Rail Yard
Rail yard is next generation PHP framework. It brings together common patterns like MVC and ActiveRecord. It follows conservation over configuration. It is build on PHP 5 and follows PHP best practices.
Why another framework? Don't we already have CakPHP, Code Igniter and Zend! All very good frameworks but having created applications in all these frameworks we believe that they are all missing a few key points. The first and most important problem is that routing in side of an application doesn't just relied on a Url. Other variables like sessions or cookies can also play a part and often Ajax and/or APIs also play some part of the process. To deal with this problem RailYard using a dispatcher class that handles routing requests. Second is lack of a descent ORM. Although most people assume that the ORM is mapping to a database it could also map to a service and RailYard flows the Rails approach to handling this problem with ActiveRecord and ActiveResource. Third is how these frameworks map actions to views. It is the nature of MVC that an action is related to a view but most frameworks call a view and auto render the results. All this makes managing the layers of the application hard. In RailYard in your actions you interact with a layout object that gets render against a layout view. The content of this layout is filled by rendering views into sections of the layout object. By taking this approach we can combine views in a Object Oriented fashion.
Crypto-Cartography
- Project Started: 2010
- Reference: Future Online Password
Crypto-Cartography is a service that provides authentication for web systems, like OpenID. What sets Crypto-Cartography apart from other systems is that your password is not entered as text but is entered by selected points on a map. With the longitude and latitude serving as the access code. By zooming down through the map to the high level of resolution, users can graphically produce a nearly unbreakable password that neither people nor viruses could track.
XSLT Templates
- Project Started: 2008
XSLT Templates is a client side jQuery library that takes XML and/or JSON data and renders it against of XSLT template to create text, HTML, XML, or JSON. As well the library can run script(s) after the templating process to add client side logic to the processed data.
XSLT seemed to the the best choice for a javascript template engine because it is standardized. As well a large collection of the internet data stores are XML, but JSON support is also needed for interaction with applications. It also meant that the same templates that are used in the web are transferable to other environments that support xslt.
Bottalk
- Project Started: 2002
- Reference: Semantic Web
- Reference: Twitter
Bottalk is a service for bots, devices, services and people to communicate and connect through the exchange of frequent structured messages. Why? Because the world needs and better way for technological devices to talk to each other. With Bottalk, services can post messages to a feed which other services can follow.
Bottalk was originally created before twitter but since its lunch as adapted some of its ideals. The target was home devices that could follow each other and other services for information and commands.
A prototype air conditioner was created to that monitored a feed for weather updates and adjusted its temperature range a accordingly. It was also able to monitor a feed from Ontario hydro that had information of current state of the electrical grid and would power down if in a high risk area to safe power. It could also follow my cell phone's feed for commands and confirmation of commands.
