Random() bits of development musings

Hi and welcome to my blog. This is the first post of many to come.

In this initial post I’d like to cover some background about the projects I’m working on and what components I am likely to be covering in forthcoming posts.

A small note about the structure of the blog. I plan to analyse specific and unique components from the different projects I am working on. I want to demonstrate, learn and refine the entire process. The one thing this does in presenting the component in the manor is to make it a very specific detached unit. This is because I will be presenting the idea and development outside the context of the project itself. This means I’m already meeting one design goal OO by separating concerns. I won’t go further into this but suffice to say that when applying the process in your own projects it may be helpful to design and implement code in this frame of mind. In fact this is one of the founding principles of TDD.

Onto the projects. I have four projects I am currently involved on. The main one being the one I work on full time as part of my job. It’s fantastic project to be working because it presents so many challenges and interesting avenues of development. The other projects include a small web site for a sailing club and two open source projects of which I’ll go into more detail on below.

Maxemail (Work)
Maxemail is an email marketing system. In it’s simplest form it allows you to upload a list of email addresses and send a message to them. Then information is fed back to the system about who opened the email and clicked on a link and that information is compiled and presented to the user. There is a large amount of extra functionality formed around this core system. Some of this functionality or rather the components will be a focus for discussion here.

The latest version of the software has recently been released. Version 5 of the Maxemail product is based on the Ext JS javascript interface library which interfaces with a PHP backend through JSON calls. The setup uses a replicated MySQL setup with round robin load balanced application servers. This architecture makes the Maxemail system itself highly scalable.

Sailing Website
Overall web sites don’t really excite. They tend to be basic static HTML files with some dynamic content with PHP thrown in. The sailing web site I am in the process of redeveloping is no different. However there are few areas of interest which are a little beyond the norm of run of the mill web site.

Open source projects
These are two projects that have been started only recently. One is WebExplorer and the other is ExtDb. At the moment the ExtDb is on hold while work is underway on the WebExplorer project.

WebExplorer
The web explorer project aims to provide an interface using Ext JS to navigate most file systems. For example to most obvious ones that spring to mind are local and ftp but thinking further we’d like to integrate other file system like services. These might include SCP, Amazon S3 and maybe even network based shares. These would all be provided in one windows explorer like interface. The are no firm plans yet but there is potential for the project to incorporate other file operations other than just navigation.

ExtDb
ExtDb is a large and very ambitious project. The aim of the project is to provide an interface similar to SQLyog, again using Ext JS, for multiple databases. The main features would be CRUD for tables, indexes and views. The goal is to replace phpMyAdmin as the default administration interface. I think you’ll agree, a lofty goal indeed.

As I work on these projects I’ll present different aspects of the design and development here.