AWDNUG March
For the first time, I believe, Crucible has beaten me to the punch in recapping this month's meeting of the Albury/Wodonga .NET User Group!
Last night we had Anton and Tristan presenting; Anton covering a module for Dot Net Nuke called Enterprise Forms, and Tristan talking about the LAMP development stack. Both were very interesting and engaging presentations. Tristan's almost made me want to get back into PHP. Almost.
For those who are relatively new to madprops.org, you may not know that at one point we ran on a content-management system called Drupal, written in PHP. At the time, I created a Drupal module called Propstar, which allowed you to assign star-ratings to posts and would bubble the highest-rated posts up to the front page. It's still in use on some sites today.
Next month we'll be looking at code generators as part of a presentation from Anthony, which should be fascinating. Brian will also show us the Goolge Web Toolkit, which I had never heard of.
In May we hope to have a presentation from Microsoft about Workflow in SharePoint! That should garner some attention. I'm desperate for more knowledge about SharePoint Workflow, and perhaps Microsoft themselves can sate my hunger.
Comments
# tristan
15/03/2007 10:54 AM
Ah, Drupal. You can forget getting back into PHP then, you're scarred for life ;-).
(Actually Drupal wasn't bad back at the time it came out, it hasn't really kept up the pace though - I was actually considering using it in my 'bad code' example!).
# mabster
15/03/2007 11:38 AM
I found it interesting that your 'good code' example was based on the premise of embedding snippets of code between standard HTML tags, rather than the entire file being one single script.
It kind of goes against the 'separation of UI and logic' idea, if you know what I mean.
But yeah, Drupal and PhpNuke are my only forays into PHP. It was a heck of a learning experience for someone who had really only done Pascal and C++ up 'til then.
# tristan
17/03/2007 3:53 PM
Hmm, at some stage obviously the UI and logic have to meet. Maybe I didn't explain that one very well, as the example was close to the most separate I've ever seen in any for of web dev!
# mabster
17/03/2007 5:39 PM
I did like the idea of the code being wrapped up in functions and simply calling them from embedded code. I guess I'm spoiled by the code-behind model of WinForms and ASP.NET nowadays.
As you would have seen in Drupal's code-base, my PHP experience has mostly been about writing out HTML one line at a time. Basically the least separate it can be.
In suppose I feel that a linear, procedural language like PHP works best when it's one long script, writing the HTML out as it goes, rather than snippets of code distributed among HTML. I definitely bow to your experience here though, having never had to maintain PHP code for any great length of time!