Our progress in 2011

In just about 12 months since the first public release in Feb 2011, Agile Toolkit now have thousands of users worldwide (with no paid advertising). We’ve came the long way in 2011 and there is an exciting way ahead in 2012.

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PHP5 Forms with AJAX submit – best practices

Forms are the foundation of interactive web and what we call Web 2.0. In this article I will walk through the possible problems web developers encounter when creating web forms and solutions to those problems.

This article will be useful to people who are starting web development or who are experienced at it.

This article refers to Form implementation in Agile Toolkit. For documentation and demonstrations of forms in Agile Toolkit see http://agiletoolkit.org/doc/form

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New domain name and PHP / Agile Toolkit courses in Dublin

Unfortunately too many can’t remember or spell atk4, so we will be moving to a new domain:

www.agiletoolkit.org

We have been thinking about some new domain for the toolkit as well, but nothing comes to mind, so for time being we will leave it as “Agile Toolkit”. If you have a interesting idea – please share with me, I’d love to hear.

Also — we are looking to start a first courses in Dublin (on Saturdays) on the toolkit, so everyone who can attend — should attend. Courses will be free but I would expect some feedback in return. It would also give me more practice on teaching, so if you are willing to come — leave a note in the comments. I will announce the place on this blog once we secure the place.

Selective view rendering in Web Applications

Today – any desktop software is able to re-draw itself from a callback by operating system. However many Web Frameworks today do not keep track of objects and cannot selectively produce pieces of HTML code.

I believe that ability to have control over objects on HTML pages is very essential to have in the Framework. Here is why:

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Yin and Yang of modern PHP UI Frameworks

I came over this old question on StackOverflow: “Which PHP Framework will get me to a usable UI the fastest?” I couldn’t help but wonder, why people are not aware of all those other PHP UI frameworks? There are few, right? If you google for “php ui” you can find them. Those are more generally referred to as UI toolkits. But why those toolkits are not known in the mainstream?

Why there is a gap between UI toolkits and mainstream frameworks? If UI is Yin and backend is Yang – why can’t they co-exist?

Here is what I think..

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3.9.1 Released

Release of 3.9.1 brings us many bugfixes and enhancements. Grid is cleaned up but forms are also slightly changed.

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3.9 local change reviews and merges with trunk

Upcoming release 3.9.1

There are number of stability improvements and code clean ups happening in trunk. We are getting ready to release minor update for our stable branch 3.9. Some of the features:

• Ajax Form inline errors are back and working properly
• Grids are going to be married with atk4_grid and will support row reloading and other things
• Grid Inline editing is back!
• Improved compatibility with older projects
• … and more.

Tell me what would you like to see in upcoming release? Oh and meanwhile, we did our first public demonstration of Agile Toolkit 4:

http://files.agiletech.ie/atk-present.mov

We plan to wind-up our promotion as we are nearing closer to 4.0 release.

Stable Release: 3.9.0

Finally our next milestone is reached and Version 3.9.0 is release.

This version comes with a sample project. Please download release from SourceForge:

https://sourceforge.net/p/atk4/home/

Once unpacked you can get familiar with the code and visit www.atk4.com for more ideas and help.

See complete list of changes since 3.8 here: https://sourceforge.net/p/atk4/wiki/Changes-3.9/

3.9 branched out..

With some up-coming changes in trunk, we have created a stable 3.9 branch. It is not an official release yet, but if you are using trunk, I recommend you to switch.

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