» Making progress on the new Packman website

Made good progress on the implementation of the new Packman website the last 3 days. I've been pushing this in front of me for all too long. It's about time to finish it and move on to other things. But once the site is finished, I'll still have to migrate most of my packages there, as I'll also join the Packman team. I wrote the new website from ground up, with PHP4, starting with a small and nice MVC (or rather, Model 2) framework. I like PHP for quickly hacking something together, but it's really a pain to make something larger and/or that has to perform really well (yes, I know Wikipedia, but do you know all the tricks behind the scenes to make it scale ?). I wish I could have used Java (and Spring and Tomcat and Velocity), but hey, Marc is hosting it and Marc decides ;-) After having gone through many hurdles (e.g. properly using references in PHP, what a pain when being used to design and code Java all day), the application and framework is stable and solid now, and I can very quickly implement new features or enhance existing ones. So even for a "smaller" project, it definately pays off to use MVC/Model 2 (separate view from model and logic), DAO objects and an almost totally separated view layer (which is the Smarty templating engine, in this case). Smarty is quite nice, actually. Coding done with Eclipse (my all-time favourite) and PHPEclipse. The latter is far from perfect (= the Eclipse JDE) but quite usable and nice nevertheless. Stay tuned, more to come, I think we're not far away from a public beta. It definately looks great and had all the features you could wish for (well.. almost, I doesn't do your coffee in the morning, it's not Emacs after all).