Getting there was quite a ride: We tried lots of different concepts, played through many usage scenarios and often re-thought the basic assumptions.

Now, after getting lots of inspiration from great technologies such as TypoScript v1, jQuery, xPath, CSS, we ironed out a coherent and extensible rendering concept which is not even tied to TYPO3 Phoenix, but can later be used for any FLOW3 application!

Together with the rest of the team, I have worked lots of hours on realizing the new TypoScript, and I am really delighted to have it in the code base now.

If you want to see it live, check out the default TypoScript of Phoenix and the TypoScript which powers the flow3.typo3.org website. Furthermore, you can check an almost up-to-date presentation I did on the T3BOARD12.

We’ll hold various presentations on T3DD12 about this topic, and gonna prepare some documentation as well really soon. I’m excited – a big step for TYPO3 Phoenix!

All the details can be found at the news posting on typo3.org.

However, running some code does not necessarily mean that a test actually checks the correct behavior! Exactly this is what Fuzzer is all about. It’s an open source tool for FLOW3 which mutates (modifies) your source code step-by-step, for example by commenting out a single line. Then, it checks if the code is still valid PHP, and if so, tries to run the unit tests.

If the tests now fail or run forever, everything is fine and the tests detected the change. However, if the tests run successfully, it means that a changed source code line did not trigger a test failure — hinting at some missing test cases!

A lot more details and examples can be found in the readme of the project on GitHub, so check it out, and I’d love to get feedback using Twitter or the comments here!

→ Fuzzer on GitHub

The reason? Amazing autocompletion and a ZSH configuration system called oh-my-zsh which has been praised a lot.

Now, I had some time over the christmas holidays to work on a FLOW3 plugin for oh-my-zsh, which supports the following features:

• The flow3 command is available everywhere inside the FLOW3 distribution, so you can call it from any subdirectory you want.
• The flow3 command now supports autocompletion, both displaying the short help and the full help for a given command
• Some additional helpers to easily run unit and functional tests: f3unittest and f3functionaltest
• A way to mark a FLOW3 distribution as active, and directly cdinto any of its packages:

  cd /anywhere/you/want
  cd TYPO3.FLOW3

  Oh, did I mention that you also get autocompletion for the package keys?

The full plugin is available on Github with installation instructions and a more in-depth readme. Go check it out!

… and of course tell me what you think; either via Twitter (@skurfuerst) or via replying

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… And all this in the major browsers starting from IE7.

The code is almost ready for merging!

It has been a lot of fun to work with Clemens from Gentics, who was my contact person during the time! I look forward to more of these projects.

I am finally finished with my Diploma Thesis about FLOW3 and the Semantic Web. Two days ago, I had my final diploma presentation at university, so I am now officially a “Diplom-Informatiker”

In my diploma thesis, I analyzed the current state of Linked Data from the perspective of a web application programmer. Furthermore, I developed a FLOW3 based framework which can be used to connect FLOW3 Applications with the Linked Data Ecosystem. The code can be found at our GitHub account, and while it is not yet updated to work with FLOW3 1.0, I plan to do that in the next weeks.

We have some very ambitious ideas, both for our company and for the TYPO3 Project, where the developed semantic FLOW3 framework plays a key role. Stay tuned for updates!

Of course, the Diploma Thesis is also available for your reading pleasure. It’s about 100 pages, all in English for maximum reach.

So, head over to the Downloads section at Github and have fun reading my Diploma Thesis And I of course welcome every comment.

Greets, Sebastian

The Current State of TYPO3 Phoenix

I was especially eager to do my talk on The Current State of TYPO3 Phoenix together with Christian Müller from the TYPO3 Phoenix team; as we were unveiling the great progress we were doing on TYPO3 Phoenix, explaining the reasons behind switching from ExtJS to SproutCore and giving a perspective on the next development steps. The extremely positive feedback of the audience made me especially happy: By using a more pragmatic approach to the Phoenix development, we seem to be on the right track.

If you did not attend T3CON, I can really recommend to watch the recording of the talk, which is already online thanks to the video team. Just go to t3con11.chaoscdn.de and search for Typo3PhoenixTheCurrentState.

Furthermore, having this talk out in the wild, means we (=the Phoenix team) are getting out of the hiding again and will blog and twitter a lot more about the progress on TYPO3 Phoenix in the next weeks and months. That makes me happy as well!

FLOW3 Goes Semantic

Furthermore, I was presenting my work on integrating the Semantic Web with FLOW3 during my diploma thesis – also this talk was really nice, and I really enjoyed presenting my visions about Linked Data to a broader audience. The talk is also online at t3con11.chaoscdn.de (title: FLOW3 Goes Semantic).

Inspiring talks and conversations

This time, I felt it was really easy to get in touch with people. I spoke to a lot of people I did not know before, and also learned quite some new things. Especially, I enjoyed getting to know David Zülke who did a great presentation on RESTful web services (also online at the video site). I had some discussions with him concerning the convergence of the RESTful web services with the Semantic Web; and by now, I think they can be a really good match. I’ll explain this in a further blog post, so stay tuned for that

Furthermore, it was great to again meet Haymo, the whole Phoenix and v4 Team, and many good friends.

Looking forward to next year TYPO3 Community Rocks!

http://buzz.typo3.org/people/sebastian/article/typo3-phoenix-status-update/