My thoughts, rants and musings on technology, life, or otherwise

First off, I apologize to those who have tried to post comments. I did not realize I had broken my commenting section when I recently uploaded a threaded comment plugin. As far as I can tell, it is fixed.

I’ve received a few emails and requests for more information about linking Symfony to Joomla (Original Post). The questions were pretty varied, but mostly centered around gaining some additional clarity and securing my approach using symmetric encryption.

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I’ve been having this migraine of a headache lately. Its the result of trying to get a symfony-based web service that requires authentication to hook up with a Joomla web site. I’ve tried using COil’s suggestions, but it still didn’t quite work.

UPDATE 6/10/08:  I think I’ve nailed a solution down.

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Now that I’m back from Seattle, I’ve had some time to digest everything that I’ve learned.

I need to take more time to unit test. I half ass it right now and it hurts me so much more later in the development life cycle. What it comes down to is that I need a way to make my testing easier and I think I’ve learned a new way to do that.

XUnit
The XUnit framework provides a standardized way to test your code. Each unit test can then be combined into a test suite that can be run during each build cycle. Its own added value ensures that new code conforms to existing tests.

I’ll be looking into ways to utilize XUnit in my C development (CUTEST or CUnit) as well as my switch56 PHP development efforts. I will also be looking into such frameworks as FUnit and FlexUnit to assist in some of our switch56 Flex development.

As many of you know in my “free” time I manage, direct, and write code for a small company called txtMovieClub.com. It’s a pretty neat idea where we notify our subscribers of up coming movie screenings via SMS messaging.

One of the aspects to the project involves using google maps. Now since the project is written in php and uses symfony (which is flippin’ awesome!) I checked out phoogle. I’ll say this… it’s a good start and I like where Justin was going with it. It’s sexy, it’s abstract, neat. Unfortunately it just didn’t meet the needs for the page I was working on.

I decided to take a different approach. I wanted the map to be AJAX driven. If I wanted to modify the location I didn’t want to have to reload the map, I just wanted the map to clear its markers and recenter.

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Word press apparently has its limitations when showing code. At least with my hosting service.

If you’re using libperl++ and you’ve run into headaches or you’ve come up with improvements, let me know.