April 2006 Archives

I'm planning on putting out a few proposals to get into the SoC 2006. I had hoped to get TWIG in as a mentor, but that didn't go through. So I'll take a tangent, and definitely see if there's other good PHP work that can benefit everyone. My ideas are:

Portland State University: Open to "projects that might fall through the cracks" -- I'm going to pitch XIDLE/XCB, TWIG and the network monitoring integration.

X.Org: See if they'll go for my XIDLE request to get that working again. Otherwise, check out their XCB stuff. I'd like to learn it!

Joomla: wants to do a phpGACL layer, a DB abstraction layer and an AJAX layer. I'm good for all of those. I'm not sure if I want to be reporting to this project, although the work looks good.

Horde LDAP Browser / Manager: Develop a Horde LDAP application capable of both browsing and managing an LDAP directory. Should also support importing and exporting LDIF files. Now this would just be funny. Basically I'd port/rewrite my TWIG ldap browser into Horde. Or maybe is funny-sad :-\

PostgreSQL: PL/PHP Build Improvments: PL/PHP is a PHP based procedural language for PostgreSQL. This project would clean up memory usage and the plphp_proc_desc struct, be built without Apache's SAPI module, allow large resultsets to be processed through transparent use of prefetching on a cursor when spi_exec is called, and support IN/OUT and named parameters.

Proposal guidelines and example.

Last week I got an itch to learn something about AJAX, and procrastinate a little bit on some work. I started out by trying to find some useful springboard to get into AJAXland, but discovered that a) most of the PHP toolkits for AJAX are really big and foreboding, and b) JSON notation is the new preferred X format in AJAX. So we'll call it Ajax and Jason, I guess.

After a while, I scoped out a few bare-bones tutorials and hacked together my own script in their fashion. Then I found a Jason converter for PHP that follows the semantics of what will probably be a pair of PHP built-ins, json_encode and json_decode. Simple as that. Pass in an array and it spits out the array in Jason, ready for consumption by your JavaScript. Well, about six hours of hacking later, I now have TWIG 4's data tables slurping data asynchronously from Jason modules. Model-View separation suddenly became incredibly easy! In fact, when I copy-pasted code from the Wiki feature, the first to get its Jason upgrade, into the Mail feature, and tied it together with a simple public domain tree system, it pulled up my mailboxes but showed me the contents of the Wiki system! Wait, that's good! It took just five keystrokes to switch the request over to grab data from Mail :-)