Yesterday, at Forskningsavdelningen (geeking every Tuesday night!) we had a blazingly fast run-through of web tools. This link-dump will probably be amended.
I had time to set up a Redis, and do a test run with Rediska – a PHP interface to Redis. It worked, and it’s in PHP. I was more impressed with the redis-cli experience. There are many atomic commands in Redis, and the datatypes are quite helpful.
We spent some time walking through a BDD tool for async web framework Node.js: VowsJS. When that was done, we looked at kyuri, the library that can transform a Cucumber feature spec into a skeleton VowsJS “vow”. kyuri was used for prenup, a web tool to create Cucumber specs for Node.js projects. prenup was quite alpha, but we sympathized with the concept.
Joel pointed to PHP-based web frameworks “like Sinatra“, and found a few that he rejected. The last man standing was named GluePHP. He can list his gripes with all the others. We looked at Troels’ Konstrukt, as well, and it got good reactions. It’s good, but it’s nothing like Sinatra.
Flask is a web microframework which was used at Forskningsavdelningen last night. “I don’t know how to use this, so let’s begin.” And we begun, and had a website up and running pretty soon. A roadblock in the form of “convert a regular font file to a PIL-font format” appeared, and a hell-of-Portfiles ensued. I should start using Homebrew…
Oskar had referenced Windows hacker Scott Hanselman, and we praised his article on changing default web browser in Visual Studio for it’s complete hacker attitude. Here is a link to his PowerShell category on his blog.
Oh, Hanselman lists Windows tools he uses.
Other stuff, that should be mentioned, so as not to forget:
Whiskey Disk is embarrasingly fast deployments – their videos, presentations, etc, are very convincing, and “keep it easy.” Someone who takes Capistrano down a notch for “not being simple enough” should be listened to. The system seems quite capable.
Inspiration: This morning I saw that some Drupal folks were using a Phing task to automate fetching and building a customized version of Drupal, for their deployment. They included two useful tasks: help and explain, where help informed about the available options, and explain printed all the variables that would be used when running a phing build. Also, they informed the user of how to change those variables right on the commandline, and gave the tip that they should run the explain task with changed command-line settings. This would verify that Phing had understood the user’s invocation correctly.
