Mihai Mobile

The v0.1 release that I wanted to prepare for the 1st of July is postponed. The situation is that there are too many problems and missing functions at the moment to warrant a release.

In the future I’ll avoid setting release dates. I wanted to use the ‘release date’ trick as a self-motivating device: knowing that I have to do something at a given date, I’d push myself to work harder. But this may not be so, in fact this technique may backfire. The situation is that I sometimes avoid to do what I have to do, and instead work on something else. Maybe another trick would be to convince myself that I have to do something that is of no importance, and than I’d avoid doing it becase I have to work on it, and instead focus on the real thing.

The project update:

I use Clearsilver for the presentation part. Clearsilver takes care of the View part of the MVC (model-view-controller). All the HTML is in the clearsilver templates, and I don’t use ‘inlined html’ anywhere in the project code.

I recently discovered CTemplate, which is a Google open source project doing about the same thing as Clearsilver. I didn’t understand why Google internally developped CTemplate, instead of using Clearsilver. Perhaps such an explanation (why one should use CTemplate instead of Clearsilver) would be a useful addition to the CTemplate documentation.

I’m using SQLite as the database. SQLite is a nice and useful project, I particularly like it’s lightweight characteristic. On the other hand, I’m missing some advanced features like the enforcement of foreign-key constraints and the full-text search. The alternatives to SQLite are Postgres and MySQL.

As deployment architecture, I use FastCGI behind an Apache or Lighttpd server.

The hosting is at Dreamhost. All I can say is that Dreamhost is incredible value for money (you may want to take advantage of some coupons when starting with them). On your one Dreamhost account, you may create multiple unix ssh accounts, host any number of domains, configure DNS for any number of prefixes on a domain, and use FastCGI.