December 30, 2007
As I was walking to the grocery store two days ago I had an idea for a simple service that would allow for anyone with a simple internet-enabled cellphone to get deals and special offers at the store(s) you’re going to. Here is how it would work:
Deal Database (and website)
Create a database of deals. You can do this one of two ways, either create a community-driven site where people would submit special offers and savings from the stores in their area, or create a mash-up of all the current deal sites out there. Only problem is, there are not that many (If at all?) sites that display deals for brick-and-mortar stores, and most focus on online shopping. Each deal would be tagged with the store name, as well as GPS (Or Street address) location.
Using the service
The service would be very simple to use and have two ways you could use it.
- Simple search: With this method, I could be heading to my local Walmart and go to the services website and type in “Walmart Waterloo”, or “Walmart N2V1K7″ (Postal code search) or any other variety of searches to narrow down your location so you can see the deals for that specified store.
- Multiple deal search: Similar to the simple search, this one would allow you to search via city, postal code, street, etc and display all the deals from stores in the given area. This way, I could be heading to the mall and get all the deals from the 50+ stores within the mall.
- GPS/Location search: This one could work for GPS-enabled phones as well as any phone that can access Google Maps as it can now track your location as well. With this, I could simply log into the site and see all the deals within my area via a Google maps mash-up, or maybe a simple text feed depending on the power of my phone. Additionally, you could also simply search for “Walmart” and it will know your location via GPS and show deals for the Walmart near you.
With user settings, the user could simply setup what they would like to always use, but the initial setup would promote a more simple search, unless we can check and identify if the phone is GPS-enabled (Can you do that?)
That’s my idea in a nutshell, obviously there is a bit more to it but this is just a simple blurb on it. As for making money, programming it and publishing it, that’s another story.
If anyone is interested on working with me on something like this, let me know, otherwise tell me how silly my idea is.
I’ve been using PHP on-and-off (mostly on) for a good 5 years now and about a month ago I finally buckled down and decided to try out CakePHP, a PHP MVC framework that promotes “rapid development”
I will tell you right now, there was definitely no rapid development in the first few sessions of coding. I had my development plan, models were laid out and setup, associations were made, then I hit a stumbling block, putting it all together.
After a lot of reading, some playing around, and a few questions on the helpful CakePHP IRC channel, I finally “got” it and am now slowly becoming a CakePHP super star.
Today, I finally realized why they can claim rapid PHP development, as I created and finished a very secure, easy to adapt, and expandable user authentication system in about an hour.
Here is why you should be using CakePHP for pretty much any large project (unless your boss/client says you can’t!):
- CakePHP promotes an MVC setup, in which you are required to write good code. This makes you feel great and look like a rock star as you progress through your application and you’re not spending 10 minutes trying to find that user search function you created
- bake.php is a simple script that will take the models you have created and create views and controllers from them. If you’re having a hard time figuring things out, or you just don’t feel like creating all the basic CRUD pages and controls right now, this will do all the boring mundane work for you
- Built in session management and other classes keep the annoying nitty gritty details out of the way. Sure, it is always important to know and understand how core PHP things work, but if you know how they work, why not let Cake save you the time and do the small things for you?
- A growing code and tutorial repository make it easy to find and learn from various people. CakePHP had no Cookie class, so I created my own, but I was able to see how components are structured by browsing the Bakery.
- Once you get it, things move fast. It took me about 2 weeks of on-and-off sessions on the computer to fully understand how to build a large-scale CakePHP application but I finally got it. Once I got it, I was able to progress quickly and get things done. What would normally take me a few hours of coding, building of test forms and testing was minimized to about an hour with all the extra features of Cake
Of course, CakePHP isn’t for everything or everyone. If you do not understand the core aspects of the PHP language, I recommend you pick up a book, and learn PHP before dwelving into it. CakePHP kind of feels like I was learning a new language to a point, which felt kind of awkward, but since I understand the core concepts of the language itself, it wasn’t too hard to grasp what each function was actually doing.
I’m curious to how many large companies have actually used CakePHP for their own website or various tools, anyone know of any?
Some useful things I’ve found while learning Cake:
facebook
twitter
friendfeed
flickr
pownce
youtube
Hi! I'm Bart, Currently enjoying life in Waterloo, Ontario. I love Programming, Cooking, Music, Science ... and pretty much everything interests me.