Symfony Ajax Admin Doctrine Generator Plugin

We all know symfony's admin generator is a massive help when building CRUD functionality. With symfony 1.2 it's gotten even better but to a lot of people the art of generating code is perhaps just a learning step too far to master.

So when i started work on an app that was to be quite heavily CRUD centric but was to have to fit into a more dynamic interface i bit the bullet and got stuck into creating my own generator theme and generator classes.

The result is a plugin that will pump out doctrine admin modules that work over via ajax. The generator creates an external javascript class incorporating jquery, creates web symlinks and a view.yml to link it up. This keeps the generated module nice and clean.

Also included in the generator are arguments to incorporate taconite returns. For those in the know, this great jquery plugin allows the ajax return to denote a whole bunch of dom based events to happen. You can achieve some great effects and control them all from an action template.

The plugin can be found on the symfony plugin directory here. I'll be updating the plugin regularly and perhaps adding some extra themes. I'll follow this post with an in depth installation and use guide.

Why are all tech startups the same?

I've worked at a lot of places. It doesn't take much to figure out that they all want me for pretty much the same kind of work. And that's all good. What i can't figure out is: why do they think they're the first people to ever go through this and why do they feel they are so special?

So, they've got a product or a client. That's the hard part, right? This much money coming in, pay someone this much to come in, leaving this much for us. Its easy. Maybe it is. Now try scaling this formula. Melt down. People doing silly hours, arguments, mistakes, angry bosses.

It really should be funny, just dropping a buzz word has everyone repeating and marching about. "May i suggest a new project methodology?" Ooooh, methodology. Yes, let's get one of those. "You need a staging environment with deployment system". Yes, we do. Its just that i don't, find it funny, nor find it easy to forget when a jumped up "project manager" (awarded by default), complete with notebook, ignores your suggestions.