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My Life; Updates

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Howdy! It's been a long time I wrote anything here. The usual excuses apply: Life caught up too fast, broke records on how busy I could be & lots of happiness and sadness mixed together to create wonderful memories that I'll retell and relish often in the years to come.

Since I last wrote, I've twice thought about quitting MobME and going for higher studies. I got an admit into two UK universities but finally accepted one at UCL where I'll be starting an SSE course this September. Naturally, I'm quite excited about that! London itself would be quite an experience.

MobME has been astoundingly happening these past few months. When 7 of us sat around on my bed and talked about Torque, I never could have imagined it growing this big and vibrant. From working on Mobshare, to fixing problems with our bulk SMS solution FastAlerts and our voice solution based on Asterisk, it's been a hectic but fun ride. I've also slowly evolved from a programmer to a manager-cum-coder (the SSE degree makes sense in this context). It's a different ballgame altogether managing people and assigning work, talking to other technical guys to make things work and everything. Combining that with coding makes for interesting work. I've also decided that it's probably in my genes to work for a startup. Startups value good, hard work and do not care about my other eccentricities. Of course, I've had to tone down a lot of that. I sit with my leg up on the table still, but Scrum can't happen with a Scrum-master, so late-night work takes a back seat.

When I think back though, it's only the blogging that has suffered. Reading? I still read a lot of books (I'm probably the only person who's got a membership in Eloor Trivandrum, Kochi, and Delhi), and I buy at least a book a week online (either through Fictionwise or Webscription), and my taste in reading is still eclectic although it tends nowadays to Fantasy and Scifi more than the norm. Obama's Dreams from My Father was a good read though. So was Randy Pausch's Last Lecture (the video is a must-watch for anybody). Karan Bajaj's Keep off the Grass was interesting at first but the ending totally let the book down - it tries to do to MBA life what Chetan Bhagat did for the IITs, but sadly fails miserably.

Watching movies? Regularly, with discipline and a lot of focus. From electic ones (Swedish Let the Right One In - awesome) to all the usual masala flicks (RNBDJ), I've kept on top of the scene.

Coding too hasn't suffered much. There's work of course, but there's the bits I've managed to extract from it to be generally useful - the S3 asset cacher comes to mind. I also recently updated my portfolio and I'm more active on Twitter than usual.

I've made lots of new friends too at MobME, but I've found it hard to keep in touch with old ones largely due to me being pinned to Kochi & busy to boot. I'm right now in Delhi and I did visit Uzanto again after a long time, that was fun!

So that's it for an update, I'll probably blog more often from now on. There are some things I do want to do about this site - refresh the look for one - and more I want to write about (Love and Life doth come to mind), but that's it for now. Adios!

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Rails-like ActiveRecord for PHP 5.3

Saturday, September 13, 2008

I've worked on a small project that makes Rails-like AciveRecord available for PHP 5.3. It's unimaginatively enough called active-record-php. I think an approach of this nature would make a really viable competitor to the likes of Propel and Doctrine and I'll tell you why!

It works exactly like Rails' ActiveRecord. There are two features in PHP 5 which makes this possible (the magic function __call - equivalent to method_missing in Ruby) and something called late-static binding which is only available in PHP 5.3. __call allows dynamic method invocation and late-static binding (along with a few tricks) simulates class and instance methods in Ruby. Let's see some code!

user.php:
<?php
	
require_once 'base.php';
	
class User extends ActiveRecord::Base {
  protected static $class = __CLASS__;
	
  public static $associations = array(
    'has_many' => array(
      'photos'
    )
  );
};
	
?>
	
photo.php:
<?php
	
require_once 'base.php';
	
class Photo extends ActiveRecord::Base {
  protected static $class = __CLASS__;
	
};
?>

That's a basic has_many relationship. Include the base.php class (which lives in its own namespace), and that's it. No more configuring schema.xml, regenerating boilerplate get/setter code, etc. It's all in there.

How do you use it? Again, intuitive:

<?php
	
require_once 'user.php';
require_once 'photo.php';
	
ActiveRecord::Base::establish_connection(array(
  'host' => 'localhost',
  'database' => 'test',
  'username' => 'root',
  'password' => 'root'
));
	
$users = User::find_all();
$user = $users[0];
$user->user_name_set(\"Love\");
$user->save();
print_r($user->photos());
print_r($user);

That's all there to it. And less than 150 lines of code too!

Of course, this is more like a POC. The only stuff implemented are attribute getters and setters, a simple save(), a has_many relationship etc. No validation, the rest of the relationships, eager loading, et. al. But it's easily doable. If somebody wants access to the github project do let me know! It does require PHP 5.3 though (which is currently alpha 2) but do give it a try: a siege benchmark showed 5.3 to be around 30% faster than 5.2.6 for a simple caffeine (note: that's a link to my fork: the original is here) application, so 5.3 would be good!

Comments are welcome!

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