Guest Post: Ben Chapman’s week of code (Part II)

Posted by Eamon in PHP, echolibre
Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 18:25

This is an UPDATE post by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who has been with us for the past week on work experience. (Original post here)

Well, I’ve been working on my project for the week and here’s the update that you were promised! (And stick with the post, there’s a live demo!) I haven’t gotten as far as I had hoped but I have learnt a lot whilst here. See the previous post for more on that and what I had planned.

Monday
I sat down with Eamon and planned out exactly what the app would do, the users and roles, and what out of that I could get done in the week. I spent the remainder of the day planning each of the “actions”, “roles” and “resources” my app would have so that I could write the app much better and understand what would be going on in it. On that day I really got a sense of object-oriented programming that I hadn’t before, mostly thanks to David and Helgi for helping me with it and finding my feet with Zend Framework and understanding the concepts behind OOP.

Tuesday
I got started with the code. Much of this day was taken up with looking up various things in the Zend documentation and trying to understand how it worked. Despite the ton of reading I had to do to find out how to make Zend do what I wanted I got a lot of the core features for the model done like adding, viewing and listing resources. The main thing I learnt was how to use Zend_Db which is a critical component to most apps using Zend since the database contains all that info!

Wednesday
I coded the remainder of the models and started on creating the interfaces and forms. The theme I was lucky to get off  ThemeForest so I just dropped in the default code from Zend_Layout and that was that. Then I learnt that you really should add users before models because I had one fun time trying to add it in retrospectively using Zend_Auth and Zend_Acl.

Thursday
I just finished the journal and resource components and rounded them off. I learnt that you really should make sure your revision control is working before you screw up your code by deleting an entire library that you have no backup of. (Doh!)

Friday
Today, I finished the prototype of the app, all the components started behaving and working together. I cleaned up the user system so the Zend_Acl worked to the best of it’s potential and rewrote the library that had I deleted by accident on Thursday. I learnt that when under pressure I code faster and that you should really, really plan out and code the user system first before any other components. Also libraries are better the second time you code them!

Here’s some screenshots and a live demo for you to try out! I still have not decided on a name, so I’m just going with Project X for now

You can play around with what I’ve been working on here: http://projectx.teachmetothink.com/

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.