it. The documentation has been already improved and over the time it will keep getting better and community will grow.
I had the chance to get in touch with the lead developer and trust me, it will get better and better.
Even, as an example all the ATK4's site is developed with the toolkit and the code is short and pretty easy to read.
Good luck!
ATK4 does have many examples, and code is concise and clear. It accomplishes the goal of wrapping server-side and client-side into one comprehensive framework via php. Plus it looks nice. It does appear that documentation is improving.
Yep - agree with what the others are saying - Romans is doing a great job of getting the documentation updated. I started writing an application in straight php but realised i was going to need to use jquery to get a nice, cross browser compatible front end and wanted a php framework that would support that.
I looked at Yii, Cake and CodeIgniter but ATK4 really seems to do what i wanted. Like anything, it takes a bit of getting used to and i'm still relatively new to both php and ATK4 but i've rewritten what i already had for my application in the framework and the code is so clean - all the html and css are separate and the page code is really compact. The integration with Jquery is great and i've just written a plugin that i needed to get jqplot working for nice looking graphs.
Related
currently I am looking for a new PHP framework, with which I can create some powerful business logic applications. I stumbled over ATK4.
Since yesterday, I am trying to get a grip on this, but I must say it seems to me that the whole framework and its documentation is in some kind of unstable - or at least very beginner-unfriendly - state.
I mean I tried doing the DVD Rental example (with ATK4.2) and there are so many errors coming up (I did it all according to documentation). Then I realized that there is a new release, 4.3, which I tried then. But same problem here: The beginner documentation (the examples from the book) have so many errors in it or there are so incomplete.
Am I too dumb to find a decent example or is this really the way it is with ATK? I mean I really like the concept of ATK but with this kind of documentation I would think it will be very difficult for new developers to start using this framework for new projects.
Update 2017:
Several parts of Agile Toolkit (ATK4) have been refactored into stand-alone frameworks. The issues OP have outlined with poor code quality and lacking documentation have been addressed and explained in READMEs:
http://github.com/atk4/data - Refactor of Model from Agile Toolkit
http://github.com/atk4/ui - Refactor of UI widgets from Agile Toolkit
Both libraries can be used in conjunction with any other PHP framework.
As author of the original ATK framework and now Agile Data / Agile UI - I am always trying to support the core code and publish it under permissive license.
I've recently built a demo application using PhoneGap, and I chose to try JQuery Mobile as a UI framework. It was... okay. I'd like to try out Sencha Touch now and see if I like it better.
As of now (mid-December '11), it appears that Sencha Touch 2 has been released as a preview, and has significant improvements in performance (which is a key ingredient for me). However, it's missing some features, and doesn't seem to have many demos / tutorials yet on the Sencha website.
In the valuable opinion of SO's seasoned Sencha Touch developers (and by seasoned, at least in the mobile realm, I mean that you've at least played with it for a week or so), would you recommend I start with Sencha Touch 2 from the get-go, or go through the motions of learning 1.x and just upgrading to 2 later on? What are the advantages / disadvantages of using "preview" versions of this and other frameworks, particularly when working within the ever-shifting world of mobile development?
Thanks for any input!
I created a few proof of concepts for my company in jQuery Mobile. While I personally love jQuery, jQM was not ready for a production environment if you wanted a slick, responsive, bug-free user interface. That was in the v1.0RC3 days. It is a stable release at the moment but I still feel the same way, hopefully future versions will address the shortcomings. I made this decision after running a number of benchmarks, a focus group and a pilot program(6 ppl). All said and done, I decided to evaluate ST.
Sencha Touch has the best UI, IMO. However, there is a strong learning curve with this framework. API documentation is complete and while there are tutorials lurking here and there, there is NOTHING that spells out the ST framework from start to finish. I often find myself searching in the depths for a brief glimpse of an explanation with no resolve. I find it frustrating that the Sencha team hasn't addressed this. I hear a lot about brushing up on EXTjs first as that is the placenta of ST's birth. (yes, I just said that) Truth is, if one has to learn another framework to utilize the one you are interested in, just to understand how it works, its a major fail. I'm not learning EXTjs just for ST...
For Sencha Touch, you should be versed in MVC, object oriented programming, debugging web technology and have a solid understanding of JavaScript.
Now the real question is 1.x or 2.x. Situations like this are highly debatable. Resource and cost analysis should be done on both versions to show how your development time increases if you were to port 1.x code to 2.x and any other overhead associated with learning curves, etc. So instead of give you my biased opinion, I'll just tell you what I did for my company (7k + employees).
My project needed to be at a certain milestone by a certain date and I certainly can't deploy something that isn't in production status. Simply meaning I cannot use a beta for anything substantial. As ST2.x is in the PR3 stage, it isn't ready for production. Not to mention a lot of key features of ST are currently missing from the ST 2.x release, though will be added in future releases as they progress to production stable.
I developed my app in 1.x because it was stable, has numerous examples and documentation available so I could produce an app TODAY. If I started in ST2, I wouldn't be able to finish the app. The API is not frozen, lacking full documentation, sparse examples, limited community resources and missing features. I can't wait for ST2(going to be great!) but can't risk my project over it.
Bottom line... if you need an app today, go with ST1, if you can hold off for another few months and have the time to make updates to your app as the ST2 API is frozen and features are added back in, then I would go that route. Cheers.
I would suggest learning Sencha Touch 2. I wasted a lot time working with Sencha Touch 1. Just before giving up - decided to try Sencha 2 - devel release 4. Much much easier to work with and learn.
Good luck
JRS
I've used CakePHP on several projects in the past, and have more recently started using Ruby on Rails, but there's a new project I'm about to start that will require PHP. While refreshing myself on CakePHP I learned that there is a new framework called Lithium that is essentially what CakePHP 3 was going to be. It's being developed by a group of former core CakePHP devs.
I haven't found a whole lot of information about it since it's still under development status, but I was wondering if anyone knows (or has a link to) some information on what benefits it provides over CakePHP. Hopefully something a bit beyond the quick overview shown on the official site. I'm trying to decide whether to use CakePHP for my upcoming PHP project or to wait a bit for Lithium to release a non-development version and try that out.
Hope this answer doesn't come too late, (and as the lead developer of Lithium, I'm a little biased :-)), but I will say that this is a hard thing to sum up. Lithium is the culmination of over 4 years' experience building and working with CakePHP, and while it retains many of the same designs and conventions, it was built to correct CakePHP's many architectural flaws.
In brief:
Framework features are grouped into loosely-coupled "packages" that are easy to use independently.
Tangentially, everything in Lithium is a "library", including your application, and Lithium itself. Support for integrating 3rd-party libraries is vastly improved, and all classes are namespaced, so you can finally have a model called File.
It is very easy to swap out core classes with your own custom implementations.
Lithium has a unique "filter" system that allows you to hook into many methods in the framework, which allows you to design your applications in an aspect-oriented fashion. These features work together to make Lithium the most flexible PHP framework, bar none.
Everything is lazy-loaded, and the architecture has been designed for maximum performance.
Lithium supports the latest tech, especially new databases like CouchDB and MongoDB.
I could go on for a while, but that's the gist of it. If you have any more questions, feel free to drop by #li3 on Freenode, and someone will happily give you a tour.
There is very little documentation so far. Here are some brand-new slides from gwoo though, that might be a good overview:
http://www.slideshare.net/gwoo/li3-ocphp
See the Lithium about page in their wiki. It lists all the features it will provide.
http://rad-dev.org/lithium/wiki/about
Currently as my job profile i am more working on asp .net application but i also wanted to have my hands on silverlight application. so, i just decided to build one silverlight 4 application in my spare time and on weekends.
We are having a team of around 4 people. We also tried for commercial application but as we can only develop it in our available time we can not commit on timeline as well as we people are new to SL, so first we need to learn concept and implement it. (Though we know the concept of binding, commanding,templates etc.)
Now i just thought to work on project like creating a social networking site in SL 4
having facilities like forum, blogs, calander, task, dashboard etc.
We want to use features like .Net RIA Service, Entity Framework, MVVM pattern, SL 4.
Objective here is to learn new concepts as well as to get some good project experince in silverlight.
Now,
what you people suggest is it a good idea ?
If yes then the project selected is correct or you suggest some other project ?
Any pattern or technology related suggestions ?
This is quite a vague set of questions but I'll attempt to give my 2 pennies worth of advice.
As a learning project this is as good an idea as any to get going with. As a commercial idea it probably isn't such a good one due to there not being any niche in your product. It has all already been done, and been done successfully by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. Developing any kind of social media site is incredibly difficult as the market is already fairly saturated. As I said though, as a learning project it's quite nice as you can just borrow concepts and ideas from other sites and you can concentrate on you main goals of gaining knowledge in the various technologies.
Whatever you decide to do I'd say split the project up into much smaller components rather than having the end goal in sight. Try to take more of an agile approach by setting yourself 2-3 week targets. It should help keep the momentum going. My experience is that learning projects tend to die a death as people get bored of the concept and lose motivation to do it. By keeping the tasks small you get to see small results often. This should help keep you motivated as you move from requirement to requirement.
Personally I think setting up personal projects and goals like this are a great way of learning new technologies - good for you!! :-)
From a tooling perspective it sounds like SL4 is an ideal route to follow. This is highly likely to be released in early 2010 and has some awesome new features compared to SL3. Would also recommend using VS2010 and WCF RIA Service too.
From a code sharing POV have you considered hosting your project on Codeplex? This will give you a hosted TFS server to manage your source code in a distributed way. This is bound to save you some big bucks.
As far as document management is concerned Google Docs are certainly worth a look (as is Google Sites as a really easy to set up (albeit simple) project management portal).
Finally, I can't recommend learning SketchFlow highly enough. As a prototyping tool for silverlight it is really, really cool. Take a look at the PDC video for a great kick start on this.
Good luck :-)
I'm getting ready to develop my first Silverlight app. It is going to be primarily used by my church for data input but also will need to generate at least one report, ideally in Excel but XML/XSLT is not outside the realm...
It will be Internet facing and will talk to a SQL Server 2008 db for which I will be creating a web service hosted at the ISP (db is also hosted at the ISP). The clients will be a mix of Windows and Mac.
My question specifically relates to the interface architecture. I know MVVM is big for this right now and I'm comfortable with that. I want to get this up fairly quickly (ie- next 3-4 weeks). I've also seen mention of Prism (Composite Application Guidance) and Caliburn. What are anyone's thoughts on these two? The initial version of the app is not going to be huge so I don't imagine it would be overly difficult to refactor a framework into it at a later date.
You are right, if it's your first development on SL, adding the complexity of MVVM won't help you much.
I think a good approach could be to go for something simple (e.g.: the good old Document/View could be just a good start http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4x1xy43a(VS.80).aspx, or just breaking in standard layers, UI / BS / DL).
After that development you will have learnt a lot of good stuff, and then you will be able to throw your app and start new bigger challenges using more advanced architectures (about MVVM, a very good web cast: http://blog.lab49.com/archives/2650 it's WPF based most of the concepts can be ported to SL).
Good luck and enjoy for SL development.
Cheers
Braulio
Start with something you are very comfortable with especially if you need to get this up quickly. Follow good coding standards and should not be a problem to refactor later into other frameworks if you get a bigger team.
This is a useful pdf.
I haven't read it in detail yet myself, but this article looks rather useful:
RIA Architecture with Silverlight in mind