Mike Whitman

Not much time for anything but packing and paperwork these last few weeks. Looking forward to getting it done. Interesting things to checkout when internet is reconnected and life settles a bit.  Google App Engine and Spring Roo. Also would like to continue investigating Symfony.

I submitted a support ticket and received an intelligent response with in 12 hours.  I followed that up with further info and received the resolution in another few hours. Turns out there was a misconfiguration in their standard php.ini.  The extension_dir was not set correctly. Anyway I am a satisfied customer.  Good job Bluehost!

When running symfony commands in an ssh session to create tables in the database:

php  symfony doctrine:insert-sql

I get

Couldn’t locate driver named mysql

phpinfo accessed via http indicates the presence on pdo_mysql and the mysql driver.  It seems like the command line php cannot find it. php -m does not mention pdo as a module.

Two hours of my life is gone and the problem is still not solved. Sent a ticket to Bluehost.

Symfony has the choice of two ORM tools, Doctrine and Propel, will be interesting to see how they stack up to Rails’ ORM, ActiveRecord,  and the Java ORM, Hibernate. This blog suggests that Doctrine is superior.  Looks like Doctrine, which is the default tool, is setup with a .yaml file which is what Active Record uses. If Symfony is Rails for PHP I am not sure I will like it.  I prefer linking pieces together with XML descriptors rather than by assumed naming conventions that I always forget because either I don’t use the framework enough or I killed those brain cells with the beer I drank last night.  I like an xml descriptor file to refresh myself on how an application is put together.

I am playing around with the Symfony MVC framework for PHP.  I have worked with Smarty templates before to at least separate out the presentation from the logic but have never worked with a full stack MVC framework in PHP.  In the java world I use Spring MVC and I have written a few Ruby on Rails apps.  I wonder how Symfony will, ahem, stack up. More later…