In December 2011 I decided to give Play! Framework a go, and what better place to start than right here on my blog. A totally non mission critical application that I can just have fun with and figure out how play works. I was so impressed with play but I already wrote an article on that.

As this is the first time setting goals to measure myself against next year, I don’t really have anything tangible to measure against from the start of 2011.

The one thing I have accomplished though is getting a lot more into development. I started out from an early age as a web designer, got around 5 years commercial experience under my belt and then in mid 2010 after starting a fantastic job at Crafty Devil I started to learn more about development, starting with PHP and Codeigniter.

Being quite a JavaScript aficionado, I am used to and quite like functional programming, I finally got the opportunity to use a closure in PHP, a recursive one at that.

Over the Christmas break I’ve been trying out Play! Framework using java. I really like it, so much so that I’ve not only written an article, but rewritten my blog to run on play.

Play is a reasonably new web framework based on the java language. It uses model view controller as a base for structuring your applications, but also has a few other neat tools to break down your code into a few extra layers, to hopefully acheive logic-less templates.

I decided a couple of weeks ago to start putting the new things I’ve learnt over the past six months into my codeigniter template on github. This is mainly for my own use when starting each new project to be able to clone, but it’s in a public repository and it might be useful for others to take it as a starting point as well.