Bruce Sutherland

Lithium: the Most RAD PHP MVC Framework

2012-02-08T22:00:00.002+11:00

I decided that I would use the Lithium Framework as the basis for my website. I decided early that I didn't want to use an off the shelf Content Management System because my online based business is going to need an actual web application. It will not be simply a blog, forum or other site aimed at having people post and view content.

The plan for the application is to have the website receive information from the users, run computations and display the information back to the user whenever they visit the site. Whilst working at EA I was introduced to the Agile Methodology. This methodology is rooted in the technique of running small iterations to achieve a goal and build the software incrementally. This approach will allow me to set high level goals for the functionality of the application and plan the execution of these goals as I go. I believe this will allow me to have a flexible approach to building the application, get to market earlier and hopefully build some traction. If I manage to achieve this, the iterative approach will then also let me react quickly to the needs of customers. Lithium will help with this because it has been designed specifically to facilitate RAD.

Lithium helps with Rapid Application Development by being a Model-View-Controller framework. This allows the separation of the application storage, logic and rendering layers.

Model: The models in an MVC Framework are objects. These objects represent data which will be saved for visitors' subsequent visits to the site. An obvious example would be this blog post. The model would contain fields which store the title, body, publish date, author, etc. of the post. Every time a user visits the page the model can be recreated, used to load the data from the medium where it is being stored and shown to the user. You can then have collections of models to sort by date, author, tags, etc.
Controller: The controller in an MVC Framework is the most important part of a web application. It is where logic is used to turn input into output. For example, a blog such as this has two parts to the system; it has a front end where visitors come to read posts and a back end where the author can go to write new posts or carry out other functions. Each of these other functions can have their own controller. Blogger could have controllers for dealing with Posts, Comments and Stats as well as others. Each of these controllers then has one or more actions. An example action would be New in the Posts controller. This may be self explanatory but the New action would allow the Posts controller to take input from the author, create a model and use it to save the Post to the database. Usually the last function carried out by an action is to render the view.
View: Views are possibly the easiest part of the system to understand because they generate the HTML to be sent to the browser. Lithium's views are usually made up of two templates; one for the page layout and another for the page content. The layout template is used to store sections of the page which are shown by all actions such as the navigation bar, page header and page footer. It also determines where on the page the content should appear. The content template is then used to generate the HTML for the content and inserts the content into the HTML created by the layout.

This is a very brief and quick description of how the Lithium Framework is laid out. This is also mostly true for any other PHP Framework such as Zend.

I decided on using Lithium as it supports newer features of the PHP Programming Language which appear to be able to make life much simpler for the developer. Models, for instance, can completely abstract the process of saving information to a database. This means you can create models for any type of data without having to write complicated SQL queries. It also allows our code to be neat, tidy and understandable, a by product of which is code which is easy to understand, learn and maintain. All of which will become important if our business becomes a success and we need to hire other people to work on our code.

By this point you may have decided that a CMS or a more simple solution would benefit your business more and that's great. Computer programming, whilst not always hard, does take a considerable investment of time to learn and you may already have enough on your plate with learning how to design a product, bootstrap a business and communicate with other people effectively.

PHP: First Step to a Dynamic Web Page

2012-02-05T12:14:00.000+11:00

PHP is a scripting language which you can embed into files on your server. The PHP interpreter is executed by the server whenever a browser requests a page and it returns a page of HTML to the browser.

If you are wondering why this might be useful, think of any website you go to which could look different every time you go to the same page. With only HTML that page would look the same every single time you visited, but by using a scripting language, such as PHP, you can create a site which shows the latest information which you have stored in your back end database.

Your favourite news site is probably the easiest example of a dynamic web page. Every time you visit a site such as BBC News you'll see all of the latest headlines without you having to do any additional work.

The BBC would have achieved this by using a script on their server which queries their database to show you the last 5 or 10 news stories which were added to their database, sorted by the time and date they were added. Quite clever.

Now that you understand the basics behind why you might like to have a web site which can show content dynamically, you will start to see these pages or elements of pages every time you visit them. A more complex example is Facebook which actually has a lot of PHP applications all interacting and co-operating to produce something like your timeline, messages, wall posts, photo albums and games or applications. Now that you know this, you can see just how powerful and flexible a web page can be.

For our very first PHP enable web page, we're going to do something very, very simple, just get PHP to output a piece of text.

First, if you already have your index.html file from earlier, rename it to index.php then make sure it's contents are as follows.

<html>
<head>
<title>PHP Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo date("h:i:s D m, Y"); ?>
</body>
</html>

Now, if you've set up your server properly you should be able to use your browser to point to http://localhost/index.php, or which ever address and folder you used to set up your server, and you'll see the current date and time shown on the page. Every time you refresh the page, after more than one second has passed, you'll see that PHP has dynamically generated the current time.

Well done, you've created your very first dynamic web page.

If you use your browser to View Source (usually an option when you right click on the page), you'll be able to see that the PHP code you entered into the file is not present. The server has stripped the PHP code out and replaced it with the time which was provided when we used echo date. You can look at the date page on the PHP web site and play around with the letters to print out the date and time in different ways.

If you have any queries about this post, leave me a comment or if you're having trouble getting set up let me know and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction.

LAMP: A local web server

2012-02-05T11:06:00.002+11:00

I've decided that I'm going to use Ubuntu as the operating system for running my home based business from.

I've decided to use this because it and all of the software I need to run the business are free which keeps the costs of my business so far at zero.

I'm not going to try to provide information on how to install or set up your computer to suit the way you work as the information I provide here would quickly become out of date and it would also be suited to exactly the way I like to work which may not be the best for you.

You can get all the information you need to install and use Ubuntu from the Ubuntu web page: http://www.ubuntu.com/

If you're reading these posts in chronological order, every post from here on will assume you have Apache, MySQL and PHP set up on your system of choice.

On Ubuntu you can install LAMP easily using the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^

On Windows you can install a WAMP using WampServer:

http://www.wampserver.com/

And on Mac you can use:

http://www.mamp.info/

As always, if you need any help of info regarding this post leave me a comment.

CSS: Giving Your Web Page Style

2012-02-05T10:46:00.002+11:00

Cascading Style Sheets are used to provide the style you see on web pages. The point of having CSS is to separate the content of your web page from the data regarding how it looks. This is a useful thing to do as it allows you to change styles when it suits and makes it easier for you to know when the content of your page is wrong, or the style is wrong.

CSS can be applied to HTML documents in three different ways:

Inline
Embedded
External

Inline styles are created by applying CSS statements to the HTML tags directly using the style attribute.

This will set the colour of any text inside the body of the page to red. For anyone out there using British English, note the American spelling of the attributes, if you get this wrong it will not work!

Embedded styles are inserted into the page by using a special HTML tag called style:

<head>

body {

color: red;

}

</style>

</head>

As you can see the embedded style can be placed inside the header of your web page and will achieve the same result as if you'd attached the style to the tag directly. This is the first step towards separating your style from your content. However, it would still be difficult to swap styles in the future as you would still be required to rewrite the page to replace the style section of the header.

External styles allow you to write your style into a separate file and use the page header to tell the browser to request that file from the server.

index.html file:

style1.css:

body {

color: red;

}

This example shows two files, your index.html page which contains the content of the page and your style1.css which contains the style for the page. Now, if you wanted to make a change and have all the text on this page blue for a short time, rather than changing the style sheet, you could create a new file:

style2.css:

body {

color: blue;

}

And then change the link to point to the new file:

Now you can change styles on the fly or even show different people different styles using PHP, which we'll look at later.

Hopefully this gives you a basic understanding of what CSS is used for and the three different ways to add style to your page.

Dual Booting: A Guaranteed Way To Boost Productivity At Home

2012-02-04T21:09:00.000+11:00

Computers are great devices for working on, but they're also exceptionally brilliant time wasters. It's not very often when you sit down at the computer when you can blank out all the temptations and not check your email, Twitter, Facebook, the news or even the latest page count for your last blog post.

Josh Kaufman, in his book the Personal MBA, reckons that people have a limited amount of willpower to use every day. I found this idea fascinating because I know myself how I can prevent myself from doing certain things, like drinking a coke despite wanting to lose weight, but after the umpteenth time that day I will cave in.

The same thing can be said for trying to avoid distractions when you're meant to be working. His solution comes in the form of trying to set up your environment to avoid needing to use your willpower as much as possible. He calls this theory a Guiding Structure. With the coke example, it's much better to not ave any around, that way you don't have to use will power to prevent yourself from pouring one out.

Whilst it's not possible to block out the internet whilst making a web based business we can create a guiding structure which puts us into the working frame of mind. I have done this by installing two operating systems on our laptop. Windows 7 for play and Ubuntu for work. If funds are no barrier for you it would be possible to achieve the same result with two computers, a Windows PC and a Mac for example.

I've chosen Ubuntu for my working operating system because it provides absolutely everything I want from an operating system for setting up our business. Most of the web hosts out there use a Linux operating system and Ubuntu is a particularly easy to use distribution of Linux. It's also completely free which meets the needs for us to keep our costs as low as possible and it's fully compatible with the laptop we already own.

Ubuntu has a very easy to install LAMP server package which will get us up and running with a local web server which supports PHP and MySQL without any real effort. It also supports free image editing software such as GIMP, a free development environment such as NetBeans or Eclipse and a host of other free tools which we will be using to set up our business.

If you've any other tips on how to be productive at home whist surrounded by all your favourite temptations, leave them in the comments below.

An HTML5 Primer: Learn How to Write Your Own Web Page

2012-02-04T10:23:00.001+11:00

Web pages are actually just text files which follow a specific layout. This specific layout is called HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

When you type a web address into your browser, the browser follows a set process to retrieve the file from the remote server. The communication between the browser and server follows a protocol known as the HyperText Transfer Protocol.

Don't worry about the specifics of this for now as it's a complex topic and you'll become more familiar with it over time if you stick to your plans for running a web based business.

So, lets take a look at the layout for a simple web page.

<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
My First Web Page
</body>
</html>

That's it. This is all you need to create your very first web page. Admittedly, it's not very exciting and it's definitely not going to be the next Facebook but it allows you to see exactly how HTML is written and the major parts of a web page.

The first thing to notice is that there are certain words wrapped in <>. These are called tags. An HTML tag is an instruction to the browser to treat everything between the tags in a certain way. All tags in HTML must be opened and closed. The entire page is required to be wrapped in an <html> tag so you can see that at the beginning of the page we have an opening <html> tag and at the end we have a closing </html> tag. You can see the same for the head, title and body tags.

The head tag is used to contain meta data about your website. A good example of that is the title tag which is used by the browser to set the text displayed in the menu bar and on tabs. We'll cover more about the types of information and what they're useful for in future posts.

The body tag contains the actual content of the web page. If you save this file into a file using a text editor, call it index.html, and open it in your web browser you should just see the My First Web Page. The browser has automatically stripped out the details it needs to create the page and has shown just the content and hopefully set the menu bar to be Page Title.

That's it. You're first web page!

At this point it's a good idea to talk about html editors. On Windows you can use the simple Notepad application which comes installed with Windows although I'd recommend you download Notepad++.

On Linux, you've got the option of using the command line editor VIM which is very powerful but complex or the pre-installed GEdit.

I've never used or own a Mac, so if you're reading this leave your recommendations for Mac html text editors in the comments.

Starting a website

2012-02-03T21:19:00.001+11:00

The very first decision you need to make when starting a web based business, is to decide which type of technology you'd like to use for the site.

In case you don't already know, most web pages these days are actually computer server programs running on server computers which send information back and forward between your computer and the computer the web site is running on.

The word server has two meanings in this case. The actual computer the web page is running on is often called a server but the software application running on the hardware is also called a server.

There are two main software servers in use today and you need to decide which of these you would like to utilise for your web presence.

The less common of the two is produced by Microsoft and is called Internet Information Services. Web sites which use this server are normally full web applications written using a Framework called ASP.NET and written in the C# programming language. The costs associated with this are usually higher than the other type of server and the technical knowledge of programming required is generally also much, much higher.

The most common option is called Apache. Apache can run on Linux, Windows and Apple OS/X and can support a variety of plugins and extensions. The most important of which is the PHP Programming Language. PHP is a much easier language to learn and is one of the oldest languages which have been used to create dynamic web pages.

The next most important piece of technology which you will use for your website is a database. You may not use a database initially when creating web pages with simple images and text on them but when you extend into storing user information, running a blog or handling sales, you will definitely need a database. You'll find Microsoft servers come with Microsoft SQL Server or Linux servers will come with MySQL.

At this point you need to decide whether you want to develop your own web page and learn how to program web applications. If you don't you'll likely want to use an off the shelf Content Management System. Examples of these are WordPress and Drupal. Almost all free and easy to use CMS systems are written in PHP, utilise a MySQL database and are best suited to running on a Linux based web hosting plan.

I've decided that I would like to program my own web page and have decided to use a LAMP stack. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I won't be using an off the shelf CMS although I am still trying to decide if I'll use a pre-existing framework such as the Zend Framework or Lithium.

If you've any questions about any of these things or have any advice regarding using the Zend Framework or Lithium, leave a comment or a message on Google+.

An idea is not a business

2012-02-03T13:30:00.000+11:00

So, you have this amazing idea for a business or you look at something you own or use and can instantly see all the ways in which it could be made better. Or you maybe even have a role at your work and you know you could execute it better if you could do it yourself.

I imagine that these are common feelings which people have. The thing is, none of these ideas on their own are a business.

I think the best description of a business which I've come across is Josh Kaufman's in his book Personal MBA.

He defines a business as a repeatable process which:

creates or provides something of value that
other people want or need
at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that
satisfies the purchasers' needs and expectations and
provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners' to continue operation.

This is exactly what we want to achieve.

I'm going to be creating a website to facilitate selling educational mobile phone and tablet apps aimed at young children.

To go along with that this blog is a side project of the business. It's helping me formulate my business plan by forcing me to think it through well enough to be able to write it down. It's forcing me to be happy enough with what I want to do to a point where I'm happy to publicly discus my plans.

It's also, hopefully, going to create posts of value, which someone wants to read, for free, which they get enough out of so that they're willing to keep coming back and generate enough revenue for me to keep the blog going.

If you're thinking about starting an online business, I'd recommend doing the same. Get a blog and plan to write regular posts about your business. The process is worth it, you'll hopefully learn something about yourself and your plans, you might connect with like minded people and if you're really lucky you might even make a bit of money from it.

Starting an Online Business

2012-02-01T21:37:00.000+11:00

Hi,

This blog will detail and discuss the steps I take along the path to starting my own online business.

The plan is to start of a business with as low amount of financial costs as possible whilst working at my full time job. Online is an excellent way to go about trying to achieve this goal due to the low overheads involved. So far I figure the only overheads required to start a purely online business are web hosting and domain registration. The only other things required to begin are my time and effort.

As a bit of a background you should know that I'm an ex-game programmer and am currently working in the web development industry writing PHP back end services for web apps as well as dabbling in a bit of front end development with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. So the internet itself isn't alien to me but the concept of running a business definitely is.

This blog will eventually have posts with subjects as diverse as front and back end web programming, web analytics, hardware infrastructure, Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing as well as how I am attempting to keep fit and healthy whilst doing all of this. I'll also write a few posts about what I'm hopefully going to do with any proceeds I make from this business, which will be to invest the profits into income producing assets which will hopefully enable me to retire financially independent.

If anyone takes the time to read my blog, add me on Google+ and let me know what you think.

Bruce