OpenGEO – yet another startup with Symfony

Name is: OpenGeo

Last Saturday 07/26/08 me and my friend decided to create simple online service for Ukrainian market.

Idea was in the follwoing – create free of charge open source database of geographical locations of all IP addresses of Ukraine.
Every visitor has possibility to see his IP address and set his Ukrainial location with help of drop downs.

Possible stakeholders of this service are:

– e-commerce services like auctions, online malls
it would be easy to find goods near to you with it, for example find motorbike in 50km radius.

– social services (social networks)
Also find people near to your location and get in contact

– and so on, connected to location definition

So we decided to start development of this project with Symfony (actually I enforced him to do that 🙂 ).

Two days ago we finished first stage and now project in “locations-collection” stage.

Please take a look on www.opengeo.org.ua

The next step will be development of analysis module and user interface improvements, for example make location tag-cloud instead of select-boxes.

Feel free to say your opinion in comments to this post – it will be very useful!

Migration to Symfony 1.1: Step Two

In my previous Symfony 1.1 migration step 1 I descirbed how to upgrade your old Symfony 1.0 project into Symfony 1.1 version. This is works and this is OK.

After that I upgraded project I opened it in my browser and got errors (of course, in development environment you can see it). My Symfony was dissatisfied of presence ‘web_debug: ~’ and ‘flash:     ~’ lines in my ‘frontend/config/filters.yml’. I deleted these lines and everything became OK.

There are too many small issues I’ve discovered while migration process and seems like there will be more.
And another reason – I’m using many plugins from different vendors in my project so these plugins must be custom edited to work well with 1.1 – It’s a lot of work.

I made a final decision – rollback to Symfony 1.0.17 with my project and wait while almost all plugins vendors migrate to 1.2 🙂 Because 1.1 is the transition release and for one year only.

So, I’ve got good experience with migration and have seen powerfull features of 1.1 like forms, events for example – this is right way of development, Fabien! 🙂

We’re looking forward for the 1.2.