N2F Yverdon: v0.2 Database Testing Update

We’ve been at it for a little while now and are finally wrapping up the tests for our new database extensions.  The MySQL and MySQLi extensions have had their test sites completed and ctd1500 and I are working on finishing both the PostgreSQL and SQLite sites.

One thing that’s become clear to us is that our testing methods are relatively simple and probably will have missed some functionality as a result.  This first set of test sites will be very simple for the sake of saving time and getting us to v0.2 a little faster.  As we do more detailed work with the different database engines, we’ll work on expanding the test methods for our database extensions.

Until then, we’re just happy to be moving along with v0.2.  Last night I also began working on the new layout for the N2F site and I have to say I’m really excited.  The look and feel is much more modern and fluid, I hope that you all like it!

 

- Andy

N2F Yverdon: v0.2 Dev Released

After well over a month (heck, almost two) of internal testing, we’ve nailed down enough of the bugs that we are comfortable releasing v0.2 to the public for testing.  This is a development release and will still have bugs so should probably not be used for production development.  As always, you can find the downloads on the N2 Framework website.  Enjoy!

 

- Andy

N2F Yverdon: Tested On…

Just had a quick discussion in IRC and found out that we’re already tested as working on a few different environments:

- WAMP
- WIMP (IIS 5.1, 6, 7 & 7.5)
- LAMP
- MAMP

Still waiting for confirmation on Lighttpd but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.

Not bad really, but I guess that’s more to PHP’s credit that it works so consistently over all the different environments.  Cool times, thanks for the testing guys!

 

- Andy

[Update]
Confirmation of Lighttpd has been received, thanks Anthrax.

N2F Yverdon v0.2 Update!

In case nobody has been watching the website, we finally have started showing life again on the Yverdon v0.2 front.  The code is officially feature complete and going through some new test routines that are being built to make sure that we aren’t breaking anything major between v0.1 and v0.2.  After testing, we have some website updates to do, as well as new documentation to create, and then we’ll be ready for release.

In other news, we have begun work on an early prototype version of N2F Rupley, which will be created for use in an environment very similar to ASP.NET.  We’re excited about this, even though we feel we’re about a year away from having an alpha version to show for our work.

 

- Andy

Upcoming Zibings Activities

I’ve had a few people ask me recently what’s going on with Zibings.  The renewed interest comes at a very peculiar time, considering how much is going on behind the scenes that nobody knows about.  In order to give people a bit to go off of, I thought I’d share some things…

N2 Framework – Yverdon
Work has not stopped on Yverdon (though it’s been hindered by many other things).  At this rate, we’re hoping to have v0.2 into testing very shortly and released as soon as possible afterwards.  You can expect to see the next version sometime in March if everything stays on course from here on out.

The Zibings Network
The Zibings Network, which to most people has been dead for quite some time, is actually far from being dead.  Our initial Proof of Concept version (http://beta.zibings.net/) was a great endeavor for us as a development team, and we’re working hard to build the first legitimate version.  No specific dates in mind just yet, but we’re aiming for beginning a testing phase sometime in the next month.

Other
The reason for the delay on the previous two mentioned projects is going to be revealed within the next 3 months to early testers on ZibNet.  We’ve been putting tons of work into approaching this project in an organized manner and I know I speak for everyone at Zibings when I say that we’re excited as hell to reveal it to you.  Keep your eyes peeled here and on the main sites (www.zibings.com) as they begin to change and mature while we head towards the unveiling of our new pet project.

If you want more insight than this, you’d probably be best off joining us on IRC.  Otherwise, I’ll look forward to filling you in on more details as they come!

 

- Andy

Some Interview Questions for Developers

While reading through links this morning I came across this blog post making fun of how managers interview developers.  Having been a part of several interviews recently and being a developer myself, I thought I’d lend a few good questions to those managers out there who are looking for some tips.

I’ve used each of the following questions in various interviews with mixed results, but each one was effective in giving me some insight into the potential developer’s tendencies and personality.

1. Have you ever had to work on a project that has fallen behind schedule?  If so, how did you manage the pressure of catching up without sacrificing quality?
2. Would you call yourself driven?
3. Why did you decide to get into programming?
4. What project were you most proud of that you’ve completed?
5. What is your weakest area in the development process?
6. What is your strongest are in the development process?

As usual, don’t think that I expect my questions to be the ultimate solution or anything.  These are ones I use, I’d be curious to find out what other people use for similar situations.

 

-Andy

Why Not To Make an MVC Framework

As I think about what I’m hoping to convey with this post, I’d like to make two points very clear.  First, I am sick right now and very possibly am loopy beyond compare.  Why I decided to write a blog post in this condition is not a question I could ever answer.  Secondly, I have nothing against MVC beyond its status as an apparent fad in the web development industry.  It is a good design pattern that helps many people follow some great coding practices.  With that out of the way, lets get into the reason for the post.

The other day I was preparing to make a presentation on N2F to my local PHP Meetup group.  I remembered that a good many of the other members in the group were proponents of MVC, and figured that there would be no harm in creating a simple MVC extension for N2F that would show how flexible we made our framework.  Quite simply, this was the worst idea I’ve had in quite some time, but at least I got a bit of a chuckle out of the whole process.

I would never claim to be any kind of an expert on MVC.  I know the basic concepts, and attempted to build my extension based on that understanding.  The following file will give you everything I did to make N2F an MVC-ish framework.  The file mvc.ext.php is the extension which overwrites two system events to allow the change in structure.  The rest should be fairly self-explanatory, but should never be used on any kind of server…ever.  Enjoy!

 

Download N2F-MVC.rar

 

- Andy

Yverdon v0.2 - Looking Forward

For those of you who have been testing out Yverdon v0.1, I want to first say "thank you" for your time.  We've gotten some great feedback thanks to you and are doing our best to shape the system based off of your input.  We're aiming for a release early in December of v0.2, so I thought I'd give everyone a taste of the things v0.2 has in store.

Bug Fixes
Though I'm proud to say we've had a small number of bugs thus far, it would be a feat of unmatched fame if we had gotten through v0.1 without a few.  We're tackling all of the bugs we've encountered or been informed of, as well as fixing a few bad design choices with some of the core systems.  Everything will be backwards compatible with v0.1 just in case any of you have started using the framework seriously.

New Template Extension
Yverdon v0.2 will introduce improvements to the current dynamic template extension, as well as a new template extension called "static."  The static extension offers a more secure template parser for use with publicly editable templates.  We'll be sure to post a blogtorial on how to use it when the time comes.

More Database Accessibility
This release of Yverdon will expand upon our database engine selection.  We're including the old MySQL library as an option, plus one or two new engines that we'll save for release.  We also made sure to account for a bug in PHP's MySQLi library that would dump errors regardless of suppression.

New Utility Extensions
In order to show how versatile and effective the Yverdon system is, we're also piecing together some utility extensions (such as a FirePHP extension) to enable new capabilities for you, the developer.  I won't disclose a full list, but as usual we're working hard to make sure that the code is well thought out and efficient.

There will be other improvements, including additions to the web site and the introduction of a formal documentation.  I know I speak for everyone on the team when I say how excited we are to be getting close to this release.  Thanks for your patience with us as we build Yverdon into the robust framework it's bound to be and I look forward to more of your comments!

 

- Andy

N2F Yverdon v0.1 Released!

It's official!  The N2 Framework web site and the N2F Yverdon PHP framework have been released.  You can get to both of them by going to our website:

http://zibings.com/n2f/

Make sure you sign up on the forums too!

 

- Andy

The End of One Era, The Beginning of Another

Don't let the title fool you, I'm actually not about to embark on another journey down my twisted political mind.  Instead, I'd like to pay tribute to a piece of my development history that has served me dutifully over the past 4.5 years.  Most anyone who reads this blog will at least be familiar with the existence of ZSF, and some may even use it for their own purposes.  Regardless, tonight we celebrate all that it was and respectfully retire it into the software heavens.  (For anyone not following, this means that I'm not doing anymore work on ZSF, just to be clear)

Now that we have the emotional part of this out of the way, we'll get to the good news.  In lieu of the loss of ZSF, I have been working with some good friends and new colleagues to create 'ZSF Reincarnated', which we have called The N2 Framework.  The specifics of the plan for N2F are somewhat complicated, but for the moment we are working on one particular strain of the framework code named Yverdon.  Yverdon is the evolution of 4 and a half years of experience with ZSF bundled into one system.

Yverdon intends to be both simple and flexible for developers, on top of offering top performance and extremely low overhead.  The system is currently modular based, but is flexible enough to be overridden into most other popular patterns (including MVC).  Yverdon has been tested with PHP 5.2+ and should work with earlier versions of PHP 5.  Since the PHP group has been working to end it's work on PHP 4, we have opted to not make the framework PHP 4 compatible.  The system is currently being tested on both Windows and Linux environments to ensure that our code truly embraces PHP's cross-platform goodness.

Keep in mind that this is a very early release of the system.  Though we have worked hard to make the release functional, we can not guarantee that things will not change moving forward, nor can we assure you that there will not be bugs.  Our web site is in development and will provide easy ways to submit issues to the development team so that we can work them out.  We're looking forward to building a community around this framework and will rely on community feedback to shape the direction of the framework in the future, so don't be shy.

When the web site has been finished, I'll make sure to mention it at this blog.  Special thanks have to go to Chris, Matt, Patrick, Clemens and Javier for their various efforts towards this first release.  Working with each of them has been great so far and I think we're all looking forward to coaxing the true potential out of Yverdon in the months (and hopefully years) to come.

 

- Andy

ZSF Update

Last night a new update was made to ZSF. The update cleans a lot of bugs that were hanging around, and also begins working on some upgrades that will be important in the future.

enc_str()
One of the bigger changes was the introduction of a new function for creating hashed strings. The enc_str() function is documented within the code of ./conf/functions.inc.php. The previous function, encString(), will still work as expected, but is now considered to be deprecated.

ZSF_USR_LEGACY
As the PHP group stops work on PHP 4, more nad more sites written in 4 will finally be migrated to 5. Thankfully, ZSF is written to ensure as much consistency as possible during such a migration. The ZSF_USR_LEGACY setting fixes a problem that occurred when a PHP 4 ZSF was migrated to PHP 5 ZSF where the userHandler class' ability to inherit new methods was crippled due to a parameter change between the two versions. This setting is found within ./conf/config.inc.php as $system['usr_ver'].

config.inc.php and zsf.php
Another big change was the introduction of a new file, zsf.php. The contents of zsf.php are basically the same as the second half of config.inc.php, but the introduction of the file allows for configuration values only to be within config.inc.php. Along with this change, the index.php file for 'top level' directories was changed to be simpler.

Comments
Yet another big change has been the addition of standardized comments to the classes and functions within the system. This will help programs such as Zend Studio more accurately build their Intellisense library off of ZSF.

All in all, this was a huge update for ZSF. If you find bugs or have suggestions, please send them to our development list. We are holding off on the release of this until a quick site can be developed for hosting the system.

- Andy

What A Week...End...

So what started as a small idea for a side project between z|Casey and myself has turned into one heck of a plethora of changes.  I'll go straight into the breakdown.

The Zibings Network
This was meant to be the side project.  We were going to create a new site for the Zibings Network, one that allowed us to provide a good centralized location for registering with the network, logging into the network as well as getting general information about the network.

What happened instead, was the birth of a whole slew of upgrades to the network infrastructure.  While doing the upgrades (which include things such as friends lists and private messaging), I was faced with the necessity of having to change the way ZSF worked.  And that is why, the second part of this is...

The Zibings Site Framework
Yep!  And as with the ZibNet updates, this one started out small as well.  I just needed to add one capability to one section of the framework.  In adding that functionality though, I realized that just throwing the feature in its place wouldn't do much good in the end to help the framework grow.

After a few hours, I'd completely rewritten the framework, and we now have a few bug fixes thrown in as well as a new event system (that was the feature I needed).

 

Either way, its been a lot of programming, and this forces us to do some major updates to ZTC soon as well, so keep an eye out for that.  We're flying around like little bees as usual, this time just a few more fun things are on the way for you the user.

 

- Andy

Quite A Few Updates

Alright, so its been -quite- a long time since we've last spoken.  I won't apologize for it as the reason I've been so flaky with this blog is due to my excessive amounts of work towards adding features for little old you.

ZibTech Computers
A ton of work has gone into the ZTC web site, there's more details on that if you go to my news post.  What it comes down to, is that we've finally finished the inventory system and its in testing phases.  Once it leaves that, we'll be putting together things like our product listing and configuration.  Very exciting stuff!

Zibings Network
The Zibings Network updates really come in the form of two things.  First and foremost, we've sorted out a ton of bugs in the connection code and are now testing it on the ZTC site.  So far, its been running almost flawlessly, so we're happy.  Secondly, we've begun recoding ZibNetBot, which you all know and love.  He'll be redone in PHP and run as a Windows Service on our dedicated server, and from what we've done so far I can honestly say I'm looking forward to getting it done and seeing him in action.

Zibings Technologies
With the addition of someone to the Zibings Incorporated team, some new life has been breathed into Zibings Technologies, or as it was once named...Zibings.com Web Services.  I won't go into too much detail, as that would be giving away juicy secrets, but I will say that we're working on something useful for ourselves and for the company.  All of it is aimed at bringing something to life that should've been alive for years.

Epoch Gaming
Ahh, Epoch Gaming, my favorite little thing to forget about, how I do love thee!  For once, Epoch has taken a large step forward on a few fronts.  The web site has been resurrected and is being tweaked to work with the current version of ZSF.  Also, we're preparing to plug in the ZibNet connection code so that it works properly with the network.  Add onto that the fact that we've begun having development meetings for Forgotten War...for once I can gladly say that we haven't forgotten about good old Epoch.

Zibings Incorporated
We've recently added a new Director of Marketing.  Though his name is also Andrew, it is not the same person as me, which means the world to me.  He's already proving to be a very effective and motivated addition, so I think I speak for everyone when I say that his joining us is a welcome event.

 

That's about it for now.  I'm still out campaigning of sorts for Ron Paul, but its been hard to get much done with all the work being done on Zibings.  I'll make another entry when I can, and maybe someday I'll be caught up enough that I can fulfill my dream of blogging on a daily basis.  Until then...take it easy!

 

Andy

Stick To Your Guns

From good news to bad news, life seems to pack one next to the other, no matter how the world seems to be treating you. The multi-million dollar contract that we were working on has fallen through, but thank goodness it fell through in the manner that it did. I'll explain...

When we first started dealing with the bid we were a bit cautious as I stated in my earlier post regarding the bid (the post titled 'A Day Of Great Expectations'). I had asked a few friends to do some research on the company that we were dealing with in England to make sure that the offer was legitimate. The initial findings that we received weren't very promising, but we concluded that the best course of action would be to continue with the bidding process and see if our suspicions were disproven.

Up until the end of the process, we were happily disproven most times by the buyer. When we'd ask about something we were suspicious about, they'd answer in a way that gave us enough doubt in our suspicion to be comfortable with proceeding. As we got closer to the end however, they started making demands for product without payment, and finally for payment of a bogus registration fee to a government agency in Britain that didn't exist.

We finished up our research with our friends, and retracted our bid offer when they refused to take the £1,350 registration fee out of the several million Pound Sterling payment we were to receive on Monday (May 14th, 2007). We have contacted British and American Authorities and are working with both to try and track down the people we were dealing with so that they can't scam someone else.

Luckily, because of our suspicions and the title of this post, we didn't lose a penny on the scam. The phrase 'stick to your guns' is one of my favorite when it comes to business transcations. I know my company, I know what we're capable of and more importantly what we're comfortable with. I do not leave our 'guns' at any point during a negotiation, regardless of how large or small the transaction is.

In this case, our 'guns' were the facts that we would not begin working on building anything until we had received payment, and that we weren't going to pay for anything that we didn't know was necessary to pay for up front. We paid for things we needed, such as licenses with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, our distributors, etc.

We're all pretty upset about the loss of this 'contract', but we've already begun advertising all over the internet with our new website. If you search for the right terms, you might even see one of our links on the side of MSN Live Search or Google. ;)

- Andy

ZibTech Computers - Open For Business!

In the midst of everything else going on with the company, we've managed to finish the first version of our website and release it to the world. The site is by no means a good representation of what the site will eventually become, but its a great start and wonderful way to introduce the company to the general public.

I'd like to give a special thanks to Jon Coleman, Chris Butcher and Matt Hykes. Each of these three gentleman did a wonderful job working with me (often times late into the night) to get the different portions of the site setup and running smoothly. Without these guys, the site wouldn't exist yet, so thanks!

Along with releasing the site in its infantile form, we've started advertising online through things such as Yahoo! Classified, Windows Live Expo, and Google Base. Of the three, I so far like Expo the best, though its statistics could be a little better. The statistics category is taken by Google Base, and Yahoo...well Yahoo is there and used by a lot of people, so why the heck not use it?

Make sure you tell your friends/family/other and check out our website whenever you've got a few minutes!

http://www.zibtech.com/

- Andy

ZSF v1.3.3 Released

I've spent a bit of time with my beloved ZSF (Zibings Site Framework) tonight and released v1.3.3 of it 'to the masses'. You can check out the post on Super Tech Help for details on how to download it and some basic information on what ZSF is. I'll probably make a post at some point to go over what my goals are with the project, its pretty close to my heart. Here's a brief changelog for those interested:

• Imported entire tree into Subversion repository for versioned development


• Secured source.php for Windows machines (haven't tested on a *nix machine yet, will do for 1.4)


• Removed database 'script stoppers' so that script runs even if it can't connect to db


• Removed database error echo()'s so that error messages are all pretty in default template


• Modified and tested tpl_addVar() functions, tested OK but not sure if bug is fixed completely


• Changed config file to have proper default TPL_DIR (D:\webRoot\zibings\public_html\siteSys)


• Cleaned up a few files so they don't have blank tabs everywhere


• Modified database classes to work independantly of each other (new resource link on connect)


• Removed .tpl.cac files from cached directory (not necessary in repository)


• Removed install.sql file (outdated)

- Andy