Yesterday I was toying a few ideas with a colleague. We were talking about platform strategies and how they could serve our business. Platform in this sense come down to service oriented architectures (SOA).

I instantly wondered: isn’t tying it all together a perfect use case for Symfony?

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ESI · REST · Service · SOA · symfony

About a month ago I asked you what do you think about advertising on test.ical.ly for Open Source sponsoring. In the last few weeks more thank 50 people participated in the poll.

Here are the results.

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advertising · Online Marketing · Open Source · test.ical.ly

The websites I supported over the past four years all earn money mainly through advertising. For that reason I am interested in the technical aspects of advertising and would like to add adverts to this blog knowing that most of you won’t appreciate this.

Would it make a difference when the money earned would be donated to the Open Source community?

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Open Source · test.ical.ly

I just had an idea. Maybe other had it before me but so far I haven’t heard of it.

What if instead of hiring an SEO agency for your web site you let a few of them pitch for a prize. The one with the best result wins and gets the money.

Would agencies take the risk of loosing – of getting no money at all? What are the prerequisites?

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Google Analytics · Google+ · SEO

When you start a new website to earn some money from the first thing you want to make sure that you can measure its success.

Using Google Analytics you can do a lot from scratch but you can do a lot more when you dive into it.

How do you implement GA?

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Google Analytics

Following yesterdays post as well as Ryans comment I want to try to  get closer to the bottom of the business value of a software.

To answer this I think one has to understand the effects a software – a framework in this particular post – can have on the business.

Let’s examine.

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Business · business value · Frameworks · Software Development

When working with Symfony2 one of the first things you notice is that in all those places where your first impulse is to look for structure there is none to find. No classes to inherit from and no particular folders to place stuff that will come to live automatically (magically).

This is true for Doctrine 2.0 as well where all your models are plain old php objects (POPOs). In fact there is no real structure. You can do pretty much everything pretty much everywhere.

But there must be some best practice to follow surely?

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Doctrine · Symfony2

Imagine you write a cool new PHP library and you want to decoupled it as much as possible so the user can be as flexible as he can be.

But during runtime you need these dependencies anyway. The question is how to inject them?

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dependency injection · inversion of control · PHP · Separation of Concerns

I am thinking about this question for quite a while now and try to find an answer that is not technical as the people doing these decisions in most cases try to decide economically. So this question is not limited to symfony or PHP or web frameworks but in fact applies to every framework technology.

It is my understanding that a framework is a tool that enables your development to get a better result faster.

How how can you estimate this? How can you value one framework over the other?

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architecture · business value

One of the many things I really like about doctrine is the data type Array. On the database level it is a serialized string representation of a plain PHP array while on the record level it is PHP array.

You can use it to store more complex data with a changing structure per record. But how do you maintain this in a symfony form?

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Doctrine · DRY · gjPositionsPlugin · symfony