Rego’s Everyday Life

T3CON08: Last Day

Yesterday was the last day of the conference and after the party the day before people were quite tired.

I decided to go to the next talks:

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to TYPO3 v5: This was a talk to summarize the work done during the last year on FLOW3 and TYPO3 v5 projects. There were some things repeated from the tutorial and he mainly talked about persistence and REST services, every operation that could be done in TYPO3 backend will use web services. A good presentation with videos and so on, I liked it.
• Continuous Integration for FLOW3: A good talk about Continuous Integration in TYPO3, it works really nice perfectly integrated on TYPO3 forge running all tests in 3 platforms (Mac, Linux and Windows). It uses Hudson, and he explained about how to use it for particular projects.
• Intelligent web forms: As a Formidable collaborator I can miss the only talk about forms in the conference. They talked about the extension FormMaker that allows to manage forms from backend. Something interesting is that it allows to define some steps in a form, dividing it in several pages defining a workflow; they manage it with sessions and it has a drawback because you couldn’t have two forms with different data in two browser tabs. It seems a very powerful extension, maybe quite complex in the beginning but I should test it to give my opinion about it.
• Transparent Object Persistence with FLOW3: Karsten started talking about DDD (Domain Driven Design) and explain the different concepts of that approach: repository, aggregate, entity and value. This is the base of FLOW3 persistence framework that defines a Content Repository in which objects are stored automatically. A good point of this repository is that you can mount a relation data base and use it as an object with the API of the repository. There is a tool called TYPO3 CR Admin quite useful to see the stored date.

Finally I didn’t attend to the Best paper award event because the “Spanish” people (Nivel Siete, ICTI and Igalia people) went for a walk to get an overview of Berlin. We took the underground till Alexander Platz and we returned walking to the hotel seeing a lot of monuments.

In this TYPO3 conference I tried to catch as much information as possible about FLOW3 and TYPO3 v5 and these talks refreshing my concepts about Software Engineering (AOP, DDD, TDD, …). Furthermore they recommend a lot of books about Software Engineering you can see the further reading section at FLOW3 website. My conclusion about these projects could be that there’re a lot of things to do and one of them is improve the performance, if they get it FLOW3 will be a great framework and TYPO3 will have a great source code.

Congratulations to the organization of this great conference and also to Igalia for let me live that great experience.

T3CON08: Second Day

This are my feelings the second day of the T3CON08 (October 10th Friday), actually it was the first conference day, because the previous day there were only tutorials.

The day started with the Keynote by Kasper, it was shorter than I expected but quite amusing. The next year will be a TYPO3 Conference in Dallas (USA) but it should not replace to the conference in Europe, it means that TYPO3 community is growing and it’s good.

After the Keynote I went to the next talks:

• DEV3 – TYPO3 Enterprise Development: DEV3 is an Eclipse plugin to work with TYPO3 4, FLOW3 and TYPO3 5. It has a TeplateView that allows to users to modify TypoScript from Eclipse, users can edit constants and setup sections, moreover it has syntax highlighting, syntax checking, auto-completion, … for TYPO3, FLOW3 and TypoScript (mental note: “I have to test this plugin”).
• CSC2: Bringing CSS Styled Content to the next level: This was a talk about CSS, but it was very general and I don’t like it so much, maybe because I don’t usually have to fight with CSS or because I already knew the most of the things that she said.
• OpenEMM – Sending out Newsletters with TYPO3: An extension to send newsletters that integrates OpenEMM into TYPO3 backend. For that extension you need OpenEMM, an open source Java application, and it doesn’t provide anything special compared with TC Directmail (tc_directmail), so if tc_directmail doesn’t fits your requirements maybe this new extension could do it.
• Business Case – Marketing Open Source Software: Another quite general talk about marketing in open source companies, he recommended a book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and talk about that in open source companies there’re 4 C’s, the common 3 C’s of marketing (Corporation, Customers and Competitors) and Community.
• Touchless Security with FLOW3: An explanation about how the security framework works in FLOW3. It uses AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) to can intercept every method that is going to be executed and through ACLs (Access Control Lists) the framework allows or denies the execution of any method. The most important here is that you don’t have to take care about security in your code, only have to define a concrete ACL and never modify your code.
• Test Driven Development using FLOW3: He explained the concept of Test Driven Development in which you have to write tests for all your code and before write your code, in that way you define the APIs before write it. FLOW3 has a Testing package based on PHPUnit that make easy write unit tests. I think that it’s a very interesting idea about how to develop an application. Karsten also talked about Test Driven Design, because some time you are doing design while you write your tests.

That day was a long day because of the conference dinner and the party after that. Not a very good day talking about the talks but a good social day.

T3CON08: First Day

Hello from Berlin .

I’m in the TYPO3 Conference, today I’ve attended two tutorials: development with FLOW3 and a workshop for creating TYPO3 websites.

Robert Lemke was the author of the first tutorial, it showed a mixing of his podcasts about FLOW3. The great new was that there is already implemented a complete blog system like buzz.typo3.org with FLOW3 using the content repository as persistence mechanism (quite interesting see that actually some stuff works). However the main problem is still performance (Robert said that it shouldn’t be difficult to fix) but the development context is currently very slow. Some brief comments about this tutorial:

• Classes define actions, methods that are going to be called from outside.
• All objects are single instantiations (Singleton Pattern) if you don’t mark them as prototype.
• If you depends on another class you should use Dependency Injection defining a method that is going to be called automatically when the class is instantiated.
• He gave an overview about Domain Driven Design, in a roughly way we can talk about 3 concepts: entities (objects), values (immutable objects) and aggregates (entities that are going to be searched).
• Talking about persistence we need a repository for each aggregate, if we extend the basic repository we’ll have common methods to add, remove, find, … (other entities will be stored transparently). The content repository need that the type of class attributes is specified through comments.
• Finally he talked about REST services, and all repositories are going to be services that will be called automatically to the concrete method depending if there is or not some GET parameter or if there is some POST parameter.

The second tutorial was a workshop from jweiland.net, they gave some useful receipts that can be applied in any TYPO3 projects. They talked about a tool to clean TYPO3 installations, it seems very useful because in big projects usually you don’t know how file you need or not in your filesystem, they don’t say the name of the tool but I can guess that it’s the cli_dispatch.phpsh script (more info) I have to test it!. Other comments:

• Use UTF-8 for the database from the beginning (it’s always good to remember).
• For TypoScript they recommend to create a library in a system folder that could be used in other projects (exporting/importing), these TypoScript templates will be used with Basic Templates and defining constants.
• Moreover it’s possible to detect syntax errors in TypoScript using the Object Browser and the Template Analyzer.

I’ve enjoyed this first day so I’m going to rest to be prepared for tomorrow.

PS: I’ve met some people from Colombia (Nivel Siete) and we’ve been talking Spanish in Berlin .

MyTime 0.2 – Remote storage

We’ve just released the new version of MyTime the main new feature is that now the information about applications use registered by MyTime is stored remotely, so you can use MyTime in different computers and share the same data.

If you want to use this new feature you’ll need an account at Box.net, a web service that allows users to store files online, and set this account at MyTime preferences.

Moreover MyTime 0.2 is integrated with Online Desktop because it’s using the Online Desktop account system to store the Box.net account. We’ve developed a library (libmytime-common) that has the responsibility to manage the account data depending on if there’s an Online Desktop session, when it uses the Online Desktop account system, or not, then it uses the GNOME Keyring.

Feel free to test this new release, we’ll be glad if you give us your feedback.

PS: MyTime is on Softpedia.