PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 10: Solar Overview
Special Guest: Paul M. Jones
Release Date: 07/10/2007
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
Today’s special guest is Paul M. Jones. Paul is an internationally-recognized expert PHP developer and technical consultant living in Memphis, TN. On his blog, he writes mostly about his software projects, but also touches on management, business, politics, and culture.
Today Paul is going to talk to us today about his Open Source PHP framework project, Solar.
Episode #10 Show Notes:
Do you have a question about what was discussed in today’s episode? Do you have a comment about the episode or it’s content? Post a comment and let us know.
If you want a list of all the episodes of PHP Abstract, checkout The PHP Abstract Podcast home page.
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About Cal Evans
Many moons ago, at the tender age of 14, Cal touched his first computer. (We're using the term "computer" loosely here, it was a TRS-80 Model 1) Since then his life has never been the same. He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PC's.
For the past 10 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, Windows. He has built on a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of "management by wandering around".
Cal is currently based in Nashville, TN and is gainfully unemployed as the Chief Marketing Officer of Blue Parabola, LLC.
Cal is happily married to wife 1.28, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 kids who were both bright enough not to pursue a career in IT.
Cal blogs at http://blog.calevans.com and is the founder and host of Day Camp 4 Developers
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July 11, 2007 at 3:17 pm
I’m litte bit dissapointed with that podcast as most of the things mentioned there is already written on the solar’s page – the only new thing was that bit about namespaces. And then Paul pointed to solarphp.com if one want to get more info, yet there is hardly anything more there than what was said in the podcast. Manual covers only basic things, no help on most crucial part of the framework (which is MVC of course). Also it turned out that Solar is still in alpha version (0.28) – considering the fact that the development started in 2005 I’m afraid that we won’t see anything near final (like version 0.9 beta) before php6 arrival. Kind of irony since solar is "Framework for PHP 5". All in all it looks like Solar isn’t really worth any interest yet and it’s better to stick to Zend or Symphony frameworks, eventually to ezComponents or even PEAR.
July 11, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Hi!
I’ve used Solar from the very beginning and I can tell you that things are pretty much settled down, at least regarding the MVC part. Overall, you’d be suprised how stable Solar is even though it’s still in alpha state. The MVC is *very* stable, in fact, I’d say it’s even more stable than Zend’s. There are many things in Solar that are not part of the Zend Framework. Solar concentrates on different things than ZendFW, so the stability is in my opinion a bad comparison method.
What comes to the manual, you’re right, there isn’t much yet. But don’t let that stop you; the code is *very*, *very* well documented and easy to read, also the mailing list is very helpful and friendly.
Paul, thanks for the introduction, hope to hear more podcasts touching on Solar
July 11, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Hi, Altom.
Don’t be afraid of Solar version number. The development consistence is a key part of Solar and 0.28 just means that it follows a reasonable and fair version numbering. It can be considered production ready, yes, and will probably reach a beta on the next releases. As commented by Paul M. Jones in the Solar mailing list, there are still some missing parts in the framework before a beta can be announced, but it is close, close…
> All in all it looks like Solar isn’t really
> worth any interest yet and it’s better to
> stick to Zend or Symphony frameworks,
> eventually to ezComponents or even PEAR.
Some misunderstandings could be avoided if there were more tutorials or docs out of the official site. Solar *is* really worth trying; after you try you can say if it fits your style. So, as a Solar user (and fan) I’m biased, as well as I’m forced to disagree with your statement: I’m running Solar in several sites and I’m pretty happy with how well it ties things together while leaving the door opened for my own implementations. All in all, it’s all about elegance: Solar is concise and consistent. Fine for me.
And again, don’t be impressed by version numbers… ZF is 1.0, but where is the M part from MVC, or forms integrated with models and validation, etc? Not to disrespect ZF which I appreciate very much and have been working with since beginning, but imo 1.0 is kind of a random number there.
July 11, 2007 at 7:40 pm
It seems to show a blank page after comment submission, leading users into believing that their comment was not inserting. The result is a bunch of double posts as shown above.
-Andreas
July 11, 2007 at 7:56 pm
Yes, the comments system will sometimes return a blank screen. The comment is recorded but the redirect fails. This is a known issue and I have a herd of code monkeys looking into it. Expect a solution soon.
Thanks all for the comments!
=C=
July 11, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Good to read that Solar is in good shape, the impression from visiting its’ website (alpha stage + bad manual + mailinglist archives not working) was pretty bad, especially in comparission to vivid communites other php frameworks have.
What can I add? Hope we will see final version soon.
P.S. regarding M in MVC from Zend FW – Zend_Db_Table works well in that matter
July 12, 2007 at 1:24 pm
to be able to listen to the podcast.
I usually listen to them in Google Reader, but for some reason, the podcast didn’t get sent with the feed. So I decided to come to the come to the site to listen and looked at the page for two days thinking that maybe it will be added before I figured out that the dark blue title was a hyperlink to an mp3.
Youtube’s founders said there is something about a play button that people just love to push and know exactly what it does…
Just a thought. Great work though I love listening to these on Tues and Thr weekly
July 12, 2007 at 1:29 pm
@emerhkay,
I’m glad you brought that up. Our crack team of design artists are hard at work on a solution for this very problem. This problem should be resolved in the coming weeks.
Thanks for the comment,
=C=
July 12, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Hi altom:
You said: "alpha stage + bad manual + mailinglist archives not working".
Alpha stage: sure, but in practice it’s about as stable as Zend Framework has been for that past few months. We don’t want to go to "beta" until the full planned suite of functionality is available. Otherwise we’d go to a premature "stable" and likely break compatibility between so-called stable releases. (Reasonable people can disagree as to how much BC breakage is allowable between stable released.)
I’ll grant that the manual needs some love, but I’d argue that the API reference is better than almost any other project’s. For one example, take a look at Solar_Controller_Page:
http://solarphp.com/class/Solar_Controller_Page
Yes, I know, narrative docs are better than API docs — but they take so much longer to write. I don’t have the financial backing of any corporation or development group to pay authors at this point, and all the Solar users are generally too busy writing Solar-based applications for fun and profit to write narrative docs for it.
However, you can view the community wiki pages here, if you’d like to contribute:
http://solarphp.org
Finally, as to the mailing archives, the link from this page does seem to be working for me:
http://solarphp.com/project/mailing-list
The direct link is:
http://mailman-mail3.webfaction.com/pipermail/solar-talk/
Hope this helps to dispel any negative perceptions about the project; please feel free to email me at "pmjones -at- solarphp -dot-com-" if you notice anything not working the way you think it should.
July 13, 2007 at 10:41 am
hi
yep, the mailing list archives are working ok now, there was some issues at the very moment I was writing my first comment (404 if I remember correctly)
I would like just to make it clear that I don’t question the quality of Solar FW itself, quite opposite – I’m pretty enthusiastic about that project and I strongly belive it is a well written PHP code, yet the things I mentioned underminded my rather positive feelings, and I think the same could happen to many others people. But, as I wrote before, it was (only?) "the impression". Yet, for many people (including myself) this might be the crucial thing as they don’t have the time to dig into the code or even API reference, nor reading the mailing lists. So please, treat my comments more as a concerns than an accusations.
July 13, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Hi Altom — thanks for clarifying, and for your good feedback.