I'm thinking about this for two weeks now and I cannot decide. I need a permission management system preferably with an existing web UI to control the rights. I may create one on my own; it can be a great benefit for the project, because this provides unlimited flexibility. The project itself is a very complex portal which will hopefully get hundreds of thousands of hits every single day - sooner or later that is. I shouldn't depend on other projects at all.

At the same time, I'm an open-source guy, so I'm also leaning towards using existing systems; I selected LiveUser and phpGACL for the purpose. The big question is, if I should:
a) use LiveUser, which means including PEAR on every request, which wouldn't happen if I didn't choose LiveUser. I prefer LiveUser because I already know it (well, the last version I used is 0.3.0-beta, they actually have 0.14.0-beta) and because I know many of its developers personally plus I tend to like them and trust their knowledge.
b) use phpGACL - it needs ADODB but I don't use ADODB at all and I don't plan to do so. It doesn't need PEAR though. You are right, I'm a PEAR developer but I don't use PEAR in this project at all. phpGACL is also very promising: "GACL class: Designed to be very small (517 lines of code including comments) and very fast, this class strictly takes care of the permission checks."

LiveUser has LiveUser_Admin and phpGACL has its own "Admin Interface" as well. The latter is currently more advanced as far as I know.

Oh, and if it counts, the project is based on WACT. I need to access the permission system both in the PageControllers and inside the templates, so I will have to create some new tags as well, which is an exciting task - hehe, code generation rulez :) I also know that Ian White has already started working on a LiveUser implementation for WACT.

Actually I think I will choose one of the systems above, run profiling tests at the end of the development and create a custom system if they aren't as fast as they should.

LiveUser vs phpGACL - PEAR vs ADODB.. what should I choose and why? Any tips are greatly appreciated :)

There's no tool that meets my expectations or it is too complex for my needs. Today I found this great WinZip add-on (thx nrg!). The following commands placed in a common batch file do the trick:

del e:\backup.zip
svnadmin dump e:\_data\qlzrep01 > C:\svndump
wzzip -s -ycAES256 -r -P -ee -x@"C:\_backupexclude.txt" e:\backup.zip @"C:\_backuplist.txt"

-s: asks for a password
-yc: encryption algorythm
-r: recursive mode
-P: store full paths
-ee: enhanced deflate method
-x@: list of files (wildcards) to exclude
@: list of files to add to the archive

c:\_backuplist.txt
"C:\_backup.bat"
"C:\_backuplist.txt"
"C:\svndump"
"C:\Documents and Settings\x\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\*.*"
"C:\Documents and Settings\x\Application Data\Thunderbird\*.*"
"C:\htdocs\*.*"
... etc ...

c:\_backupexclude.txt
; music videos
"E:\_hobby\(media files)\*.*"
; dj mixes
"E:\_hobby\djmix\*.*"

Works perfectly. There's no better tool for Windows if you have a well-structured directory tree.

"Software patents are dangerous to the economy at large, and particularly to the European economy," Torvalds, Widenius and Lerdorf stated.

Despite the fact that I saw the call against software patents everywhere in the last couple of months, I didn't really knew what it's all about. Now that I see the three well-known names from the open source world behind this, I suddenly got interested.

I made some research on the web and I feel that from my point of view, software patents are considered being mad. I found a lot of great examples against them like this one but the whole thing probably isn't so simple. People thank Poland for stepping back.

"Because of numerous ambiguities and contradictions respecting the current directive project, Poland cannot support the text which was accepted in the vote of the Council on 18 May 2004," the Polish Council of Ministers said in a statement. Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands have made declarations distancing themselves from the text. All of Germany's political parties called for the proposal to be modified to clearly exclude software patents. (eWeek online)

Although I plan to move many times in the following 20 years, I'm proud to read the name of my country in the list.

You can read more about software patents on this site.

I didn't really like the Horde project until now--mainly because not knowing its details, except their webmail client. Today I had to install the Horde framework to some unix box and I'm amazed because its internal structure. Horde is a great (and huge) collection of projects using the same framework, don't believe what those people say who only tried the mailing client.

The goal was to install Whups for ticket management; the process was clear and straightforward after installing Apache, PHP and mySQL on the server and finding out that I need Horde 3.0 & Whups from the CVS.

I recently installed ThunderBird 1.0 and it seems to work perfectly. The upgrade went fine, I use this client since the 0.7 release. The new icon set is nice and I tried the RSS reader as well, but I still don't like the fact that the mails & feeds are stored on my desktop PC. /me really needs a notebook.

I must admit we have some great talks for the Hungarian PHP Conference in 2005. If you feel you can talk about some interesting topic(s), join us now!

Finally using Subversion for all of my projects & I'm lovin' it.

In fact, I really dislike WACT. I checked out the newest committed stuff and patched a file again that wasn't patched in the CVS yet. Then I went to grab some food and when I arrived back to my home, I saw that Jeff committed the patch :) Lesson learned: checkout only before you actually begin to work.

Until now, I was fine with the simplest rules only (REQUIRED_RULE, SIZE_RANGE_RULE). Now I need to compare two fields, specifically passwd & passwd2, where passwd2 is for confirmation in the registration procedure. So I started to browse through the rules to find out how to write one. For my greatest surprise, I found MatchRule, so I don't have to write anything on my own :)

The reason to hate WACT is that it's fcking good to work with :) Awesome architecture, a lot of pre-written classes. Thanks to everyone who participated in the project until now.

Harry already reported about this but I missed it somehow; an interesting article of a Development Infrastructure for PHP. Scheduled to be read later on today.

Looks like there's a couple of new commits again in WACT, Jeff changed the way tags are registered in the template engine. This doesn't really affect average WACT users (like me now). But hey, let's start testing the new stuff :) Just checked out of the CVS

In the last days Jeff committed the new controller architecture which makes things much more simple. I found a very simple bug in Controller::getRealPath(), that is also patched now. WACT 0.2 planned to be released on 1st December.

<oujie`> public function __construct() { parent::__haveSex(); }
<awormus> if PHP supported multiple inheritance, that might work...

These weeks I get more and more involved in WACT. I'm very impressed, it made development exciting again, I didn't feel this for more than a year now. Besides WACT I still use Savant of course, DB_DataObject still speeds up my development, and HTTP_Upload takes its parts in my daily job. I'm a bit sad because I didn't found the time for improving FormBuilder and I couldn't attend The Conference. Everyone's there except me and Helgi, but we promised to attend the next one, if possible. That's the perfect place to discuss TGCP. Wondering what's that? :) It'll be announced during next year :)

For those who want to know what's going on in my mind in these days:

"I started working with ThoughtWorks in the spring of 1999 and found a company whose attitude to people and customers fitted remarkably with my own views. They build the kind of mission critical business systems that I like to be involved in with the quality that I always aim for. But the key reason I joined them is because they really do believe that people are their biggest asset. I've seen many companies say that as a cliche, but not here. And that to me is essential because I believe the biggest impact on successful software development is motivated, talented developers. If you don't have that all the technology and methodology in the world can't help you. By hiring and keeping the best people, ThoughtWorks have the key to succeed in this business - and I do enjoy being around the best."
(Martin Fowler)

"talent goes where the money is"
(Marco Tabini)

Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google

Enterprise PHP

WACT

Do you get it...?

Thanks for everyone for the comments and the mails regarding my previous entry. In the last two weeks I came to the conclusion that what I look for is more like an IDE than a run-time form generator engine. I have very big plans in my mind about a new IDE that speeds up PHP development to the max--it's a web app designer desktop application that generates whole websites/portals in PHP. And yes, it can be written to be flexible enough(*). It should be able to generate "plain" PHP code or code using PEAR packages and/or other external libraries (ADODB, Smarty...).

The process could look like this:
- database structure creation (+ additional info like field labels, validation etc)
- form generation from the database tables (add/remove fields, modify field labels/validation, add upload fields etc)
- template creation (skeleton from db tables for lists, forms; they can be modified in any ways)
- sitemap definiton (defining "actions" for web requests)
- fill in the actions with code: this should work using the drag & drop technique, pre-written code snippets like "get record with id #x from table #y", "load template" or "send mail to $address" (which generates a call to the mail() function or puts the mail to the Mail_Queue, depending on the project configuration)
- code generation

The main idea behind this is to get an IDE where you deal with the webapp itself and not the code and/or the libraries you use. You define what you want to achieve, decide on which libraries to use and the system should generate everything for you. It's a must to avoid any possible limitations.

Did anyone see any project like this on the web? Let me know! I'm strongly thinking about starting such a project by myself. Anyone willing to invest in me? ;-)

--
*enough: for developing small-to-middle sized web projects.