This post is by Ben Chapman, a 5th year student in Scoil Mhuire Clane, who is with us for a week on work experience.

Hello! The guys here at echolibre thought that making a web app would be the best way for me to experience working in this industry, so I am. The idea that I’ve come up with and started this week is, as Eamon put it, a document management system for schools, teachers & students.  Here’s just a quick overview of what I want to do with the project and I’d love to hear what you think about it or any ideas you have — so if you want to, just throw me a comment below! (more…)

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…)

I wanted to write a post that shows a few different ways to customise Zend Frameworks routing when you’re using their MVC implementation. Most of this is covered in the documentation, but it can be a little difficult to dig out.

The standard routing setup of Zend matches URLs like these:

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www.example.com/module/controller/action/var1/value1/var2/value2
www.example.com/controller/action/var1/value1/var2/value2

You set your controller directories in your bootstrap with something like:

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$front = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$front->setControllerDirectory(array('default'=>'../controllers', 'bar'=>'../modules/bar', 'foo'=>'../modules/foo'));

For the first component of the path Zend will first look for a matching module, if none is found it will look for a matching controller. The module name ‘default’ is important here; it represents (surprisingly) the default controllers. So these are the ones when there’s no matching module in the URL.
(more…)