02.19.08
Leitrim Design House website
I recently did some work on the Leitrim Design House web site. I used the Zend Framework for the skeleton, YUI for the javascript bits and bolted WordPress into it to allow the nice people at the LDH to manage the content. I mostly developed it with Aptana and vi (more on that later), so I got lots of mileage out of free tools.
In hindsight, I think I should have used prototype instead of YUI (as I mostly ended up writing all the JS from scratch - I only used YUI to get at the DOM really). I had a really frustrating time editing my javascript with Aptana though. On my iBook G4 it kept freezing and crashing, mostly when it was trying to autocomplete my variable names. After a while I just gave up and finished off the JS stuff in vi.
I was impressed with the Zend Framework, especially after a long while writing fairly amorphous web apps in PHP. Forcing the MVC approach is a great way to put structure on your application. In fact, that would be my major criticism of ASP.NET - in trying to be all things to everyone it means the programmer has to be quite disciplined, which doesn’t always come naturally. Not to me at least…