Hi Lester !

Lester Caine wrote:

> Rather than HOW, Alexandre the first question should have been WHAT.
> What do you want to actually program?
>

For the start I plan to develop some web interfaces to search trough key
points of my ERP system, more focused at first on the sales module
(stock available, for who it's being sold, last prices applied to the
product for that costumer, financial details to see if I can sell
without risks and the like)

> I have no problem with Alan's approach, and it works for him.

I could not say if it's the best or not, for sure it works, as Alan Said
it's fast and lightweight. As always we have trade offs, I did not like
that much to have all mixed together, I would prefer separate pieces of
code to handle logic/presentation even if it's brings me a little speedy
penalty.

I am not saying that Alan code is bad, I never could say anything like
that, and I really, really appreciate and I am thankful that he kindly
show me his code, I am a newcomer to that land, and looking every
possible approach will bring a lot of knowledge to me.

My fear of using an approach like the one presented by Alan is how
difficult would be to handle any change on the system. I could not say
if it's easy or not to handle that case on separated code (I think it
is, since it's what I am looking for) but I have no real-world
experience, It's just my feelings... Alan says that code standardization
he uses make a breeze to change it, I have no reason to doubt that, but
as I am starting (and he has more than a decade of web development) his
skills are far greater than mine, so I need to use as much
tools/resources I could to try to leverage that game, since I don't have
that experience, I need techniques to try to achieve the same
productivity he has.

> Personally I
> needed a set of basic functions that all systems require, such as user login
> and on-line editing, so I looked for the options on that. I have a solution
> that works and a great bunch of guys who are adding other functions to the
> package. *I* contribute integration and testing with Firebird, along with
> packages that add my own functionality needs. Since there is a group of people
> contributing faults get sorted quickly and new ideas are always evolving.
>
> Different requirements allow for different solutions, and while ADOdb is not
> the fastest of abstraction layers it allows collaboration between different
> groups. Smarty provides a well developed display framework, and while I may
> disagree with decisions at times on the whole I have a framework that meets my
> needs.

This is the kind of experience that I am looking for, for a newcomer
smarty could look pretty cool, but as one gets the hand dirty doing more
than trivial, one could make a conclusion that such template system is
not designed for complex tasks, and to handle it's limitations is
hacking around with band-aid code and that would be more productive to
not use such solutions. Since all that is new to me, I just like to
avoid that kind of deception after spending some months of work. :-) Or
one could say, "Guy ! You should use a template system like smarty,
there is no way to develop a medium sized dynamic web-site without such
tool". Of course what I expected to hear, and what I am hearing so far
is a mixed of the both, and that's exactly what I wish, I will take the
arguments and make a decision based on that.

> One requirement was that the style of the results had to be easily
> modified to match the style of a particular customer. This is easy to achieve
> using the integrated theme system, and normally just involves adjusting the
> colours used in the .css files, although layout can similarly be revised if
> the target system prefers right hand menus instead of left for example.
>
> So what are your target requirements :)
>

At first:
Develop a web interface for search information of my ERP system to
provided quick information to salesman off site, just read data for a start.

Since that is my first project, I look for something that help me to
make that software and guide me on good practices. I will make all kind
of mistakes (security, session handling, data validation and so on) my
hope on adopting something to start on (framework) is that it will guide
me, and show me what I need to take care (because the foundation will
provide that I think it will be easier to do and spot what I should do),
on the other hand, I have a fear that I will get a lot of
code/complexity that I don't need.

thank you !

--
Alexandre Benson Smith
Development
THOR Software e Comercial Ltda
Santo Andre - Sao Paulo - Brazil
www.thorsoftware.com.br