Johanna Cherry

T-15 days until thesis deadline.

So after struggling with Solar for so long, I decided to switch to a different framework. I evaluated Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, and symfony; which were all on my list in the beginning as well. I looked at others as well but didn’t seriously consider them. After looking at each, I decided to try symfony. I didn’t like the documentation for ZF and although I really like CodeIgniter, it is PHP4 compatible, which makes me sad

I thought symfony was over complicated and bloated, especially compared to CodeIgniter. But I figured if nothing else, I would get a lot done quickly and that’s what I need right now. So I’ve been working with symfony for about 2 days now, mostly reading documentation and trying out some stuff. I’ve gotten more done in 3 hours of coding with symfony than I had in 7 days using Solar. All I can say right now is . . . I think I’m in love . . .

I am using the Solar framework for my senior thesis project at school. I think the framework is great but the lack of documentation is extremely frustrating. Maybe once I am done with school I can help contribute to that. But until then, I’ve got 15 days to finish my project, and its not looking good when it takes me 4 hours to figure out what one line of configuration code I am missing. I am going to keep notes on this post of the issues I ran into and what I ended up figuring out. I’ll then try to work it in to some more formal documentation.

Mailing List
The mailing list archive has answered a lot of questions for me, but the link to the page is broken. The archive is here.

Extending Solar_Sql_Model
This class is the active record/ORM implementation in Solar. An abstract class which is extended by your application classes. Great implementation so far, but one little configuration quirk. Add this line to your bootstrap index.php file so it will stop throwing the exception “Solar::ERR_NOT_IN_REGISTRY”

$sql = Solar::register("sql", "Solar_Sql");

Solar_Sql is your database configuration info and it must be manually placed in the registry. Still trying to figure this one out. I’m going to try to check in with someone in IRC tomorrow. Nobody is around right now. Its like they’re sleeping or something…