Moblin got me curios and I wanted to test it out:

Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems.

Cause I don’t own (yet!) a netbook, I installed it under VirtualBox (VB from now on). The image is 666 MB big and it comes not in an .iso, but in a .img format. But, VB, a really awesome software, had no troubles booting from it. As with the majority of Linux distros nowadays, Moblin image is also a Live CD, which means you can run it, without installing it.

Installing Moblin

The preinstall process is made up from 6-7 steps: choosing the language, the keyboard layout, the timezone and, of course, the partitioning. Basically, it’s just another boring “Next-Next” process. The installation itself took around 6 minutes to finish. When it’s done, it asks for a username and a password.

The first boot went pretty quickly, considering that booting under VB takes longer than booting under regular installations. The thing about VB is that it needs, the so called “Guest Additions” installed on the guest machine, so that the guest machine can be used normally. In this case, I failed to install it: Moblin comes with one version of the Linux kernel and the additions are for another version of the kernel. This prevented me in my quest to test Moblin fully. Anyway, I’ve managed to take a few screenshots of it, all are uploaded to my Picasa profile.

The m_zone

There was one thing that was strange. It has a “Status panel”, from which you can update your profiles on social networks. A really useful stuff. I just opened it up and updated my Twitter profile. Almost. I wasn’t logged in to Twitter from it and Moblin didn’t say a word about it. It just happily said that my status is updated. Once I found the “Web services” panel I logged in and this time I was really updating my Twitter stream.

I really was hoping to test it normally and write a detailed review of it, but this guest additions thingy thought otherwise. Moblin is a great distro, even in this beta stage I believe it’s useful. What do you think? Did you test it already, saw it in action?

One thing’s for sure: when I’ll get myself a netbook, it’ll run on Moblin.

Cheers!

P.S.: Check out the Moblin intro, too!

This post is the second part of my introductory text on Zend Framework, Starting with Zend Framework. This time I cover the basics about controllers, actions, view scripts and view helpers. On request routing and the Front Controller I will write one (or more) big post(s), so this part won’t be explained now. I will also skip explaining the models; they deserve their own post :)

If anyone is into writing a guest-post on models, let me know!

The Controllers

The Controllers are the heart of every MVC based application. They control the execution of the application, what to do with the data, what to show the user, what to write to the database, etc. The Controllers that you will write all the time, are called Action Controllers. These Controllers subclass the Zend_Controller_Action abstract class. Every application module must have a default Controller, which will be accessed if no specific Controller is requested. The default name for this default Controller is Index. Examples of the IndexController and FooController:

<?php

// The IndexController class must be placed in the controllers folder
// and saved as IndexController.php
class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function init()
    {
    }

    public function indexAction()
    {
    }
}

// The FooController class must be placed in the controllers folder
// and saved as FooController.php
class FooController extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
    public function init()
    {
    }

    public function indexAction()
    {
    }

    public function barAction()
    {
    }

    public function someRandomFunctionDoingSomeFunkyStuff()
    {
    }
}

Continue reading this post…

Zend Framework is a big & heavy object-oriented framework for PHP. I started working with ZF a couple of months ago, I liked it’s documention (it’s very well documented) and decided to stick with this framework. Here is the latest version of the framework — at the time of writing v1.6.1.

It supports the MVC pattern, which helps separating business logic from viewing logic. It supports a great number of API’s, such as Delicious API, Flickr API, Yahoo API, Akismet API and many more.

The advantages of using a framework is that it is enforcing the developer to write code using a coding standard, it is well documented and well supported, and it is a lot easier to work in a 2+ person team using a framework. If you are a one—man team, someday you may want to add more developers to your projects; the process of their settling in will be very comfortable if you are using a framework.

Choose yourself a framework that best suits your needs, or write your own (be sure to make good documentation, also!). To be honest, I wasn’t looking at other frameworks, just ZF, but I knew right away that it is good for me. Prior to this post I did a little research on other frameworks, and I’m still sure that I made the right choice by choosing ZF.

You can read a bit more about ZF in general on the overview page.

How does it work?

Before anything, we should take a look how does the ZF work, when used in the MVC manner. ZF has a thingy, called Front Controller. When a user is accessing a web page, the Front Controller is called: it’s determining what should be done with the input and which further objects should be instantiated and methods called, and in what order.

Continue reading this post…

… I have a Blog too! Well, it was damn time to get yourself one of those.

Actually, this is my third blog. The first lasted about a day or two. The second went alright for a time, but then the hosting company started to play around with settings, so the whole thing fell apart. This time, I’m serious. Kinda.

Until now I was foolin’ around a lot. Tried this and that, experimenting. Heck, I even got a job. A real one. For real money. It lasted about 5 months, but then I quit, ’cause I still have some bloody exams @school, and I commuted every day to work, so it was pretty hard to concentrate on both. Now, I’m back to freelancing. Studying hard to get these exams off my back, and working on some projects; nothing big.

Sooo… What to expect from me and my blog? Tutorials, screencasts, reviews, freebies, random writings… Anything that is connected with the Internet, it’s development and me. I’ll try to show up with some quality and creative stuff, hopefully, on a regular basis.

Ramble on!