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I stopped working on the Osm Admin project, for financial reasons. Did it hurt? A lot. Was it necessary? Unfortunately, yes. This post is a short retrospection on this matter.

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.

After 3 days of intensive work, I've got dot syntax working!

Along the way, I refactored the query internals once again, which reminds me a heuristics saying that you've got to implement something three times to get it right :)

New query implementation uses the concept of formulas - SQL-like expressions used for selecting, filtering and sorting data. Currently, formulas are quite limited, but with time, they should be a really powerful feature.

I decided to support selecting, filtering and ordering by properties of a related object using dot syntax: product.price, parent.level. This syntax will automatically join the table that stored related objects.

I realized that implementing joins requires a better query model than my current naive wrapper around Laravel query. This article describes the new query model.

This article is about running SELECT and INSERT queries on data objects stored in the database.

In short, use the query() function. It runs on top of Laravel Query\Builder. It handles the mapping of data class properties onto table columns, and initiates the computation of indexed properties.

Currently, you can only SELECT and INSERT, other operations are coming soon.

Today, I implemented computation of indexed properties during insert. The implementation dictated some changes in indexed property definitions compare to the initial design, and how indexers are reflected into the data schema.

Also, I implemented a table query class working on the top of Laravel Query\Builder. More about it next time, for now I'll review how indexed properties are computed during INSERT operation.

I had two weeks full of meaningful, productive work. I started with sketching Osm Admin grid and form pages, and implemented a very basic, but working home page, and success/error messages. To enable that, Osm Framework now have extensible Blade templates, and a nice JavaScript solution for capturing user input into a modal dialog box, or into some picker component.

Then, I undertook a major refactoring of Osm Admin, including moving lots of pieces of code to their new places, stabilizing the underlying object model, rewriting database migrations and sketching future effort on data indexing. During this effort, I implemented generic object hydration and reflection over named subtypes.

I've already shared most of this information on Twitter, so if you are reading this, consider following me on Twitter and getting daily updates.

It's often needed to compute, or index, data in database tables based on data in other tables.

This article is the first sketch of a consistent indexing solution.

I've finished refactoring how Osm Admin stores data objects in the database. Also, in order to support multi-website, multi-vendor, multi-language applications, I've introduced the concept of scopes.

Most reasoning from the first version is still valid, so let's take a fresh look of what's changed.

I developed dehydrate()/hydrate() functions for a very practical need - storing the data class schema:

• in cache - to reduce processing time spent on reflection;
• and in database - to compare current and new database schema, and only add new tables and columns.

This article describes the information stored in the schema, and unit tests that I prepared in order to be sure that schema classes are property hydrated.

Recently, I developed a couple of helper functions for transmitting PHP objects over the wire, and saving them in database records:

• dehydrate() - recursively converts an instance of a PHP class to a plain untyped object. Then, store the plain object in the database, or convert it to JSON and send it to a browser.
• hydrate() - recursively converts a plain untyped object back to a PHP class instance. Use if after decoding a JSON received from the browser, or after loading a database record.

This article describes how to use these functions.

When active, modal elements - dialogs, pickers, or AJAX spinners - need to prevent user interaction with the rest of the page.

A common approach is putting an overlay <div> under the modal element covering the rest of the page, as a click shield. However, user can still navigate the page with the keyboard.

Today, I implemented a better solution by capturing mouse and keyboard events outside the modal element, and keeping focus inside.

Currently, I'm working on Osm Admin package, and I need a module to inject its HTML markup around some well-known place in a Blade template. However, Blade template extensibility is not a problem that's specific to Osm Admin project. It's a generic problem. Let's solve that.

I had two very productive weeks. #buildinpublic works wonders.

Most effort went into my new project, Osm Admin. I sketched how data classes look like, generated database tables from class attributes, and started working on the Admin UI. It's very fulfilling to see how an abstract idea gains shape.

As described in Migrations, most data objects of the same class will be stored in a database table.

But what about subclasses? In an e-commerce application, bags, dresses, and digital products, collectively known as subclasses, are all products stored in products table, and they may have bad-specific, dress-specific or digital product specific properties that should also be stored there.

This article describes how subclasses are defined and stored in Osm Admin.

Different data classes have repeating structural patterns. For example, most data classes stored in database tables have the auto-incremented id property. Use PHP traits to effectively introduce the same properties to different data classes over and over again.

I partly implemented data schema migration. It takes data class definitions, and incrementally creates or alters underlying database tables.

The article below describes how schema migration works, and what's not implemented yet, but most probably will be.

Note. This topic is continued in the new article.

Install PHP 8, MySql, Node, Gulp and ElasticSearch. Clone the project. Edit project settings. Finally, run few commands in the command line.

New Osm Framework version comes with improved, configurable and easily customizable Gulp script, modular NPM dependencies, standard page layout Blade component and brand new README. osm.software website contains an easy-to-follow new project installation instruction.

This article describes how we use GitHub issues and projects, both for new development and for support.

Install and use osm, osmc, osmt and osmh command line aliases for faster command typing.

Note. This post is moved to Osm Framework documentation.

Once PHP 8, Node and Gulp are installed, create new projects quickly using the command line.

Note. This post is moved to Osm Framework documentation.

The first osm.software blog articles have been written, edited and revised. Content changes are deployed in semi-automated way. The website got some SEO improvements, and now it scores 100% in Google Lighthouse.

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.

This article explains how to write and publish blog posts.

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.