Invenzzia... in English - Invenzzia

Invenzzia reactivation

Zyx — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:34:00 +0100

In the last few months, Invenzzia Group websites became a bit outdated, and the projects went into a more chaotic development flow. It was related to some private issues, but finally better days have come and I would like to announce the incoming Invenzzia Group reactivation and refreshment. Read more to see, what is going to change in the next month time.

The most noticeable change will be a complete reorganization of our web infrastructure. eXtreme is making a new CMS and it is mostly completed, and we will abandon or replace some web tools we are using:

Website - a new website with new content organization that will ease the access to project information and materials.
Version control system - last year, we migrated from Subversion to Git thanks to Github service. However, our network infrastructure still does not reflect this change. We are going to finish the migration, and introduce the new, successful and well-tested workflow. We expect it will shorten the development time and allow to improve our software quality.
Bugtracker - we are rather certain that Flyspray will be abandoned. Two alternatives are taken under concern: another bugtracking software or simply using Github for this purpose, as we have already moved the repositories there.
Discussion board - it is going to stay, perhaps with the same software.
Blog - not decided yet.
Wiki - to be removed.
SVN repositories - to be removed.
Documentation repository - will be extended and improved.

The next scheduled change is introduction of the new working schemes, and software quality standards. My vision is to ensure that every project released by Invenzzia Group follows the unified, well-designed rules that guarantee a good and flexible design. We will put even more attention on proper testing and documentation, so that no piece of software will be released without these elements. The development cycle is going to become more regular, and shorter. New major versions are expected to appear approximately every 6 months.

And finally, the projects... what do we keep, what do we abandon? The new base family of projects will include:

Trinity Framework - a web framework for PHP 5.3+ with innovative MVC architecture implementation. Contrary to the existing frameworks which rather follow many of the MVC pattern derivatives, Trinity is based on the original implementation without any modifications except those necessary for the web environment adaptation. It is currently being developed by me as an experimental framework on Github.
Open Power Libs 3 - the new edition of our Open Power Libs foundation, redesigned from scratch.
TypeFriendly Documentation System - the project is going to go through a great redesign in order to make it even better and more attractive for programmers interested in writing their own documentation. eXtreme will become the new project leader.

In addition, two new libraries are expected to appear:

Yii Framework MongoDB Driver
Native PHP Git Library

Stay tuned, as this is not over. It's the beginning.

Invenzzia on SlideShare

Zyx — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:01:00 +0200

I have just created an account on SlideShare.net, a place where you can post your presentations and slideshows. I will use it to post various presentations and learning materials about Invenzzia projects, so that you could follow them easily. Currently, you can watch there a tour on Open Power Template (watch on SlideShare). So stay tune and follow us on SlideShare!

New Invenzzia website is on-line

Zyx — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:03:00 +0200

A couple of minutes ago, we have finally run the new Invenzzia website with new layout, navigation and features, such as news/article commenting. We hope you'll enjoy it and we are waiting for your feedback and opinions. Please note that the links to the user manuals have been changed, as well as the download links. However, we keep the automated redirects.

What's new on Invenzzia?

Zyx — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:12:00 +0100

Hi everyone, in the last few days, we had a lot of work around Invenzzia and its projects. In this entry I would like to inform, what currently is going on. We will talk about OPT 2, TypeFriendly, our new website and the activity in open source project trackers.

Open Power Template 2

A few minutes ago, I have commited a quite big revision, an effect of four coding days. In this time I solved a number of problems:

I decided to reimplement the whole section handling code from scratch, because the old one had a significant problem with handling custom section attributes that I was unable to fix with the old design. The new code is much cleaner, simpler and seems to be more stable. To check it, I wrote more that 20 new unit tests to check various edge conditions and integration with other instructions. From the end-user side, you should see no difference and the old code should be still 100% functionable.
At the same time, I finally cleaned and "standarized" the data format structure. The definitions of the five default data formats have been improved, too. There is a small change that could break the backward compatibility - the "Generic" format has been renamed to "Array" to reflect its real nature. Unless you declared the use of this format explicitly, your code should still work.
Another, quite big part of PHP code was equipped with phpdoc and more comments. If you are using a good IDE, like NetBeans or Eclipse PDT, they should show you the complex information about much wider variety of OPT methods.
A number of bugs was fixed.

Significant improvements have been applied to the user manual, too. The API reference was moved to the bottom and the more practical chapters were exposed. I decided to create a new section, "Programmer's guide" that aims to be a complete guide over OPT API issues and its practical usage. It incorporated the old "API issues" chapter. The currently written parts show us, how to start and explain:

The initialization process.
Using views.
Using output systems.
Exception and error handling
Data formats
Internationalization
HTML escaping.

The user manual can be read here.

TypeFriendly 0.1.1

A week ago, Invenzzia has released TypeFriendly 0.1.1 with a number of bugfixes found since the first release. Currently, we are focusing on TypeFriendly 0.2 and we will try to release it much sooner :).

New Invenzzia Website

Finally, we are almost ready to launch our brand new website and replace the current temporary one. Yesterday, eXtreme ran it experimentally on our server and now tests it and implements the last remaining features. The website is equipped with a new design and logo (you can already see it on our wiki). It improves the navigation a lot and shows much more useful stuff to the visitors. I hope we will see it online in the next few days.

OPT on Ohloh.net

A few days ago, I created the profile of "Open Power Template 2" on Ohloh.net website. Currently, you can find there some links, a journal of the recent works and the code statistics. We encourage everyone that have an accoun on Ohloh and use OPT to track this project and vote for it :).

Wiki.invenzzia.org

Zyx — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:06:00 +0100

Our new wiki is available on-line now. I've been working for last few days to customize it and add the necessary extra functionality. However, there is still a lot to do. As you can notice, there must be added many technical templates, help pages and some navigation structure. I hope I'll manage to deal with it in the nearest days. The wiki is intended to keep community-driven materials on our open-source projects, as well as extra information on add-ons, such as framework ports. Feel free to share your solutions with everyone - you need only the discussion board account and some knowledge on MediaWiki syntax.

Big Invenzzia website update

Zyx — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:04:00 +0100

Today morning I've found on webresourcedepot.com a post written four days ago entitled "19 promising template engines". On the fifth position, I noticed the familiar logo of Open Power Template and a description that perfectly matched the 2.0.0-beta version. The link was redirecting to the Invenzzia website. I followed it and I was shocked - I forgot to update the main Invenzzia website! Invenzzia is no longer bilingual for some time, and here still lots of pages were empty, whereas the Polish text was very out-of-date. This was how we welcomed English readers for a couple of months :(. I decided not to wait till ~~Extreme~~ eXtreme (argh, note the uppercased letter - JJ) will finish the new website and to update all the information as soon as possible. And here it is!

What has been changed:

All the pages have full English text.
The new FAQ has been written.
A set of OPT advices has been published.
The information on the libraries has been changed.
The first OPTv2 tutorial has been published: OPT quickstart.
Another English documentation update.

Next tutorials are on the way. I hope you enjoyed this new stuff and that the website is a bit more useful now.

New days for international Invenzzia

Zyx — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:31:00 +0200

Recently we found that developing Invenzzia projects in bilingual way was a big mistake. As you can probably see, the result is that for example OPL is now closed for programmers that do not live and work in Poland, even if it is a quite nice country with beautiful language. Since now, it is going to change. We understand that English language simply gives us more profits and we want to correct our mistakes. So, what changes are expected?

The documentation for the most complete development project, Open Power Template, is still written mostly in Polish. The translation is one of our goals.
The news, articles, etc. will be published in English first.
The English forums will we promoted.

This will take some time, as we have also our private lifes and other things to do. However, please give us some time and be patient. We are not afraid of foreign users and we think we can deal with it.

SVN is active!

Zyx — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:10:00 +0200

Unfortunately, the configuration of a version control system on our current server is not as simple as on Sourceforge.net. But now I found some time and ideas, how to make it work and finally... there it is, we have an SVN repository. It's available under the address http://svn.invenzzia.org/ - we still have to install a good browser. Today I'm going to upload the source code of the new OPL and TypeFriendly, a documentation generator almost ready to its first release. All the instructions, how to connect, will be published on the main site.

New Invenzzia.org

eXtreme — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:20:00 +0100

One month ago we had no time to prepare a good website for our group so Zyx made something temporary. Today I present a better and more complex solution. The website has been updated with texts and articles about our team. We've got still a lot to do with organization but our website and devblog are almost finished.

I installed and configured dotClear2 from scratch. Now, there is no problem with mixed Polish and English entries because I set up two independent miniblogs on one installation. User language detection is now integrated to the website's system and it is based on cookies and browser settings. I made also nicer and more friendly theme.

And why not Wordpress? I don't like it. There are no real and friendly templates (yes, I love sweet chaos with mixed PHP and HTML). So far, I had an unpleasant opportunity to create from scratch a template for Wordpress and it was a terrible experience. I have been working with dotClear2 earlier and it is very easy to configure everything and convert default theme to website's design. Moreover, it is a nice piece of OOP code in PHP5. ;-)

Team Invenzzia hasn't got the official logo yet. This one on website is only a temporary solution.

Licensing

Zyx — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:19:00 +0100

From time to time, I return to the library licensing issue. Undoubtedly, the right choice of a license is quite significant for the project success or failure. Simple, permissive licenses are very easy to follow and use, but in my opinion, they are quite dangerous for the project itself and can lead to some abuses. On the other hand, we have a GNU LGPL license, which has been used by Open Power Template so far. It provides the correct protection of the code, however the linking with non-GPL software is quite complex and produces many questions. Let's take a look: we write the libraries for all the website programmers and authors of complete scripts, whether they are open-source or not.

I decided to check, how much place the "simple" explaination of LGPL conditions to the end user would take, especially if he is about to make a commercial use of his software. I added the new appendix to the documentation and began to write. The result was a two-screen-long list of explainations, why and how the website creators can use it, when the source code must be published etc. Of course, it is unacceptable. I don't like too complex constraints and my intention is not to force the others to follow them unless there is a significant reason.

The reason why I chose LGPL, was to protect the library against changing it into a proprietary software. Such story happened to Wine project, distributed under the X11 (MIT) license. After a while, a proprietary versions appeared, whose creators did not wish to share their source code. Although one 150-KB library is not too valuable, I prefer to be calm and be sure, especially if the other project are going to appear. Unfortunately, there is no license that would suit to our needs:

- Full right to link with open-source and proprietary software under the condition of retain/reproduce copyright information, and retain the license conditions in case of source code.
- Requirement to redistribute the code itself (intented to link with non-author's software) with the source code, and as a consequence, retaining the license.

I think such license would be the best protector of end-user laws. By forbidding the redistribution of the library itself only in a binary form and/or witch changed license, he is sure that every OPT package found in the Internet can be used in the same way, as the original one. If he encounters a closed-source version, it means that it is adapted to this exact project and it is not indented to link with other scripts.

The best candidate is one of the modified BSD licenses without the advertising clause. Unfortunately, I'll have to add the statement mentioned above on my own in English, and the legal language is not so easy. It will take some time and probably will require some help from the West. That's why the development versions of OPT will be still available under GNU LGPLv3 and the final release will be released under the terms of much easier license.

Except that, I would also like to provide a paid versions of the libraries, inspite of using a liberal license. They would not be expensive - the price of $10-20 should be acceptable to everyone interested. The income would be used to keep the domains, servers and advertising, because it requires some money. The paid version would be the same, as the free one, when it comes to the source code, but it would include some add-ons. The ideas are:

- Additional articles and tutorials.
- The right to include them into your documentation.
- Sample projects with well-documented source code.
- Earlier access to the new releases.
- Additional releases in case of finding any non-critical bug.
- The right to provide detailed information about your project on our website.

Unfortunately for the international user, for some time it will be available only for Poland. The international service will require some extra preparations. However, I think the idea is good and everyone should be happy. We have the money to keep our website and resources alive, the customers, because they have some extra content and rights and the rest of the users too - in order to convince them, we will try to prepare new tutorials, FAQ-s etc.

Let's go!

Zyx — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:29:00 +0100

Welcome to the devblog of the new programming group Invenzzia. The reason that I formed them are my open-source projects which need a good organization and infrastructure. To begin with, the group will take care of my advanced template engine that exists for over three years so far - Open Power Template. It will become the first part of a bigger series "Open Power Libraries". Currently, we have already begun setting up everything and our website is run part by part. I'll do everything to make sure it won't last too long.

As a typical English-language user you haven't probably heard about Open Power Board project. It was a Polish initiative started in the end of 2004 as a result of commercializing Invision Power Board. The goal was to create an open-source discussion board by the Polish PHP community. However, the project was closed after a couple of weeks, because almost everyone said they have no time to develop it. In fact, the only people who were still active were me with Open Power Template and Tomasz "Slump" Szczupliński as a manager. I tried to reactivate the project in 2005, but there was the same story: everyone except Slump and me went away. I gave up and decided to create more open-source libraries, using the infrastructure left by OpenPB. I managed to make the first stable release of OPT and started Open Power Forms, a library for data validation and form processing integrated with OPT. The code is still marked as beta, because I did not have anyone to finish the JavaScript part, although the PHP-side solutions proved their effectiveness many times.

Of course the situation could not last forever. Two months ago I decided to close OpenPB definietly and throw away almost everything that had any connections with that project. The idea of a new programming group came to my mind and I asked some people whether they would like to participate in it. The team is formed by:

Jacek "eXtreme" Jędrzejewski - PHP/JS programmer and XHTML/CSS hacker. Personally, he's my brother.
Radosław "Radzio" Piekarz - PHP/JS programmer. Personally, we study together.
Tomasz "Slump" Szczupliński - our manager mentioned above.
Tomasz "Zyx" Jędrzejewski - or in other words - me. I code libraries and everything that speeds up other software.

In the beginning, we are going to finish Open Power Template 2, as well as Open Power Forms. We have some more ideas, but they will be coded later. Anyway, we'll try to provide a great set of open-source tools for PHP that present a completely new point of view to many issues.