Category — Work

Make the Enexity crew dull..and slow.

So, we played a little golf a couple months ago.

At least we remembered to take one pic.  Here it is.

From left – Joe, Scott, Jeff, Roland, Gene, Brad, Justin and Dave.  What a crew!

The Enexity Boys At The Course!

Like many folks with a software background, I’ve developed a few frameworks in my day.  My most recent framework, which I developed for LAMP sites, was the basis for Motosport’s current platform and several of eBags’ marketing websites (though not the main site).  Called iSkins, it was lean, mean and effective.  And I could whip up a marketing site in a day and a commerce site in a few days using it.

But like any other person whose day job is NOT developing frameworks, who has a small child at home and a lake house to take care of on the weekends, it was time to look elsewhere when asked to evaluate frameworks for a new in-house application we are developing here at Enexity.

Enter symfony!  Wow, what a great platform.  Every time I look for a feature that I had in iSkins, it’s there.  But it’s usually better thought out, more extensible, has a way better OO model and generally kicks the crud out of what I developed.

Symfony (from their website) is:

“…a full-stack framework, a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5.

It provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise…”

 Some of the advantages of symfony, as I see them, include:

• good object model
• MVC separation
• caching
• scaffolding
• Ajax
• ORM
• database abstraction
• a solid plugin architecture
• localization and internationalization
• the admin generator (WOW)
• the routing system
• form development and validation
• debugging

That’s a lot of strengths!

The one big weakness I see is the learning curve – the online symfony book is great, and there are lots of good tutorials floating around, but it’s still one heck of a big framework.

I intend, time willing, to someday write about how I came up to speed on the framework.  Instead of diving in to ORM and CRUD like many of the tutorials want you to do, I started with the site layout so I could understand the DNRY possibilities in the view layer.  In this manner, I was able to really learn about all the parts of the architecture without worry about some of the more esoteric matters – and, when I finally started doing “real” work with it, it looked nice right out of the gate.

Although the project we’re working on won’t be publicly available anytime soon, when I find time I just might upgrade devineville.com, parkeranne.com and a few other sites to symfony.

Ok, so I know they had a well publicized outage last week, but I finally converted my company over to the free version of google apps.  Shared calendar, great email with awesome spam protection, and it’s free.  We’re not an internet company, so having a nice partner like google to “get our back” on a mission critical service (as opposed to paying a ton for it with perhaps not even as much reliability) was a great deal.

 Love it.  Google rocks.

So I am using VMWare again – this time to test multiple platforms from my new Vista laptop (I don’t have a lot of love for Vista, at least not yet, but my company needs to test on all kinds of platforms).

 VMWare to the rescue!  I’m running multiple OS’s on one laptop and cutting my costs and testing time in half.

 Love it!

Well I finally took the plunge and decided to get my family back to Austin, where my wife is from and where I spent a lot of time in my twenties.

 I have gone to work for a great company – Enexity – that provides on-demand connectivity between secure organizations and their technology vendors and other 3rd parties who need ad-hoc, restricted, auditable network access. Their “SecureLink” Virtual Support Network (VSN) is used by over 10,000 organizations including technology vendors, hospitals, financial institutions, public sector entities and others to replace modems and is an easier, more secure and auditable alternative to VPNs. 

I get to work with the guy that founded the first dot com for which I ever worked, Jeff Swearingen (Co-Founder and CEO) – plus a lot of really smart, fun people who know how to build a great software product.

 If you want to contact me at enexity, just drop me a line joe@enexity.com.