Latest Posts

The goal is to be the most productive and focused on the most important things, both personally, and (later) as a team.

After maintaining the "done" log for several months, I decided to improve my estimation accuracy, and here is how.

Before diving into what should be in the docs, let's define what you should more or less know before using Osm Admin.

There are four types of people who will read the docs: power users, developers, vendors and contributors.

Here are my thoughts on product backlog and roadmap.

Use config:nginx, config:host and install:nginx commands to automate Nginx configuration of your project. Now, it's fully automated!

Yesterday, I tested the instructions for installing Osm Admin locally as a contributor.

Yesterday:

• Osm Admin in-browser functionality was fully restored after creating search index in the indexer.
• All test suites started passing again, and being run automatically on git push.

Yesterday started as usual, planning new iteration, and then BAM! - one folk - Saif - joined the project. It made me correct the course a bit, and take care of potential contributors:

• README explains what the project is about, and how to get started as a contributor;
• I'm fixing things to make the project actually runnable just after installing it.

Yay! After implementing invalid data conversion, I finished the iteration #18 dedicated to diff-based migrations!

I must say, it's a bit disturbing to implement the same thing for the third time. Still, the goal is to get it finished, and have it sustainable.

After the effort, the code has become su much easier to read!

I continued working on property diff algorithm that plans all the migration details.

Yesterday, I finished implementing data conversion for int and string property types.

Then, I started refactoring it.

Last time, I pushed through string property migrations and created a migration log.

Today, I continued solving data conversion issues.

• I finished implementing string property migrations.
• Migrations have got a meaningful log explaining what migrations take place, and why.
• Along the way, I fixed numerous issues.

Yesterday, I finished writing int property migrations. True, testing it is still a todo.

The major part of the code (type change, nullability and other attribute handling) will be reused in other property types.

I refactored Property::migrate() using additional Migration classes. It's so much more convenient to compare property definition versions and generate migration SQLs!

New code structure already handles property explicitness changes.

After enumerating what kind of changes can happen to a property, I started implementing the most hard one - changing property type.

Estimating projects is hard. Here is my approach for getting better at it.

It's based on a concept of a "primitive problem" - something non-trivial that you can solve in one go.

You can use primitive problems as story points in agile project management.

The Query::bulkUpdate() method is implemented in the TDD way.

My current goal is to get some minimum Osm Admin user interface and API working - just for one property, one data type, one UI control type, and then improve.

And there is a lot of space for improvement. The main areas are listed in this document.

I'd really appreciate a helping hand, so if you are into this sort of things, DM me on Twitter.

I feel that both attributes decorating data classes, and object model parsed from it are too complex.

Let's have a fresh look at Osm Admin. If I had to start from scratch, how would it be?

Today, I finished implementing an object creation form.

It works according to the specs on Interfaces and Forms. Currently, it only supports string and integer input fields; later, there will be a lot more.

Let's review how it works.

In Osm Admin, a form is an integral part of the class user interface. It's a very specific kind of HTML form.

In this article, I'll review what's in a class form, and how it's reflected from the application code.

Yesterday, I described a user interface pattern for managing data of a certain data class using a grid/form pair. Let's call this grid/form pair class interface in the admin area.

In this article, I'll examine what moving parts are inside a class interface.

So far, I've been concerned about how application data is modeled, stored and handled internally.

Yet, the final objective a user interface for viewing and editing it visually.

Let's dream a bit about how it might look like.

Yay, indexing works!

It's changed quite a bit, so let's review how it works from the very beginning.

I'm still working on indexing, and it seems to get one more refactoring. But more on that later.

Meanwhile, let's review Osm Admin modules, their responsibilities and dependencies.

Full-text search and layered navigation is a common feature for e-commerce applications. It's also used in this blog. Actually, it makes browsing any non-trivial data better. Under the hood, search and layered navigation interact with ElasticSearch, or other search engine, and this article describes how.

Note. This post is moved to Osm Framework documentation.

Osm Framework is an open-source, insanely fast, unprecedentedly extensible, and fun to work with PHP 8 framework for creating modern Web applications. It's built on top of tried and tested Symfony and Laravel components.

Note. This post is moved to Osm Framework documentation.