Archive for January, 2006

Eventum and its model for a Blueprint PHP Application

Harry, thanks for the praise for Eventum. This is mainly the result of my work and Bryan Alsdorf at MySQL, even though I’m no longer with MySQL AB anymore. We do agree with you on the aspects of making the page controllers as simple as possible, and also trying to let the code be as simple as possible, but still easy to maintain and change.

For some of its technical weaknesses such as the use of HTTP_GET_VARS and etc, there is a reason for this. Eventum was initially supposed to be a commercial product, and I wanted to sell commercial licenses of this application, to be then installed at the customer’s server. I tried to make the installation process as easy as possible (and it still is one of the easiest web applications to install around), and that meant working with whatever PHP configuration was available on that server. That forced me to make concessions on a few features, and that is one of them.

Anyway, thanks for the pointer, even though I’m not really involved with Eventum too much myself. I’m sure Bryan will like hearing about this.

Form inputs and their behaviors

So looks like someone needs to play a bit more with their form inputs. Marko reports that when he changed his form from:

<input type="button" />

to:

<input type="image" />

His forms started getting submitted automatically when clicking the image button. But yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to work. If that button is supposed to be your main “submit” like button on your form, then change your JavaScript code to trap the onSubmit event and return false to it. As in:

<form method="post" onSubmit="javascript:return handleXHR();"></form>

Then inside that function you just do “return false;” to stop the form from being submitted.

Lori (Life of Request Info) Extension for Firefox 1.5

So looks like Lori has been abandoned for quite a while, as the last extension release happened back in february of 2005. I couldn’t find the XPI download link anywhere, not even from mirror sites or Google cache. Eventually I tried to checkout the CVS module just to make sure it wasn’t available in there, and I got lucky.

The XPI didn’t accept running under Firefox 1.5 at first, but just by changing the install.rdf file by hand the extension loads fine, and gives me the results I wanted.

In any case, if you are looking for a download link like me for ages, here’s my changed XPI file for you. Talk about good karma.