Nokia 770

November 12, 2006 by Oliver · 3 Comments
Filed under: Computers, Entertainment, Ruby on Rails, Technology 

My recently ordered Nokia 770 has arrived :o) For those that don’t know, it isn’t a phone – Nokia market it as an “Internet Tablet”. Basically it’s a PDA running Linux with WLAN, Bluetooth and an 800×480 touchscreen display. There’s too much about it that’s cool for me to go into right now, so I’ll leave you with the picture :)

Apparently the term “UMPC” is being used by a few people to describe the 770 (and similar devices) – “Ultra Mobile PC”.

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Zend Framework

July 18, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, PHP, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

Zend, the commercial endeavour of the people who brought you PHP have a produced a framework, cleverly called the “Zend Framework”. It’s basically a lightweight MVC framework for PHP. Lightweight in this case is good. It doesn’t do as much as Rails does for Ruby (although it is significantly younger) – the most notable hole is a object-relational-mapping system. But it does provide URL rewriting for Rails-esque view/controller access.

I started writing my clever language thingy in it.

The biggest problem I had was getting it to work with IIS. Which I couldn’t. I decided since I had IIS installed I’d give it a go. Unfortunately you require mod_rewrite which IIS doesn’t have. So I installed ISAPI_rewrite, a version for IIS. After an hour of trying to get it to work I went and downloaded Apache 2.2. Which was my second mistake You see it seems PHP doesn’t work with Apache 2.2. Not sure why but I found a vague mention of it on a forum after trying for another hour to get it to work. So I got Apache 2.0 and everything worked.

Of course there are reasons not to use PHP 5 with Apache 2, but meh.

There is one little problem with the Zend Framework, I think. It seems to be printing a space somewhere before any other output. It wouldn’t be a problem except I need it to output XML and a space at the beginning makes Firefox (and probably Internet Explorer) explode.

Apache, IIS, Zend, Zend Framework, MVC

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BackBase really pushing AJAX

May 5, 2006 by Oliver · 3 Comments
Filed under: Computers, Javascript, PHP, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming, XML 

BackBase is another AJAX toolkit. This one is different though. It’s not really an AJAX toolkit, more a toolkit powered by JavaScript taking advantage of AJAX. The clue is the price. Yes it has a price – $2000 to be exact. There is a “community edition” that is free for personal use though.

Anyway, I don’t have time to run down all the features but basically it defines a whole new bunch of tags allowing you to create complicated content in a declarative HTML style way. These tags are then translated into proper XHTML on the fly by the back end JavaScript engine. Since the clever work is actually handled by the browser, you’re free to use whatever you like on the server (PHP, Ruby) including static HTML pages – outputting BXML is no different to outputting HTML.

In fact BXML has a very ASP.NET feel to it and embedding BXML into an XHTML page along with ASP content could have the ultimate cleanness about it (syntax isn’t one of my complaints about ASP.NET). It should be noted that Microsoft are working on Atlas which could be something very similar but I haven’t looked into it…

It all seems very clever.

BackBase
BackBase Demos
ASP.NET Atlas

ASP

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AJAXy Scriptaculous goodness

January 27, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Computers, Galaxia, Games, Javascript, MPOGs, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming 

Scriptaculous is a Javascript library used for doing AJAX stuff and certain visual effects. It’s very well written, has excellent cross browser support and best of all there are cool functions in Ruby on Rails for using it.

One of the coolest features is drag and drop. I’ve already implemented it in Galaxia Ruby for adding ships to fleets :)

AJAX, Javascript, Scriptaculous, Ruby, Rails

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Tree structures in Ruby on Rails

January 24, 2006 by Oliver · Comments Off
Filed under: Galaxia, Games, MPOGs, Programming, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web Programming 

This is becoming a trend – another built-in feature of Rails that will seriously help Galaxia development.

You can use acts_as_tree in a model to make it, well, act as a tree. What this means is you add an extra field to the database called parent_id that tracks object’s parents. Rails automatically manages this for you and adds extra methods for dealing with trees (things for accessing parent, ancestors, children etc.). Just like the post on type, this is something I was already doing with Galaxia but managing myself.

OOP

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