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Gallery 2.0 Released
uss_valiant writes "From the Gallery website: "We are incredibly pleased to announce the release of Gallery 2.0! Over three years of design and development have gone into creating the best online photo management product possible. Gallery 2.0 is the natural successor to Gallery 1, and we hope that you like what you see. Don't wait, download Gallery 2 now!" From a developers point of view, the Gallery 2 framework is particularly interesting because it's written with modern programming patterns (OOP, extreme programming, test driven development, MVC, factories, modularity, ...) in mind which is rather unusual for PHP based projects. Over 1500 unit tests ensure correct functionality and its architecture is really impressive."
RC1 was codenamed +5 Insightful, how nice :)
h0bbel
I agree - I had used Gallery 1.3.x for years and it was "OK", but was a pain to permission up, and stored all the images below the doc-root, so it was trivial to bypass the security anyway.
:P ) It no longer gets it's knickers in a twist and corrupts it's own config file either (although I suspect this only happened on certain combinations of PHP and Apache)
:)
All of this has now been fixed, with a robust user/group model with a permission "tree" ("view all sizes" implies "view full size" and "view thumbnail" for example), and the images stored in a dedicated data directory outside of the web server doc-root. They've also fixed that annoying "feature" of 1.x.x where it would output image URLs with the explicit host name used during the install. This meant for my old gallery, that all the image URLs were prefixed with my internal host name for the server, so you got no images when browsing it from outside (unless you had a real non-proxied connection to the Intarweb and could edit the local hosts file
Gallery 2 demonstrates the ease of use of a mature project. Upgrading within 1.x.x release used to be a bit of a chore, but after unpacking Gallery 2 to a new virtual server, a couple of MySQL commands to create and permissiona new database, all I had to do was browse to the new server, and tell it where the data was for the old gallery and it just got on with it. Detected all the image tools and preserved all the comments and metadata.
The "help n fill" on the local server paths is a bit spooky, but handy. The upload options are comprehensive, even supporting Xo's "publish to Internet" function, although I can't really reccomend that - it's very slow. The best option is to use Gallery Remote - a swing app that lets you just drag images, or folders or zip files of images onto it to upload to your gallery.
It even acts as a shop, letting your customers select images to buy from smaller versions and then making them a handy zip archive for checkout time.
Now I don't have to bother emailing pictures to family and friends - I just made them a user id each, created some groups, permissioned up the albums (and it supports inheritence too for permissions) and mailed people the link
Fantastic job guys.
You're comparing a decent templating engine (Smarty) with crap Java technology (JSPs.) Most modern Java programmers disdain JSPs and use other, better templating technologies. Try using Velocity . Requires no recompiling when you make changes and is a very very easy templating language that provides an amazing amount of power (you literally can drop items into a hashtable of VelocityContexts and then access them by using "$" notation... such as "$user.name") If you want something that will really rock your world, check out JSF or Tapestry (it turns web programming into writing an event-driven application, like desktop apps.)
The problem with most PHP applications is that they don't scale. I don't mean that in a "PHP SUXORS! YOU CAN'T WRITE S$!@ IN IT"... I mean that most PHP applications aren't built with any real caching implementations (like this gallery software, or phpbb, or nuke, etc...) and the PHP frameworks that I looked at don't really provide that functionality.
The stuff availble for Java is just so much more powerful. You have the Hibernate OR mapping package that provides an amazing amount of OR work for you, including the ability to plug in multiple transactional caches, session caches, database connection pools (including the ability to have clustered caches across multiple boxes.) You have complex messaging architectures to talk to and keep multiple machines in sync. You have great web service APIs and great search engines that can be plugged in. Stuff to that degree just doesn't exist for PHP.
It often shocks me to see so many "Enterprise Level" PHP apps released with no caching implementation... you shouldn't see ANY home page hit a database on every hit. (And yes, you can easily avoid stale content by eviction, injection routines.)
So yes, you can definitely write decent stuff in PHP. But for the highly scalable enterprise environment, the libraries and packages that exist for Java and ASP just don't exist.
The other thing I hate about PHP is that there just is no IDE that is of the caliber of Eclipse for PHP (and PHPEclipse just ain't there yet.) A professional IDE allows me to introspect objects, trace stacks, change variables on the fly per hit and control each thread individually. This kind of power makes debugging and performance testing so much easier and more powerful than a PHP app. Good luck trying to seriously profile a PHP app...
So yea, PHP has it's place. It's wonderful for quick one-offs. I just wouldn't want to code a massive user load, transactional, high availability, multiple machine cluster application on it.
About the internal "require_once", maybe you should read the comments on it then you would see that G2 keeping track of what files it has already included and only using PHP's (very slow) require_once speeds up the function by about 10x (line 2480, modules/core/classes/GaleeryCoreApi.class)
.inc and .class issue appears to be somewhat concerning, nothing that can't be fixed by 2 lines in a .htaccess file though. I'll be sure to bring it up at the next meeting.
As for the coding style not being constistent, could you please give an example? G2 has very strict code style guidelines that have to be followed for a patch to be accepted (you can find them on the g2 codex site which is currently getting hammered). The code may appear complicated but if you take the time to read things it's actually quite legible and it makes sense. Usually people who have not worked on very large team projects feel intimidated by something as large and complex as Gallery2, I know I was when I first started working on it.
I admit the
The error handling code works and I challenge you to find a cleaner way to let the developer know exactly where an error occured so they can fix it. Why does it occur so often? Because error checking is good, it's just too bad more people don't do it.