More programming (and VLOS 1.3 A4)

Let’s get the painfulness out of the way: VLOS.

Now I love VLOS. I really do. It is a very nice improvement to Gentoo with the Gentoo roots that make it powerful. This is why it pains me to talk about VLOS 1.3 A4 that released last Monday. I thought this was a good time to load it on a physical machine, so I grabbed an older Athlon 1900+ (all normal hardware, should be easily supported) and went to town. Well… First it couldn’t find my hard drive during install. Wonderful. Try again. This time everything goes well and seems to install… until you reboot and it can’t find the kernel as it set up in GRUB. So i’m going to install the last version and update. I wanted this one though… *sigh*.

Now I said I was impressed by the Rails framework. This is, after all, a framework and nothing more. I know there are a lot of frameworks for PHP, so is there one as nice? Actually, there are more for PHP that satisfy that and things I don’t even need. I really love the Zend products. This isn’t because I’m certified through them. This is because they work directly with the PHP developers and have products that work incredibly well with all of PHP. It is no surprise that I like the sounds of the Zend Framework… except that it is only PHP 5 (and it’s really beta at the moment). Don’t get me wrong, I love PHP 5. I just don’t have it loaded on this server… and there are many others that are the same way. So maybe I’ll work with that one… but I have to work with a php 4 one as well. I found two that looked interesting: Cake and Seagull. I didn’t like parts of the Cake ideals (they seem to follow the idea that they are the best and all others follow…), but Seagull seems nice. So I’m going to try those out… soon I hope and see how they feel. I hope to pair Smarty to the templating side. Do you use any PHP framework? What do you like and why? I really would like some more people’s feedback.

Also, if anyone has a concise way to set up PHP 5 along side PHP 4 (both as apache modules. I dislike CGI for this) in Plesk, I would love the link. I worry that I’ll kill PHP 4 with Yum or me trying it by myself.