Cameron
Cameron is a PHP Application Developer and consultant and spends much of his time furthering the business goals of his company Magnetic Merchandising Inc. which he started in 2005.
Cameron has provided technical deployment and consultation for many entities since starting MMI. Much of that work has been in complex hosted auction platforms, professional Joomla! deployments and extension development and sales.
As such, Cameron has acquired a deep technical skill-set, a sensitivity to client needs, and the ability to produce anything those clients can visualize.
Everyday, he actively seeks out and becomes familiar technologies that will give MMI clients maximum return for their web development and general e-presence dollar.
I like Putty for Windows and Vagrant
Since I've started working with Timble I have been using the Joomlatools Vagrant Box a lot. And, since my system exploded last month while in Australia and had to buy a new one, I said bye-bye to XAMPP completely and redeployed all my projects inside my vagrant instance.
Engineering Internals of a RAD Framework... as a PHP Developer
Everyone has their own set of tools. As a PHP developer, one of my favorites is a Rapid Application Development framework called “Nooku”. In the words of the development group: “Nooku is more of a web development toolkit than a framework”.
In case you are not familiar with it, have a look. It’s an open source project that makes heavy use of industry accepted design patterns to produce highly componentized applications that are easily extensible and reusable (initially created by one of the lead Joomla! developers). Out of the box, Nooku gives you a great deal to help get projects off the ground faster. A small, but strong sample:
- A default implementation of MVC where all you need to do is write the layout (this is what hooked me) HMVC availability right away
- Support for different output formats like JSON and XML for all your data (i.e., expose your API in minutes) Default administrative and front-end implementations
- At the heart of Nooku is the “Composition over Inheritance” design principle (in fact, it’s the first concept on the Nooku introductory page). In one line: you should aim to compose (or add up) the functionality of multiple objects to create some sort of composite object, rather than relying on subclassing.
Read the rest @ Engineering Internals of a RAD Framework... as a PHP Developer on the TopTal blog
One Year with TopTal ... Could not be happier
A little over a year ago I was contacted by a TopTal recruiter and went through the validation process (which I wrote about in I just joined Toptal.com). Needless to say I was successful in that process as challenging as it was. Here I am one year later, and I thought it appropriate to talk a little about my experience here.
Getting Nooku 13.1 Framework and Server up on my Windows Box
I have been working with Joomla for a long time, but of late have been focusing on Nooku. Not that I don't think that the moves made in Joomla! 1.6+ and beyond are great (especially the RESTFul implmentation in the Application folder of the framework), but am enjoying using Nooku for its Service Oriented Attributes (check out Engineering Internals of a RAD Framework... as a PHP Developer which I just wrote as the second post for the TopTal blog)
.Anahita Goes Totally Open: "Sharing the Fruit of Knowledge"
Last night I read the following @ "Sharing the Fruit of Knowledge". Check it out. It got me thinking about open source projects and the path they take to either relative success or obscurity (totally subjective, I know)
Netbeans Build File for Managing Joomla! Component Development
So this past week has been a nice week. I have finally found some time to clean up some projects and tweak some of my developer tools.
This post is dedicated to a build file I use in Netbeans for Joomla! Component Development.
Get it @ Github .Quick & Dirty: Sidestep the CSS Variables in the backend with your own Stylesheet.
If you are like me, you like to put your css changes in a file. That's my preference anyway. However I like to work with in the system as much as possible so instead of just dropping a <link> tag in my template, I am using the style_compute api hook.
Useful Tip: Regular expression to find HTML Attributes
I use OpenOffice for my text editing. Its got some nice export features for *.pdf and *.html. In fact I produce my fact sheet and thought it would be nice to put it up here on CameronBarr.com too. However, when you export into *.xhtml you get all the class & id & style attributes and I don't want them!
So I thought:
What a great opportunity to practice my regular expressions!
Don't Mind the MESS
So I finally got around to upgrading my Joomla! 1.5 site (this site) to Joomla! 2.5. It only took 6 months :).
