The problem
We have a complex XML file with many different node types, etc. supplied by a third party via a URL reference.
There’s an initial dump, and then an incremental update every couple of weeks, with additions, deletions and updates.
What I’d like to be able to do is to drive a symfony app with this data.
Some thoughts so far
I’m a symfony noob.
Getting the data
I could manually transform the XML into YAML to create the schema and the initial data load, and then build the app. But I don’t want to have to do this manually for the regular updates. Ideally, I’d like to use the symfony ORM to handle all the transactions, rather than a completely separate (outside symfony) script.
… and some images
The XML also contains URIs for remotely hosted images, and I’d like to be able to automagically pull these down to the local app file system and rewrite the references.
Anything that will help us to get started in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Does developing in .aspx produce bloated code?
Friday, July 4th, 2008This started out as a comment in response to Robbie’s question on my previous post, but thought I’d turn it into another post:
Well, I guess that’s what I’m kinda implying.
Building in the .NET framework with the Visual Studio IDE tends to mean that lots of components and snippets are provided for you. So by default you get things like having all your page content wrapped in a <form> element and you get the lovely __VIEWSTATE hidden input field and stuff like that.
I think that there can be a tendency amongst back-end developers, i.e. .NET, Java developers, to produce something that works well technically, and then take the PSDs that the designer gave them and put them on the front, so you’ve got something that looks like it’s supposed to, and works kinda like it’s supposed to, but with the interface between the front- and back-ends being very ugly, slow, and inefficient. Of course this has an often considerable negative effect for the end user.
While this may be a generalisation, I’ve experienced it first-hand, with developers who struggle to understand, or at least show some care, about good clean lightweight, semantic front-end code that performs well in the browser.
When you’re developing with .NET in an IDE like Visual Studio, you have to put in a bit more effort to get that good code.
Developing in .NET doesn’t necessarily produce bloated code, but I think if you took a look at the average .NET (.aspx) site, I think you’ll find greater code-bloat than in your average hand-crafted-in-TextMate code.
Posted in Coding, Commentary, Design, Tools | 2 Comments »