Leave a good legacy

The word legacy in the IT word almost exclusively negative connotations. Out of that context it is used more diversely. Consider the legacy left by individuals and organisations such Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Michael Jackson and the Greek and Roman Empires. The forementioned empires shed a lot of blood and caused misery, but they continue to live in our everyday lives after thousands of years. That is the power of legacy.

You can have good and bad legacy in IT as well. You could say that Windows ME was built on bad legacy where as Mac OS X was started on good legacy. But all of these have history behind them, just as the code you write today will have in the future. Most of your code is likely disposable, but it's still worth considering the legacy you leave.

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Sunday September 6, 2015
Permalink - Tags: php, javascript, symfony, legacy

Dogfooding your REST APIs

RESTful APIs are on the lips of everyone currently. Everyone is got one or will have one very soon. They are always underlined as being full REST APIs. But if you're not fully utilising your API internally, is it really complete and a priority for you?

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Thursday September 3, 2015
Permalink - Tags: php, webdev, symfony, drupal, wordpress, rest, api, ezplatform

eZ Platform and a Graph Database?

eZ Systems has been working on a Content Management System with a rather complex content model for over 15 years. Traditionally this data has been stored in a relational database, supported by a Search Engine built with Solr. The new Solr implementation for eZ Platform was introduced at the eZ Publish Summer Camp 2015 by Petar Španja.

Some time after the session we discussed more details such as the decision to go with Solr and not ElasticSearch and one thing stuck with me. Would a mapping of the content repository to a Graph Database make sense? Is there a use case for it and how feasible would it be?

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Saturday August 29, 2015
Permalink - Tags: symfony, neo4j, ezplatform, ez, arangodb, orientdb

Helsinki Symfony Meetup on September 17th

The second meetup in Helsinki, Finland for developers interested in Symfony is held on Thursday, in September 17th. More details on the programme to be announce once we get them confirmed, but be sure to reserve your spot over at Meetup.com: http://www.meetup.com/Helsinki-Symfony-Meetup/events/224921452/

If you're intererested in web development, but not into PHP and Symfony - it is still worth while joining since Blackfire will support other languages in addition to PHP. Join us!

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Saturday August 29, 2015
Permalink - Tags: symfony, finland

Break down the silos, PHP developers

Much has been written about the renaissance of PHP. In most cases this is talked about by techies for techies. This tends to lead the discussion to the advances in technology. But technology is secondary to people and their motivations.

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Saturday August 22, 2015
Permalink - Tags: php, symfony, drupal, http, zend

eZ Publish 4.x to 5.x Upgrade Paths

In November 2014 the last versions of eZ Publish were released (5.4 and 2014.11). This is the last version of the fully featured Open Source Content Management System, whose code base dates back to 2002. From this version onwards the legacy code is no longer included with the standard distribution and the product will be known as eZ Platform.

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Saturday August 15, 2015
Permalink - Tags: ezplatform, ez, php, symfony