general posts

Haven’t been posting much at all, but I’ve not been working on web stuff any less. I’ll give a bit of a synopsis of what I’ve been doing. This year I’ve been doing less new and interesting with HTML and CSS and more with JavaScript and PHP and database stuff, particularly the last several months. We’ve had one rather large project that requires mostly work in those areas. We are building a system that will use a JS heavy admin area based on Qooxdoo. The public side will use Symfony 2 with Doctrine for managing data. All three of those I’ve never worked with before and have had to learn as I go.

Qooxdoo is a full framework for JavaScript with a class system and a bunch of widgets that make working with it sort of like programming a desktop GUI application. It really extracts away from HTML/CSS and it can be frustrating knowing how to do something easily with those but not being able to use them. I don’t care for the abstraction, and it would be unfeasible to build a non-JS compatible app with this approach. I do like its class system quite a bit though. It has a lot of features and gives a lot of functionality for free, such as firing events on property change and easy access to parent methods. I’ve been working on my own class system and would like to incorporate some of its features.