DaveDevelopment::Dave Marshall

It’s been just over a month since I launched zfsnippets.com and I’m very pleased with the reception it got, which spurred me on to try and improve it.

Since then, following suggestions on the feedback forum I’ve implemented a few new features. What I’ve noticed is the ease at which these features where added, thanks to the quality of the Zend Framework.

Favourites

Along with adding icons for up votes, there’s now a little star icon to add snippets to your favourites, easily accessible from your user page. A little sprinkling of dojo and these are added via AJAX.

Revision History

Snippets can now be edited by the creator and a revision history is kept.

Using a simple implementation of the Longest common subsequence problem, you can also view diffs of the revisions.

Search

Lastly there’s the search engine, built on top of Zend_Search_Lucene. This took a little more work, but the results were worth it. I hadn’t realised how powerful the Lucene query language was until now and I’m very impressed with the implementation.

As you would expect, traffic has slowed down considerably since the initial burst, but there’s still a bit of steady traffic there and I hope people keep coming back to visit now and then. As for going forward, I think I’ll add a field to allow contributors to specify which zend framework version their snippet was tested or is compatible with, then look a little more at the scoring system.

At my current workplace, on a particular project we have not been allowed to use third party libraries, due to fears of licensing issues if and when we come to sell the product. The project is predominantly for the business, but it would be nice if we could convert the product into something we could market.

Despite multiple discussions and suggesting to management that open source software licensed under an MIT or BSD license would not have any implications, they would not have it. This has meant writing pretty much everything we need from scratch.

Recently, the managing director must have noticed the improved the user experience the little bit of JavaScript we use brings to the product. In previous conversations, I’ve mentioned to the MD that JavaScript is an area that the development team has little experience with, and this seems to have nudged him into letting us use a third party library or tool kit within the product. I spent a bit of time reviewing some of the frameworks and tool kits out there and basically boiled down to going with Dojo. Most of the frameworks reviewed provide similar features, Dojo came up on top because of the BSD license, recent announcement of a partnership with the Zend Framework and the added bonus of contributors having to sign a CLA. Looking forward to getting stuck into it and making our application a little easier on the eye.

The next task is to go about documenting the best way to include and use the tool kit in our application, will write about it if I get chance.