PHP developers have been left out of GENNIT for too long. So it is with great pleasure to announce that GENNIT now supports the excellent CakePHP Rapid Development Framework. If you are a PHP developer and want to get a head start on your project consider using GENNIT to generate DAL and MVC elements of your project to use on the CakePHP framework.

Checkout the updated templates list to see the CakePHP template features.

GENNIT will build your MySQL database and create model - view - controller objects that you define using the GENNIT designer, as well as any relationships between them.

Once you’ve defined your project using the designer, download the generated code zip and paste it into your CakePHP installation. Thanks to the scaffolding feature of CakePHP; you will also be able to manipulate your data without having to write a single line of code.

CakePHP Scaffold

If you decide to use GENNIT Pro. with the CakePHP template, 10% of your subscription will be donated to the CakePHP development team!

Leave to cool and serve with ice cream or custard.

Positive Spin - GENNIT is now $8.33 a month which is a about the same price as a couple of venti skinny soy caffèlattes that you probably could get through in one day.

The minimum signup period is now six months rather than one month. The reasoning behind this is purely from an advertising perspective. Advertising GENNIT on Google for example, typically costs $1 a click so for every ten clicks one of those people has to sign up just to break even. This is obviously not going to work if I want to advertise GENNIT.

Hope everyone is OK with that!

GENNIT made the ‘Web Development Toolbox: 120+ Web Development Tools‘ over at Mashable.com.

Big thanks to the Mashable.com for the inclusion - it sent visitors through the roof for a little bit -

Reinvigorate Stats

Progress on a new feature of GENNIT is under way and it will hopefully open GENNIT up to a whole new world of flexibility.

Rather than having to select pre-created templates/generators such as NHiberate/ActiveRecord/XHTML users will be able to write their own - again using online template designers. Below is a screenshot of the work in progress that should be available within the next coming weeks.

GENNIT Code Generation Template Creator

Coming soon!

This is a continuation of Code Generation Real World Part 2 which in turn is a continuation of Code Generation Real World Part 1 which is probably a good place to start if you’ve just got here.

In Part 2 I had just successfully downloaded the zip file which hopefully contains all the code I need to get started with the GlobalSurfari Facebook System.

Extract the Zip file to a location on disk

After extracting the zip file you can see a number of folders and files exist. The first step would be to read README.html. This file contains a QuickStart guide and gives you the information about exactly what files have been extracted and what they are for.

README.html - File Descriptions and QuickStart Guide

The file lists what each project and for certain projects, what each file does - it also contains a Quick Start guide for getting your project working.

From the Quick Start the following steps are to be taken -

1. Ensure all of the directory locations match up (for example, this is an NHibernate template and I declared that NHibernate was located at c:\Program Files\NHibernate )
2. Generate the database by using the script supplied by GENNIT
3. Ensure the database connection string is correct and will connect.
4. Open the solution and build it, use NUnit to ensure the solution is working correctly and communicating with the database.

Generate the database using the supplied scripts

Opening the solution in Visual Studio I build the project and press F5 to run it. NUnit opens by default (as the parameter to NUnit is supplied when building your project), running the NUnit tests returns green lights, meaning the code and database are all working correctly. When this stage is reached the generated code is working properly and development on your custom solution can start.

NUnit Green Lights is a crucial milestone

In the fourth and final part of the Code Generation Real World series I show what source code was changed and how the Facebook module turned out!

This is a continuation of Code Generation Real World Part 1.You may remember I have just drawn the diagram for the class layout for the project -

My GlobalSurfari Facebook System - on paper

So I have my diagram. It is very simple, I have a User object which contains the Facebook ID (fbid), Name and Surf Prediction Default (home) and a Message object, which contains the message the user writes on the ‘wall’ (body), surf prediction the message was written on (home) and the created date of the message (created). As well as a many to one link with the User object.

Now I am just about ready to get going with GENNIT, all I have to do is reproduce this diagram using the designer and I am ready to go. I am going to use the NHibernate C# DAL which comes with GENNIT to create the project.

Create the Project

So I now have a ‘GlobalSurfari FB DAL’ project on GENNIT. I open the designer to re-create my diagram from paper into the system.

Reproduce my paper diagram onto the GENNIT Designer

The Many-to-One link is represented by the user property on the Message object (shown in the above screenshot).

Next step is to Generate the code, I click on the GENNIT link from the dashboard, ensure all the parameters for the project are correct (specifically what the database is named) and download the generated code.

Downloading the code generated project from GENNIT

In Code Generation Real World Part 3 I demonstrate what modifications I made to the downloaded code to get my Global Surfari Facebook Application up and running.

I wanted to give a real world example for the use of GENNIT. However, to make it a real real world demo I had to wait for that situation to come along. Fortunately the gods have blessed GENNIT as that situation came along a few days ago. This is part 1 so please be patient!

A few years ago, after spending practically 365 continuous days surfing, I found myself back in London. It felt like a million miles away from a decent surf beach. Fortunately, England’s South West is blessed with a varied coast which, in the late summer, isn’t too cold to go surfing… providing there’s waves and its a very long drive (5 hours) to find out if there isn’t any. There’s obviously other surf forecasting software out there, but I wanted my own surf forecast, so I created GlobalSurfari.com.

Skip forward a few years and the Facebook revolution has started, with 30 million users and the ability to write applications for the platform it just seemed like a great place to put Global Surfari, for all the Facebook surfers around the world.

Brief

1. Put GlobalSurfari.com into Facebook
2. Allow users to chat on a ‘wall’ within each individual surf forecast location (Facebook Social Aspect).

Design
Getting the surf prediction to the user is already handled by the Global Surfari system in place. The social aspect did not exist, to provide this functionality I would need to know -

1. Who the user was
2. What Surf Prediction they have as their default
3. What Surf Prediction they were writing the message on
4. The message they were writing (and the time they created it)
5. That’s it.

So after all that, here’s my UML diagram committed to paper.

Jump to Code Generation Real World Part 2

GENNIT Feedback is now on Tangler, rather than the forum system that we were previously using. The main reason for the swap was spam. Tangler is a pretty cool system developed here in Australia.

GENNIT Tangler Feedback Forum

Announcing the launch of NHibernate 1.2 Template for GENNIT.

The NHibernate 1.2 Template generates best practice templates for an NHibernate Data Access Layer. Based on the brilliant work by Billy McCafferty in his article NHibernate Best Practices 1.2.

The generated output includes a Visual Studio 2005 solution which contains 4 projects, Core, Data, Test and Web.

Core - Contains Domain Objects (Data Objects) and hibernate XML mapping files as well as interface design for data access.

Data - All NHibernate based operations occurs in this project. To extend the DAL with additional methods and operations add functionality to the individual classes within DataObjectFactory.cs and consider moving them out of this CS file and into their own.

Test - Very similar implementation to the Castle ActiveRecord DAL Test library. Tests the objects to ensure they are connecting and writing to the database as well as storing values.

Web - Implements NHibernate session management (defined in Data project) to provide simple example of getting values from data objects and inserting new values.

Goto http://gennit.com and signup/login to get going with the NHibernate 1.2 code generator.

Thanks to everyone who has signed up for an account at GENNIT. Special thanks to Mike Gunderloy at Larkware for putting GENNIT on Daily Grind; Google Analytics have started to show a long tail statistical pattern of visitors thanks to that traffic.

Having looked at some of usage of GENNIT and screenshots of how people have used the designer it became clear to me that how it works was definetly not clear! It is not obvious that you have to press RETURN to make the text boxes disappear when editing properties and object names.

The solution was to add a ‘tips’ box on the designer. Released today, in the top right hander corner of the designer, tips will appear at certain stages of designer use. This is better than having to watch a demo of how the designer works and more importantly fits into one of GENNIT’s philosophies of saving time.

GENNIT Designer with Tips Box (top right)

Coming soon : NHibernate 1.2 data access layer implementation will be available on GENNIT. It is the biggest generator so far and will include core libraries, data libraries, test libraries and a sample web application.