I'm so impressed by the power and features that version 2.4 (Ben Lawers) brings to the table compared with version 2.3 (Schiehallion) just under a month ago. The whole engine has been redesigned to take advantage of the object oriented design that came to BalfBlog when it went by the name of the JBlogs. The redesign makes BalfBlog easier to develop at a very small cost to performance. It makes other things such as dealing with Ajax so simple that it's not even worth considering it a separate part of the system. It integrates so much very seamlessly that you wouldn't know it's changed, that is unless you are a developer.
2.3 didn't care about developers the way that 2.4 does. Everything is developed in the most object oriented way it can be. Inheritance has become a staple feature of BalfBlog with the latest release and inclusion is no longer the only way to get run things (this doesn't need to make sense to you, but developers who fiddle with BalfBlog will understand).
A new templating system brings so much in terms of performance and easy of use. It also moves even further from the limitations on the content that were the key aim that BalfBlog aims to improve. Emails recently got put into the standard templating system, which is set for a complete renewal in 2.5 (I aim to improve the efficiency considerably by writing a new templating language).
Since I've now got full approval to include FileManager in BalfBlog, 2.4 will now include it by default and there will be no option to switch it off. However, as this is a new addition, it may still be limited in features until I've got it perfected.
So BalfBlog 2.4 is nearly ready for a late July release.
However, several features are still to be added as absolute essentials.
- All the way in version 2.4, the delete user functionality is not ideal. This really needs to be fixed. I will work on this again tonight and tomorrow and improve it.
- Ajax functionality stopped working for the front end when I updated the system to version 2.4.
- Themes have been a much requested feature but will not be a focus of 2.4, so might not make it into this release.
- CKEditor is not confirmed to work any longer. I will work on fixing this for the release date, but may remove it in the meantime.
- Users are supposed to be able to store notes, this has been underway for the last few days and I will be including this in the release.
- The whole data file needs a complete redesign now that I am using an object oriented methodology for the back end.
- Finally, I want to have an introduction help page to help new users understand BalfBlog's back end.
These features will soon appear in the changelog, so keep an eye on it and soon enough you'll be able to use them too.
For the last few days I have been looking at using something called FileManager in BalfBlog for managing users' files. The great news is, and I have great pleasure in saying this, but FileManager will now be bundled with BalfBlog 2.4.
After an requesting free bundling with BalfBlog 2.4 by asking the creator, I am pleased to say that it resulted in a very satisfactory result:
I'm very happy to announce that BalfBlog 2.4 will now be bundled with FileManager!
Here's a portion of transcript between us:
I love FileManager and I am interested in whether you would permit me to bundle it as part of an open source CMS project which I plan to share? If not, no worries.
Cheers,
Jamie Balfour
This resulted in a very good result for all BalfBlog users:
Ok no problem
So I am very happy to announce that BalfBlog will now be bundled with the well built, well designed and possibly the best file manager for any web project known as FileManager!
BalfBlog 2.4 is designed to do a lot. In this very short post I will outline the new design of the BalfBlog core and how it will make BalfBlog more efficient than before.
Architecture
As someone who cares about organisation, BalfBlog 2.3 and before always upset me. Currently version 2.4 minimises the issue of organisation by organising files in an MVC pattern with a single dashboard controller than routes requests easily. Everything is passed through the main controller. The way that the new version has been designed also takes advantage of the object oriented features of PHP to make the architecture even more seamless. By the release of 2.4, the architecture should be perfect.
Features
As well as organisation, all features have been integrated into the dashboard. The AJAX requests pages have now also been seamlessly integrated to make sure that if AJAX isn't supported by the browser (for instance if JavaScript is not enabled, why on earth would you disable JS?!) then it has a PHP fallback.
New features have also been added in terms of the way posts are produced, information is retrieved and the way in which you interact with the content management system.
Performance
Performance has seen a slight increase since 2.3 but I cannot be 100% about this because I also have changed to a VPS since version 2.3, so I might see the increase in performance because of this.
The next big change to BalfBlog is designed to make it even more powerful whilst extending it's MVC pattern to be even further refined.
Actions can now performed very easily using links which store references to each individual action and it's corresponding view. The controller then decides whether or not to access the view or model. BalfBlog is still incredibly lightweight and fast, and the new query engine makes it even faster to retrieve results from the past.
In the front end, Ajax has been removed from all individual modules and is now a system wide option if it is supported (it should be since BalfBlog expects your browser to be at least a bit modern).
Since I created this post, a lot of stuff has been fixed and is ready for release. I will hold out until the end of July for 2.4 however.
Version 1.5.5! Wow!
I cannot believe we are now in June and ZPE version 1.5.5 is now under development. So in this post, I'm going to discuss some of the new core functionalities that will be coming (hopefully) to ZPE 1.5.5 at the end of June 2017.
Serial communication
Yes! Finally! After all these versions I have finally decided that it was time to add this feature that has existed in the .NET BlackRabbit Script since the very beginning. It has been very difficult to get to a point where I can say that I know how to do it because for some reason it has been very difficult to get here. Anyway, despite the issues, I may have found a solution that would allow me to implement this effectively in ZPE, providing a wrapper to a set of functions that would allow this communication to take place.
This has been a big priority for me since I have wanted to be able to send hex commands to my projector to switch it on and off (amongst many other things) with my Raspberry Pi and whilst the BlackRabbit Script Interpreter could do this, it was a Windows only program (ZPE is of course, thanks to the underlying Java, cross platform).
Function aliases
Yep! Another feature requested from the beginning. So now I intend to add the compiler functionality of function aliases. It is planned to look like below:
function test() print("Hello world") end function function hello aliases test
Continuing on the concept of function aliases, I intend to improve the way that compiled functions can aliases other functions very soon too. This feature has been requested from the very start.
As part of the next version of ZPE, to be released at the end of May, 1.5.4 will include a new XML parser which will be similar to the JSON parser and CSV parser.
This new parser will be available to both Java and ZPE users. The new version also improves the efficiency of the ZPE parser and brings it up to version 1.1 after a big change was brought to it.
The new XML parser will generate a list of elements which themselves are associative arrays. ZPE 1.5.4 also aims to improve the way that associative arrays and lists work, making them more similar in syntax and provides a new object syntax.
ZPE 1.5.4 seems to be the fastest version to date, compilation is done faster than ever, parsing is done quicker than ever and the interpreter also received a little boost recently.
Also, 1.5.4, like 1.5.3, is part of the Port Royal versions, so nothing will change there (what this means is that the syntax is identical for all ZPE installations).
This is now my sixth entry into my blog that is a celebrity tribute and today's post goes straight to the heart for me.
Today my tribute is to Sir Roger Moore who to me was a fantastic actor. Some say he ruined James Bond, but to me, he improved it. He brought humour that didn't exist before him and he portrayed Bond well. Although Roger Moore was the least like Ian Fleming's 007, he portrayed a more modern Bond compared with Sean Connery's mid-20th century Bond, something I thought changed the way that Bond became.
I have a couple of non-Bond favourite films that Roger Moore starred in, including The Wild Geese and The Sea Wolves amongst others.
I am very sad to have heard the news about Sir Roger Moore and my thoughts are with his family.
I introduced my gallery over 3 years ago when I decided to write in whilst on my yearly get away to Dunkeld. I have finally updated it.
This means that I haven't quite finished adding the original content to it, but you'll see it performs much better for both my server and for you in terms of waiting.
Please be aware that some links on my website will no longer work as expected if they link to the gallery. I aim to have my gallery updated with all the content from the original gallery by the end of tonight. I also realise that a lot of people aren't even interested in my gallery as of recent, but I also have to point out my gallery is not for everyone. I built it as a way to share photos with my family and to build my own kind of 'scrapbook' of photos.
As the pilots of the planes that crash into the Severnaya bunker say in Goldeneye:
Negative so far. Everything seems normal
Well, now everything actually is normal. The transition has been made from jamiebalfour.net to jamiebalfour.com. jamiebalfour.com now points to my new host, jamiebalfour.me and jamiebalfour.co.uk will be here in about 2 and a bit months' time (due to restrictions on the transfer of domains, they can only be transferred 60 days after registration, and sadly .co.uk renewed automatically just before I started the transfer).
I had to make some changes to BalfBlog, and I have no idea why these changes were actually needed, but they were (actually, come to think of it, I have a rough idea it might have something to do with the DocumentRoot directive in Apache2, but I'll test that out).
In the meantime, if there are any further issues across my site get in touch via Facebook or my contact form on my website. I've still got a lot of stuff to try out at the moment so the site may have some issues due to this.
What's new
There's a lot of new stuff coming to my website because of the change to running my own system from the ground up (well in a VM).
My favourite new feature is the use of PHP 7. PHP 7 is supposedly up to twice as fast as PHP 5 and I see a huge performance gain on my website. OPCache is enabled to reduce the amount of time spent parsing the PHP in the first place too. My site was always fast but now it runs only one core and 512MB of RAM and yet it performs better than it did on the shared host where I had 3GB of RAM and four cores. Ahh the benefits of VPS!
