PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 10: Solar Overview
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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Comments
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 :)
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.
-Andreas
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=
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 :)
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
@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=
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.
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.