Like I mentioned in my last blog post, we have a company internal framework that is quite advanced thanks to the various symfony components we have integrated. Its other main advantage is that it can do a lot with very little code. The net benefit of this is that it's extremely easy to learn and debug. Especially the last point can be somewhat painful with symfony since inheritance trees tend to be quite large and things get delegated to other objects etc. However once you start getting a hang of where things are, symfony is very powerful indeed. The other day we had a little hackday at Liip where we wanted to write a little google maps app. The idea was to have different kinds of markers shown on the map which when clicking on them would both load some data into the classic GMap marker bubbles as well as some additional data into a div below. Furthermore, the markers should be filterable. We choose symfony 1.4 as the basis, mostly because we wanted to learn a bit more about symfony, but also we felt that some of the module generation tools could help us get off the ground faster.

We are currently in the process of updating our company internal framework okapi to use several of the symfony components. The service container component seems to be the one that poses the biggest challenges since there are several conceptual issues to address. As such I am looking for other implementations of the service container to see how things work there. I have posted this on the symfony-components mailinglist a while back, but got no reply (probably because the list wasn't really announced properly), so I am reposting this in my blog to reach a larger audience, but also to bring some attention to the components mailinglist. I guess most of my concerns are not really all that much about dependency injection but the service container approach that symfony provides to make dependency injection use a bit more convenient. We have managed to somewhat answer our questions, but some still remain open: Where to keep the SC instance? How to deal with shared instances that need to be reloaded? How to deal with Service container caching and auto regeneration?

What on earth is Monty (and Richard) thinking? How can you spin around 180 and expect to come of believable? How can suddenly the GPL be the wrong choice? How can suddenly OSS depend on proprietary sales? Anyways, even without this change of minds, I do not believe in their arguments. I also do not hold stock in any of the involved companies (well I do not hold any direct stock in any company only indirectly by way of a few retirement funds I hold), so why do I keep posting on this? The reason is that I think this kind of stuff hurts OSS. It creates the kind of FUD we were worried about Microsoft spreading about OSS. Now that they are shutting up more and more, some seem to feel a void that they need to fill with some FUD of their own. To me Monty is just abusing the lack of understanding but the growing interest from the EU commission about open source to get his baby back on the cheap, or at least as much control as he can, since after all his baby can never be taken away .. its GPL stupid! But just as well anyone can have his baby on the same terms and of course only one company can claim to own the original copyright.

I mentioned un-informed.org twice before in this blog. In short we want to make UN resolutions for accessible to the world. Last week I went to Helsinki for a short but very productive meeting with many people from the MCM team, the people behind the un-informed.org project. I showed them the current state of development on the backend. Thanks to Dennis we already have a more or less working Excel import, so that we could look at things with some real world data (note that in absence of a real database the team is currently using Excelsheets). The result of the meeting is that we now have finalized the requirements for a first version of the backend which we hope to complete by March 2010. Since we are hoping that additional developers will join us this month, we have a plan A for this case and a plan B if we remain a two man IT team (Dennis and myself).

In my last blog post I have explained a bit more complaints about pretty much all CMS that I have seen in the PHP space to date. Now I wonder is there any CMS I should be checking out? Note I am not so interested in a CMS that is still in its infancy, I am looking for a CMS that can have a fighting chance to compete against Drupal, ezPublish and friends in a feature checklist comparison. Actually I always wonder why Midgard gets to little attention. It seems to be based on the concept of a content repository which in itself sounds promising.