Invenzzia... in English - Tag - 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In the last few months, Invenzzia Group websites became a bit outdated, and the projects went into a more chaotic development flow.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!

Invenzzia Summary #1

Zyx — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:02:00 +0200

This is the first episode of the Invenzzia Summaries, a way to inform about various events and activities of Invenzzia Group and the development of the open-source projects. We will try to publish them regularly, but the exact period depends on the amount of issues worth concerning. In the first episode, we will talk about the last beta version of Open Power Template and the new projects that are going to use it.

Open Power Template 2,0-beta3

This is a pretty fresh news, because the packages have been published about an hour ago. The new and the last beta release contains lots of various bugfixes and improvements, such as new, more stable section implementation or data formats. Finally, the entity issue has been also solved once and for all. We have decided to use the XSLT model, where the entities are parsed on the server-side, and only the special XML characters appear as entities in the output. The end user will see no difference, especially if he/she uses Unicode. For those ones who need to display a particular entity in the output, there is a new function: entity(). Please note that it must be used with the escaping turned off, for example:

<p>The entity: {u:entity('Acute')}</p>

The new version can be downloaded from here.

The remaining issues in OPT.

One could ask, what needs to be checked in OPT before the first stable release will appear. Well, the library is already pretty stable now, after some recent bugfix parties and significant effort taken by the users in finding them. The only feature that has not been tested yet is the cache interface port. Furthermore, there are some unit tests still to write and the documentation to finish. Currently, the test suite consists of about 400 unit tests, but there are some areas that are poorly covered with them:

Template functions.
The standard data formats.
XML node manipulation API.

Now, just to finish the remaining jobs and release the first stable version.

Who uses OPT?

Recently, the development team of Extreme-Fusion CMS announced that Open Power Template 2 will be the primary template engine in the new version of their project, EF V. Extreme-Fusion is a quite popular Polish CMS, a fork of PHP-Fusion. The new version is going to be rewritten from scratch on the Kohana framework and OPT 2. Those who know Polish, may read the announcement on their development blog (unfortunately, they do not provide English-language version, like Invenzzia :( ).

Another application that uses OPTv2 is the project with the codename "Arbiter". It is a system for AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow that allows to organize programming competitions and automated program testing for computer science students. Because I'm involved in its creation, I'll try to write more about it in the next few days, as the first version is going to be run soon. The application is built on Zend Framework, Doctrine and OPTv2. It has been used as the prototype for the OPL4ZF port and the experimental field for OPTv2.

What about Open Power Classes?

The "Opc" directory remains empty on SVN, however this should change in the near future. The problems were caused with the huge amount of work with OPT debugging and I couldn't find more time to push this project, too. Moreover, I'm preparing the UML design for Open Power Forms, a form management tool based on OPT. I'll try to publish the results in the next two weeks.

Polish support improvements?

A few days ago, two users contacted Invenzzia asking for the possibility of establishing a better Polish-language support. The support concerns translating the original English materials into Polish on a secondary wiki. Currently, we are thinking, how to set up a bilingual infrastructure. We are pleased that the Invenzzia community grows constantly and becomes more and more active, however it would be nice to see more non-Polish users here. As you can easily notice, the main language is English and receiving support in this language is as easy, as in Polish. The Czech and Slovak users may also attempt to contact in their native languages, as one of the team members knows Slovak and may understand them :).

Conclusion

This is the end of the first Invenzzia Summary. I hope you have enjoyed this form of providing the recent news and issues.

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.

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.

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.