Moved (to Posterous). Giving away GoodBaad
It's been a long time since my last post, so to give myself a bit of a boost I've decided to move the blog to Posterous (sorry if this causes a flurry of reposts in you RSS reader). This should make posting a little easier and means I can get rid of my VPS server and save a few pennies.
I've also decided that I need an outlet for the code I produce out of working hours. Therefore I've started a GitHub account so that others can benefit from the work I've done.
The first chunk of code is my GoodBaad web-app that was started around 2 years ago. It was a lot of fun and was a chance to try my hand at building a scalable PHP site from scratch (year's of working with frameworks like CakePHP left me with a feeling that I needed to understand the process of building one from scratch). Although it's a bit old now I think I learned a great deal about being economical with code and building small flexible units that were short, easy to understand and ran quickly. Some rough benchmarks on my workstation lead me to think that this stack could out-perform the equivalent CakePHP stack by around 10 times. These gains were done without any data abstraction (I preferred raw SQL) or a templating engine (PHP is a templating engine if you ask me), and the app didn't need page caching as it was pretty dynamic (and you could always use memcached if it became a requirement) .
The core MVC was loosely based on ideas described in Rasmus Lerdorf's no-framework PHP MVC framework blog post. I agreed that many frameworks simply bring too much code to a application and for me this hid the most interesting parts of writing code. So, the result was an MVC app that sits somewhere between the no-framework stack and something larger like Cake.
So, if you'd like to run your own version of GoodBaad or need a lightweight PHP MVC stack you can take a look at mine for inspiration:
That's all for now, I'll be posting some functional programming stuff shortly (expect plenty of Lisp/Scheme/Clojure and JavaScript!).
