I thought I’d give an update on the current status of my latest project. In another post, I had said that I was going to build the application in Rails (a Ruby Gem), but after trying it out, I simply couldn’t get my head around how complex the system was. Yes, Ruby has hyper fast processing, but development is far from that. Therefore, I have gone to the old faithful, PHP. Though now, the entire code base is object-orientated, with custom and modified stock classes that provide everything I need it to do. The only limitation to the speed is the current bandwidth of my Internet connection. I have never had any problems with PHP when it comes to speed, it just gets a little memory hungry from time to time, but with the right processing and application type, you can keep memory down to a minimum and speeds as fast as humanly possible. So, where does this leave us now? Currently, I have a template set up (which may change slightly from time to time based on what I need from it) which utilises the Twitter Bootstrap JS engine. Isn’t this lazy? No. It’s efficiency. Instead of creating my custom libraries for displaying buttons, menu’s, forms and more, I can use an open-source licensed alternative that does everything I need. I must say, I am genuinely impressed with how easy it is to use. There are a couple of features which I would like to see, such as better AJAX support in “Typeaheads” and nicer icon support (multiple sizes) – but I think they have these in for future releases anyway. At the moment, I am working on the advanced registration system which I am hoping to have finished in the next 24 hours which will allow me to move on to the logins and the client systems. Then once the client systems are in place, I can move on to building front-end systems such as profiles, blogs, forums and “The Library”. But, this is an ongoing development which will take many months to complete (purely because of University – and once I am out of University and graduated, development will increase 10-fold!)
