What to do when you want to migrate to Symfony2, but can't invest the time into rewriting your whole application at once? I get this questions sometimes, and I've asked myself as well for some time already. Talking to other people, I found I was not the only person struggling with this issue. Wrapping Symfony2 around your old application is one option, and I've found this works well in some situations. To automate this, I wrote a very simple wrapper bundle: IngewikkeldWrapperBundle.
In August of last year, I wrote this excited blogpost about phpBB joining the Symfony2 camp by announcing they were going to use Symfony2 as the basis for their new version. Things like this are exciting, because it will allow several communities to work on the same software: Symfony2 developers would be able to help with the development of phpBB, and the other way around. Now, the same thing is happening with Drupal. Even though they are not adopting the full Symfony2 stack, they have just started implementing some Symfony2 components.
I just want to give everyone a small heads-up that I got interviewed about Open Source and what I like about it for Canadian website Web Central Station. The interview got published yesterday.
Recently in an article (Dutch) in Dutch publication "Webwereld", Drupal advocate and developer Bèr Kessels stated that while Drupal is an awesome CMS, it is not a good fit for government websites and other big projects. An interesting statement for someone from the Drupal camp to make. While Bèr has some valid points, his statements are a bit too generic for my liking.
NOS is a dutch public broadcasting organization focussing mostly on news. Some months ago, NOS announced opening up their data by offering an API which would give access to (some of) their data. Today, the API is opened up to the public and developers who requested API keys will start receiving them. To make it easier for developers to use the API, I've developed a PHP5.3 library.
Earlier this year at the Symfony Live event in Paris, I spoke with Nils Adermann, the new lead developer of the phpBB software. At the conference it was announced that phpBB was considering moving to a Symfony basis for their upcoming version 4. Since then, an RFC was posted and given the schedule for the Libertyvasion conference organized by phpBB, they're gearing up to dive deep into Symfony. This article reflects the thoughts I've offered at the Libertyvasion Conference on the combining of powers of phpBB and Symfony.
Last week I wrote about how me being active in Open Source helped boost my career in several ways. Now this is all very interesting, but how to go about actually contributing to Open Source. That is the topic of this blog post. How to look for the right project to contribute to, and what ways are there of contributing? Let's have a look.
About a month ago my good friend Lorna Mitchell put out a call for stories on how working with Open Source has influenced people's careers. Given that a lot of my recent career has been driven by my involvement in Open Source, I shared my story with Lorna. But I also wanted to share some of my story with everyone. So here is my story and opinion on how Open Source can influence your career in a positive way.
The past week was the week of Symfony Live 2010 in Paris. One of the people there was Nils Adermann, the new Lead Developer of the phpBB project. The biggest news was that phpBB is considering moving to Symfony 2 as the basis of their new version of phpBB: phpBB4. As a result of this conference, Nils Adermann posted an RFC for this. This is my response, which I post here as an open letter to the phpBB community as well as in the thread where the RFC is being discussed.
So I have this rocking new laptop from work. It's a very nice HP Pavilion dv7. It is awesome! It can search through my entire workspace in a matter of seconds. It always runs smooth. But I had one problem. The sound was not working. It's working now.
Just a little notice that a blogpost was just published over at the Ibuildings Techportal. This is but the first thing you hear from me there, next week there will also be an article on refactoring published on the same site.
As we all know by now, we're living in times of crisis. A recession is hitting us, and it's hitting us hard. Even here in The Netherlands, where at first it seemed we'd be avoiding the biggest hit, we're now getting reports that the recession is the biggest since WWII. The crisis seems to be hitting bigtime in many places. So how does it affect open source and PHP?
Yesterday my employer Ibuildings made an announcement that I think will be very good news for the PHP community as a whole. A new initiative, the PHP Center of Expertise. Once again, an initiative that confirms I made the right choice last year.
While playing around with the Zemanta API today, I bumped into a small problem. I first attempted to do it in symfony using the sfWebBrowserPlugin, but as I kept running into a 403 Developer Inactive error, I decided to try other tools, to see if the problem was on my side or on Zemanta's side. The problem, as it turned out, was on my side.
Steer CMS is a new open source application based on symfony. It offers a CMS for websites in a way similar to other open source CMS'es, yet is based on symfony and so quite a bit more interesting to me.
Gideon Marken is a very cool guy. He is the person behind the fabulous ArtistServer, and a very experienced web developer. It was Gideon who made a weblog post yesterday that found me intrigued. This was a way to look at Open Source that I'd never before seen.
Those little 4-6yr old minds are always hearing about 'sharing,' 'waiting in line,' 'being polite,' or being given a means to explore the world and create. If we look at those concepts - we see a foundation for Open Source. - there's the sharing - the acknowledgement of others - the consideration of many over one - the support and encouragement of creating
Doesn't he have a very valid point there? Somehow, when we turn into adults we seem to forget about these things we were taught in Kindergarten about sharing, respecting each other, working together. We become self-centered people only caring about our own carreer (well, with we I speak generally, there are also people who don't forget about that ) Gideon predicts that people can fight Open Source, but they'll lose. Sooner or later, Open Source will prevail. I surely hope so, though I'm not as convinced as Gideon. We still live in a capital-centered world. Everything evolves around money, where Open Source doesn't. I surely hope Gideon is right and will do my best to support the cause.
posted on August 3, 2005 - 0 comment(s) - tags: open source
) Gideon predicts that people can fight Open Source, but they'll lose. Sooner or later, Open Source will prevail. I surely hope so, though I'm not as convinced as Gideon. We still live in a capital-centered world. Everything evolves around money, where Open Source doesn't. I surely hope Gideon is right and will do my best to support the cause.
