Category: Community

Recess Community Updates

Posted by Kris | Comments ( 0 ) | Filed in: Community, PHP | | | | |

In the month since the new Recess Forums have launched the number of posts and interesting topics has been flourishing. Lots of great things are bubbling up:

PostgreSQL support is being developed on the database stack lead by Ryan Day. You can pull Ryan's postgres bits from Github here. Ryan has also put up two great, introductory tutorials on his blog. The first is on modifying the generated scaffolding code. The second is on beefing up date input fields. Awesome work.

Christiaan has been working on a Recess project that changes the Recess flow-of-control policy to achieve a more nested MVC approach. Check out his project alive.

Issue tracking has moved from lighthouse to Github to keep our source and bugs closer together.

Some other interesting threads from the forums:

If you haven't joined the forums or checked back in on them in a while, you should head that way.

Around the Recess PHP Community

Posted by Kris | Comments ( 0 ) | Filed in: Community, News | | | | |

Just wanted to call out a couple of news items that have been bubbling up around the Recess developer community over the past week or so.

  • zdk put together a plugin for Smarty Views that is compatible with Recess 0.20. Download zdk's Recess Smarty Plugin here and check out the README for instructions in smarty/README.txt. He's also put together a simple Smarty / Recess demo app. Thanks zdk!
  • Improvements to the database stack were brought into Recess Edge on Github thanks to commits from KevBurnsJr's groupBy and midnightmonster's exists.
  • Preview scripts for the Recess Sandbox, a virtual Ubuntu development environment preconfigured with all the best open-source tools to do first class PHP software engineering are now available on Github. Setup instructions can be found on the Recess PHP Wiki (that just came online this past week and needs some help!). Expect some full-blown articles on Sandbox soon, but if you can't wait to get your hands dirty feel free to play. The Recess Sandbox setup comes loaded with:
    • Server Software
      • Apache 2.2
      • PHP 5.3 w/ a Lot of Extensions
      • MySQL
    • PHP IDE
      • Eclipse PDT 2.1
      • Integrated Debugging
      • Syntax auto-completion with Recess
    • Interactive Debugging
      • XDebug Installed and Configured
      • Ready to hook-up IDE and XDebug
    • Profiling
      • Profile any script with an additional query string
      • Visualize and inspect call graphs with KCacheGrind
    • Unit Testing
      • PHPUnit 3.4 setup
      • Run Test Coverage reports
  • Work on Recess 5.3, a branch of Recess that leverages many of PHP 5.3's new capabilities for an even more enjoyable PHP development experience, has begun in earnest. More news on this will start trickling in as our series on Functional PHP continues. If you're interested in the new functional PHP features be sure to check out the first two installments: anonymous functions, closures, and lambdas in PHP 5.3 and understanding and implementing map and reduce in PHP.

Exciting times in the land of Recess and PHP. What will this week have in store? Stay tuned to via RSS.

How-to Help Document the Recess Framework

Posted by Kris Jordan | Comments ( 3 ) | Filed in: Community | | | | |

Documentation has been one of the sorest spots for new users of Recess. Until now it hasn't been possible for the community to contribute to documentation.

Recess could really use your help with documentation.

Over the last couple of days a big push was made to pull together the existing documentation into the DocBook XML format [http://www.docbook.org/]. DocBook is a common format for technical books and documentation. It is plain-old-XML, is easily modified and contributed to, and has great support for generating down to XHTML, PDF and other formats.

Examples of published output with existing content can be found here:

XHTML: http://www.recessframework.org/book/html/index.html
All-in-One XHTML: http://www.recessframework.org/book/html/the-book-of-recess.html
PDF: http://www.recessframework.org/book/pdf/the-book-of-recess.pdf

How to Contribute to Recess Documentation

Using GitHub and XML documents we can now iterate on the Recess documentation together.

The docbook source can be found on github here: http://github.com/recess/the-book-of-recess 

First, fork the repository on GitHub. A forking guide for GitHub can be found here: http://github.com/guides/fork-a-project-and-submit-your-modifications

Second, run the ./scripts/install.sh script from the base directory of the repository. This downloads/unpacks the Java libraries for processing DocBook to generate HTML and PDF with syntax highlighting.

 - *nix folks this should just work
 - Windows folks use MinGW [http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/] and make sure you have the 'unzip' command available at the command line. If you do not, download the 'unzip' executables from here [http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204414] and drop the executables in your mingw bin folder.

Third, run the ./scripts/publish.sh script from the base directory of the repository. The result should be a folder called 'pub' that has the HTML and PDF output.

Finally, edit the book's content. Don't feel constrained to the structure that's currently in-place. Use the existing chapters for examples of how to mark-up code examples, sections of a chapter, etc. This page is also a great resource on Docbook's tags: [http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/docbook.html]

Anywhere you can contribute, add comments on, provide a source code example for, please do! While the amount of documentation exists is sparse we should err on the side of quantity over quality. With editing we can refine the rough bits and iterate together towards having the best documentation of any PHP framework.

Finally, request a pull and your contributions will be merged into the documentation.

If you have any questions or run into problems with the install/publish scripts leave comments below.