F13 going public
Didn’t have much time to update my blog lately as I was quite busy working on F13 and the next Shelter13.Net homepage. I expect the page to be finished till mid-september, and fully working until october Moreover, I’m planning the commercial release of F13 for the end of the year. For details, be sure to check out the read more section.
SH13 II - current progress
During this week, I finished the basic design of the page. There won’t be any changes to it any more, except very minor ones like maybe make some text slightly larger or change a color. At the moment, I’m working on some of the backend scripts, but I’m quite confident it won’t take too long before I can put the page live and concentrate on bug-fixing.
F13
Yeah, it’s true, F13 is going to be released to the public! After working for 2 years on it and porting it over to PHP5, I’m going to release it by the end of this year (hopefully). While creating the next SH13 page I still discovered some inconsistency in the API design (small little things that make using it more complicated than needed), and I wanted to have them sorted out before going commercial with it. Plus I wanted the SH13 as a last “stress test” for the whole framework. F13 will be released with the full source code, I have no plans to encrypt the PHP files. It comes with complete documentation, both auto-generated API documentation and a “Getting started” PDF manual. If I have enough time, I would like to include some sample project, but I can’t make any promises on that yet. Full email and IRC support, including help with integrating F13 into your own page will be provided for at least 6 months.
F13 is a mature, leightweight web-development framework that simplifies loads of common tasks when creating web applications and web pages. It consists of some tightly integrated core services that are built for maximum security and flexibility, and seperated by a very clean API from all application code. For example, when developing the SH13 PasteBot or a custom in-house bugtracker, I could nearly start off directly with the application logic and didn’t have to care about how do I connect to the database or how do I make a secure user login. The pastebot is a particular good example, it consists of a single PHP script which is 6,63 kb large - yet it is a fully functional pastebot with database access, $_GET parameter validation and embedded into a few templates. A note on third-party libraries used in F13: F13 makes use of Smarty! and ADOdb, libraries that were used in a lot of production environments.
New windows style
I’ve switched to a new windows style, which is supposed to be the same that you get with the Media Center Edition. I hope this is the right link. It’s called Royale, if you search the web for “Royale Theme windows” you should easily find it.