On Friday evening we quietly announced on twitter a product that we’ve been working on for the last 10 months. FRAPI is an Open Source API framework that allows you to open up your existing web based application or legacy system to your own or third party developers.

FRAPI handles standard API things like authentication and data formatting, and speeds up the API development process — like the way ZF or Symfony for PHP, Django for Python, JQuery for JavaScript (or, I suppose even Ruby on Rails ;-p ), does for other technologies.

David Coallier put together a quick 5 minute screencast to show you how you can use FRAPI to start building your API. (more…)

There’s been a lot of talk, blogging, tweeting in the last week about TechCrunch50, so I’ll try not to tread old ground. Personally, I’d like to thank everyone in the Irish web community who wished us luck before, during and after the event. It was a great to feel we had the backing of so many people in the industry - I believe that this sense of community characterises our industry and separates us from others, long may it continue.

For echolibre, this event was a huge milestone — the software behind the two Irish companies to attend TechCrunch50, CloudSplit and VidSchool, was built by us. echolibre opened it’s doors to the world on October 1st 2008, so for us, helping two companies get to TC50 is really a big deal. As we approach our first birthday, we’ve been privileged to have worked with some very bright and talented entrepreneurs and their startups. (more…)

There are many decisions involved when using new technologies and new products. Many people will often go for open source software because it’s free and you can modify the code. To me being “an open source” project involves a whole lot more than simply having an opened code base that you can modify and use for free, but it also involves a large amount of factors as such as technical documentation, user examples, tools for a software, the community based around a project and the likes of actual response time from developers.

This article is a major Kudos to the CouchDB developers. In particular I would like to thank Jan Lehnardt, Paul J. Davis and Robert Newson from the CouchDB fame. Let me explain why…

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Last night, a simple holding page for a brand new product was quietly put live, and announced through a tweet from Joe Drumgoole. CloudSplit is a service that offers users of cloud computing a realtime view of what’s happening and how that hits their wallets.

Some of the features in current development include reporting and analysing of activity and spend, setting of alerts to suit a budget, and the service works with Amazon Web Services, with future support for Microsoft Azure.

CloudSplit was founded earlier this summer by echolibre and Joe Drumgoole, and since then we’ve been working hard on our alpha version, which we’ll be bringing to TechCrunch50 in a few short weeks.

This stage of development has been real fun as it’s allowed us to work in PHP, C, Python and we have been putting CouchDB, nginx and Gearman through their paces

If you’d like to know when the service is fully launched, let us know on CloudSplit.com .

Anyone who follows me on twitter might have seen a tweet from me last week asking for suggestions on available office space in Dublin. I got a great response from Dublin Twitterers (thanks guys!) and was able to line up viewings over the following days. I’m delighted to say that we found a new place, and given its location and layout, we jumped on it pretty quickly.  (more…)

The last couple of months have been extremely busy for me, to a point where I have not been blogging or participating in open source project nor the local user group to the level I’d like, but it has been the good kind of busy, where you feel exhausted but very satisfied with one self.

What has been keeping me busy? I have presented at 3 conferences (PHP Tek, DPC and OSCON), took a week vacation in Iceland with Chris Shiflett and Andrei Z, moved to a new house, work on a very fun but stressful project among other interesting things that have happened.
A rough calculation told me that since mid May, around the time of PHP Tek, I have been away from my home a total of 38 days, almost 50%, not bad at all!

To touch base quickly on each of the conferences I spoke at: (more…)

[UPDATE] - a sincere thanks to all those who re-tweeted and responded to our call for developers. We’ve gotten a great response in the last two weeks and we’re working them. We’ll be in touch with everyone who contacted us in the coming days.

So, it’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been busy working with some very smart and talented Irish entrepreneurs on start up ideas, and the last few months have been a blast. We’ve got lots in store over the next six months and we’ve started to scale up our team.

Behind the scenes our team has grown to six, soon to be seven. Continuing on with this growth, we’re looking for two new team members: a PHP developer, and a Business developer. (more…)

A number of people have asked me over the past few days how should one go about using jQuery Autocomplete but instead of using newline delimiters, with a URL that returns JSON data.

At first, I first had a hack that involved handling the “keyup” event myself then sending a request to a JSON URL, and then involve the “autocompleteArray” method from Autocomplete. It was a mess considering that the autocomplete method is already sending the value of your defined input to the server as a GET parameter. I was repeating the behavior of the function in order to receive a simple JSON array. I was unhappy, and felt it to be a very annoying solution because I wanted to take advantage of the internal caching system of jQuery Autocomplete.

So I decided to give a look at the code and came up with a much cleaner solution. I directly added a JSON option to the Autocomplete. So for anyone interested you can find the patch here: jQuery Autocomplete JSON patch.

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A few weeks ago I was talking to Mark Baker from MySQL AB about getting a MySQL meetup happening in Dublin. Meetups currently happen in London, San Fran, etc., and are an opportunity for local MySQL users to meet socially. Mark was very helpful, up to the point that he’s offered to fly himself and Ivan Zoratti for the inaugural meetup. They’ll give us a brief talk on MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster v7 and what the future holds for MySQL.

This event is a chance for you to engage in your community by meeting other Dublin web / MySQL developers, learn from shared experiences and to make some nerdy contacts.

The good people in the South William Bar have given us the use of their top floor for this informal event, which kicks off at 18:30 on Wednesday 24th June. Places are limited to 25 people. You can reserve your spot on eventbrite for free.

To help with the “community” part of it, we’re going to put some money behind the bar for some nice beers.

UPDATE (3rd June 2009) : This happy bunch of MySQL developers have registered to come along. We’ll be releasing a few more tickets a few days before the meetup.

Barry Alistair, Richard Bowden, Declan Boylan, Rory Browne, Paul Campbell, David Coallier, Ray Cregan, Barry Cronin, Darragh Curran, Stephen Curran, Laura Czajkowski, Bill de hÓra, Andrew Duffy, Ross Duggan, J.D. Fitz.Gerald, Eoghan Gaffney, David Gillen, Daniel Hunt, Piotr Jankowski, Eamon Leonard, Conor McDermottroe, John Moylan, Tomasz Muras, Shane O’Grady, Paul Phillips, Eduard Raos, Karen Thompson, Neil Turner

According to wikipedia, the Dragon’s Den is:

a venture-capitalist television programme that originated in Japan where the format is owned by Sony. The format, which now airs internationally, consists of entrepreneurs pitching their ideas in order to secure investment finance from business experts — the “Dragons”.

As some may already know, in 2009 the television show began in Ireland on RTÉ ONE. This post covers the technical considerations encountered when a web site / application appears on national television. (more…)