Sunday, December 9, 2007

Team Yellow MyIsern 2.0 Review

Installation Review:

Right off the bat, I was able to download the distribution file but I had difficulty opening it. I used window XP's default unzipping tool but that didn't work. Finally after the whole team gave it a try, we found that if you used winRar to open the file, then it would uncompress.

There was also no installation guide so I had to resort to using the developer's guide which was barely helpful. I was able to download XAMPP and Symfony with no problem. I also extracted both with ease. I was also able to setup XAMPP easily using the developer's guide. But when it came to installing symfony, I was confused as to what to do. I didn't know how to install symfony and the webpage provided was also confusing and set for a unix user. The symfony site asks to uncompress the symfony download into the root web directory of the server yet I have no idea what folder that is. The developer's guide basically assumes that you can install this program easily, which I couldn't do.

The main errors that occurred were getting PEAR to work. I tried all the commands provided on the symfony site: pear install symfony/symfony, pear config-show, and pear update-channels. I especially had trouble with pear update-channels because it just wouldn't do it. It found no channels. So I went ahead and tried, pear update pear and that gave me even more errors. I moved on to pear upgrade-all and it told me that there was nothing to update. I went back to beginning and tried all the commands again. pear update-channels finally worked! But then crashed in a horrid blaze of fire.

I tried to install phing after that and much of the same occurred. Entered a command, crash. Enter another command, crash. Go back to step 1 and semi-work then crash horribly. The entire team tried to run this application, at the same time, but we all had the same results. I actually got the furthest because for some strange reason XAMPP actually WORKED for me. Everyone else was stuck there.

Finally after two hours, I got pear install symfony/symfony to work. SUCCESS! Only to find that somehow my ad hoc ways of getting this program to install seriously screwed up my localhost page. Defeated, I wiped the tears off my face and hit the close all tabs button.

I actually googled (has google finally made itself a verb?) the subject earlier in the process only to find out that everyone shared much of the same problems as me. Apparent there really is no support for windows/xampp/php/symfony. Those that could get it to run used many ad hoc methods to change things here and there. There even a webpage that shared my sentiments.

http://trac.symfony-project.com/wiki/WindowsXPDevelopmentEnvironment

This person actually tells you to do something knowing that it will fail. Then he goes around and tells you how to fix it using heuristic methods. In the end, I still failed. I consider this a complete failure because it utterly defies Prime directive 2. There really is no easy way to install Symfony. Especially with the Prime Directive Redux questions to answer, finals to study for, and sleep deprivation. I'm actually angry right now.

I do not blame Team yellow for this. I blame Symfony for making it so hard to use. I'm sure once I spent a lifetime or two looking through the thousands of wikis that describe how to install symfony with this program or with this environment or any combination of the above mentioned items, all of which don't work in my opinioin, I might actually get it to run. Then maybe go on to review it.

I was also not able to contact Team Yellow for their help.

Code format and conventions review

We really don't know php at all so we can't really review the code format or the conventions.

Test case review

We could not get the page to run. At all. Therefore we cannot run the tests.

User Interface review

See above.

Summary and Lessons Learned

I've learned absolutely nothing. This was a waste of my time and very frustrating. I'm still angry. But I hope that I at least made this review a fun and delightful piece of reading. Enjoy, cheers!

1 comment:

Jon said...
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