RedBeanPHP an amazing ORM

I want to share a little bit about my experience with a library called RedBeanPHP, since it's been a completely transformational tool for me in the prototyping process (and in fact, was a big contributor to the app that my teammate and I built at AngelHack NY, which we ended up winning).

So, here's the general idea.  In the prototyping process, no matter how much you plan ahead, it's fairly likely that you will want to add a DB column or change the values you were planning on storing.  This generally means having to do a few things:

• Add a script to alter the existing schema
• Make changes to a central script that builds your DB from scratch (in case you need to recreate it on a new DB instance).
• Deal with backwards compatibility/consistency issues

When you're prototyping, this is incredibly distracting and annoying (especially if you are like me and you just want to push a version out to start measuring usage).  Enter RedBean.  Redbean is an ORM just like any other with a little trick up its sleeve- it alters the schema to accommodate whatever values you want to assign to a given object type on the fly.  So let's take the following examples:

• Let's say I set foo.name = 1.
• Redbean might set the schema for column 'name' to be a TINYINT
• Let's say I then set foo.name = 1234
• Redbean might set the schema for 'name' to be an INT
• Let's say I then set foo.name = 'abcdefg'.
• Redbean might set the schema for 'name' to be VARCHAR(250).

It gets better though.  While it builds your schema, you're free to mess with your DB as much as you want behind the scenes (change schema, add indexes, etc) and redbean will still cooperate.  And once you're happy with the DB, you push to production and you want to make sure RedBean doesn't alter your schema, you add one line of code to the top of your PHP script to ensure that doesn't happen ('R::freeze()').  After that, if the DB is unhappy with what you're sending it, Redbean will just work as an ORM solution and pass back the error if the DB is unhappy with a given query.

Beyond that, check out the site.  The syntax is beautifully simple to understand and it's my ORM of choice at this point.

Jquery Mobile

Jquery Mobile is simply amazing.  If you haven't used it before, check out the demos/docs here.  Here's why you want to use it:

• It's HTML5.  This means that it will not only work as a mobile application site but it is directly portable to native apps on iphone, android, blackberry, etc through the PhoneGap framework (I'll write more on that at a later time).
• It comes with all of the basic widgets that you would expect any mobile app to have.  Pretty much nothing required from you except to embed the html5 tags.
• It is easier to build than a normal website.  This is because the structure of the framework is that you create every view of the application on a single html document.  This means that you have one document as the source of truth for pretty much everything, and if you get lazy (as I do, to my disappointment) and put all of your code in that document, there are no dependencies to worry about later.

Here are the key things to pay attention to, that took me a little while to get a hang of:

• Since you have multiple views (each treated as it's own 'site'), using $.(document).ready doesn't work the same.  The code loaded in that view gets loaded as soon as the entire html document is loaded to the page- NOT WHEN ANY SINGLE VIEW IS LOADED.  To have some JS executed when a view loads, you bind to the following events:
• $(document).delegate("#my_patients_view", "pageinit", function(){ //Your code here});
• This will execute your JS code when the view is initialized for the first time (ie: first time the homepage view is shown
• $(document).delegate("#my_patients_view", "pageshow", function(){ //Your code here});
• This will execute every single time the view is shown
• This is an important distinction because if you do event binding in this block of code, you will attach bind multiple event handlers to an item, which can give you trouble down the line
• Ex: You bind a click event to a button in a given view.  If the view is loaded twice, the second time you click the button it will issue 2 separate ajax call instead of one.

Seriously though, this is amazing.  Love everything about it.  Please use it.

Installing Localtunnel on Mac OSX

Localtunnel is a nifty little application that allows you to share your local webserver with the outside world.  The flow is pretty simple:

• Run your local webserver
• Localtunnel spits out a URL for you (ie: 'http://localtunnel.com/abcdefg')
• Share the localtunnel URL with anyone and they should be able to access your 'localhost' remotely over the web, as long as localtunnel continues to run in the background.

This is ideal for sharing quick demos/prototypes.  It is not a good temporary hosting solution because localtunnel shuts you out after ~20 mins if the service is not actively used.  

Installing this *should* be pretty easy but about a million posts online show that there is a little hidden step that makes this 10 minute process take 2 hours to figure out:

• You need ruby to install localtunnel according to their documentation:
• Download XCode through the app store
• Open XCode:
• Navigate to XCode ->Preferences->Downloads
• Install 'Command Line Tools'
• Open up terminal and run 'sudo gem install localtunnel'
• run 'localtunnel 80'.  You should get a message saying 'Failed to authenticate.'  To get around this, you need to upload a public key.
• Make sure you have a public key
• Run 'cd ~/.ssh'
• If the directory doesn't exist, created it by running 'mkdir ~/.ssh' and navigate into it by running 'cd ~/.ssh'
• If you do not have a private/public key pair (ie: id_rsa), create one by running 'ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096'
• Run 'localtunnel -k ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub 80' and enter your passphrase.
• The service should now be running.  Take the url displayed and type it in your browser; you should be taken directly to your localhost index page.

Installing MySQL on OSX Lion

Setting up your dev environment can be a b*itch-and-a-half.  There are dozens of StackExchange articles about installing each tool/framework, but people change their setup so frequently that it's hard to tell which dependencies they have that you don't.  For my own benefit, I've decided to document how I set up my own system after a clean install of Mac OSX Lion, so all dependencies are accurately captured.  Hope this is of use to someone else as well.

Quick tips to set up MySQL on your intel Mac OSX Lion machine

• Download the MySQL .dmg file here
• Within the .dmg file:
• Run the large MySQL .pkg file
• Run the MySQLStartupItem.pkg file
• Run MySQL.pref_Pane
• Active MySQL server
• If you don't want to deal with this again, select the option to automatically start MySQL when your computer boots

Now, run the following commands in terminal

• Add mysql to your PATH
• Run 'sudo nano -S /etc/profile'
• Add the line 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin' and save changes
• Open a new Terminal window for changes to take effect
• Enable a root password for your DB
• Run 'mysqladmin -u root password', where 'password' is your secure DB password.
• Run 'mysql -u root -p'.  You should now have command-line access to your local MySQL DB.