… “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.

Yang menjadikan saya tertarik adalah karena banyak hal yang dituliskan dalam artikel ini yang benar saya rasakan sendiri. Saya ingat, semasa semester-semester awal kuliah (2 – 3 tahun silam), ketika belum ada akses Internet di kos, saya bisa betah berjam-jam duduk di depan meja membaca buku materi kuliah, dan saya bisa menikmati kegiatan membaca tersebut. Sekarang, untuk membaca satu dua halaman saja susahnya ampun. Konsentrasi mudah teralihkan, otak saya gatal untuk mencari hal-hal lain yang lebih menarik.

Bukan sepenuhnya salah Internet; mungkin karena beberapa sebab, justru saya yang jadi malas, atau jadi kurang tertarik terhadap bidang yang saya geluti / materi yang saya baca. Tapi curhat Carr bahwa “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it“, adalah masuk akal. Otak kita ini amat fleksibel. Koneksi-koneksi antar sel-sel neuron kita senantiasa berubah, mengikuti berubahnya nature dari medium bacaan kita. Di era informasi ini, constant flow of information menjadi hal yang lumrah, sehingga otak kita menjadi terlatih untuk skimming – memilah-milah informasi. Dengan semakin banyaknya cara kita berkomunikasi, distraction pun menjadi hal yang biasa (e.g. Messenger, Facebook update, E-mail, SMS, BBM), sehingga era informasi ini identik pula dengan sebutan The Era of Distraction. Dampaknya jeleknya berimbas ke penurunan kemampaun otak kita untuk melakukan deep and focused reading.

Tapi .. Mengingat banyaknya kemudahan yang ditawarkan, sepertinya hampir tidak mungkin ya di jaman seperti ini untuk benar-benar melepaskan diri dari Internet (apalagi bidang yang saya geluti adalah IT). Menurut saya, yang penting kita siap dan punya strategi dalam menghadapi constant flow of information. Saya pribadi sedang membiasakan untuk menyempatkan 1 jam setiap hari tanpa koneksi Internet untuk melatih kemampuan deep reading. Apakah efektif? Hehe2 .. Percaya saja ..

As far as I can found in CodeIgniter’s wiki, there are two approaches to integrate AMFPHP with CI. The first approach is by creating an AMF service that emulates a call to CodeIgniter, which IMHO, involves a lot of dirty hacking. You can see the work flow below.

The second approach is by providing an AMF gateway inside CodeIgniter itself. Our gateway will be a CI’s controller and our service classes would be CI’s models.

The later is the cleanest, which I suggest you to use. However, in the tutorial provided, we have CI models as our service class. Well, it works fine actually, but I myself prefer to have a controller (instead of model) as my service class. By having a controller as a service class, I can have 2 separate domains (Controller and model) in my application architecture, therefore I can better organize my code and separate class responsibilities. The illustration below is pretty much what I want to achieve.

If you have read the tutorial provided in the second link, maybe you think that this can be as simple as pointing the gateway classpath to the controller directory. Well … yes it is but it is not. Apparently, the internal working of AMFPHP doesn’t go well with CodeIgniter so we can’t construct CI’s controller after we call the $gateway->service(). After nearly a day of desperate code inspection, I manage to find the culprit and do a simple two lines workaround.

Below is the tutorial to integrate AMFPHP with CI, with CI controller being the AMF service class. Please notice that although I have done some simple testing (and it’s working fine), I hardly ever use it, as I just found it yesterday, so use it on your own risk.

The tutorial

I assume you already have a working CodeIgniter system on your hand. Please download the AMFPHP library from here, and unzip it to your application’s library folder. You may want to rename the library folder to something without space character. In my case, I change “amfphp 1.9″ to “amfphp”.

The next step is to create an adapter class inside the library folder (In this example, “amfphp_adapter.php”). What is done by this class is to provide access to the core library, construct and configure the AMF gateway.

Code snippet (amfphp_adapter.php)

Points $service_dir to the location of your controllers folder/subfolder. The next step is to create the gateway controller (put this inside the controller folder, off course). This controller would be the endpoint of any AMF requests.

Code snippet (amf.php)

You may notice that I define a global constant CURRENT_WORKING_DIR before I call $this->gateway->service(). This is is the workaround to fix conflict between AMFPHP and CI. The internal working of AMFPHP change the current working directory, which will affect the behaviour of CI. My solution is to remember the current working directory by saving it in a global constant, and then inside the service class, we will change the directory back to the previously saved location.

Almost done. The next step is to create a test service class, test_service.php. Put that file inside the controllers/services folder (or whatever folder you define in $service_dir above).

Code snippet (test_service.php).

That’s all. Easy peasy isn’t it? Well, before I came with this workaround, it took my hours to trace the code and find the conflict between AMFPHP and CI. Now you can test your code by using AMFPHP service browser, and points the gateway URL to the gateway method of AMF class. You can play around by trying to load model, fetch database records, etc. It should works just fine.

If something is not working, or you have something to ask, please comment on this post. Cheers!

Updated: Apparently, this method does not integrate very well with CI, which is not designed to have multiple instances of controller at a time. It works fine as long as you have only 1 AMF call per HTTP request, but if you have multiple call batched in one request, it will broke CodeIgniter’s internal mechanism.

For your information, currently I am having an internship at a small game company in Berlin (it has been 1 month at the time I write this post). The company is developing a Facebook game. It’s still in very early development phase and nothing to be seen for now, but I’ll post something here when the game is ready!

Anyway, the technologies used to build the game are those three written in the title. They are entirely new for me! Symfony PHP framework as the data provider, Flex as the game, and off course Facebook API.  I am only responsible for developing the backend code, so Flex skill is not mandatory for me. But still, I think some basic knowledge would be useful for future configuration and testing.

My first impression about Symfony is, I don’t like it. I have tried CodeIgniter and Ruby on Rails before, and I can quickly get a grasp on how to correctly use those two frameworks. But not for Symfony … and I think that’s because of the following reasons:

1. I am lacking of intelligency (any advice on how to fix this would be greatly appreciated!).
2. I play RF online during my study hours.
3. I don’t  like Symfony’s documentation. Sure it has a dedicated and official book, but still I don’t like the API. CI and Rails provide an extensive use of sample code to explain almost the every functionality within. Their API are very descriptive! I don’t see that in Symfony.
4. Symfony’s complexity is unnecessary for my current project. In Symfony, one project can has several applications, and each application can has their own configuration, controller, presentation, libraries.  Well, I don’t need those separations because I only have one application. Even if I want to create another application for the same project, I would have just create another controller. A simplistic approach, but I’m pretty sure it would still be fine.
5. … and maybe several other reasons.

Many people said that Symfony is a great tool once you get used to it. I guess I am just not there yet.

About Flex, I can’t tell much because it’s not my focus. We use AMF for the communication protocol between Flex and Symfony (by using sfAmfPlugin from Symfony). I think that’s great because using AMF, I can throw an exception (with error code and message) from PHP to the Flex client. Check out this useful post. Previously when I work with JSON and JavaScript, I use a primitive approach to include my own meta data in every server response. Like this:

{ success: false, message: 'Invalid data', content: null }

And about the Facebook API ….. craps, this is the hardest among them all. It tooks me a lot of time to figure out how everything works (Facebook application infrastructure, session management, etc). The wiki is not noobs-friendly and the starter sample code is too simple and doesn’t explain anything.

The best way to learn this API is to try by yourself. Get some basic knowledge, read the source code, and try the functions that you may need. And FYI, it’s not possible to test Facebook app on localhost. You need to host the application in a public server to do the testing. I use this free hosting service.

Well, that’s all for today. I have nothing to conclude, so see you on the next post!

My name is Andree, a 21 years old boy from Indonesia with a crappy English. I love techy stuffs and my world revolves around software geekery. This blog came to existence because of ….. well, no reason. It’s a boring weekend and I don’t know why but I type wordpress.com, and therefore this blog.

In my whole life, I have seen tons of  blogs with a lot of crap inside, or abandoned by the writer, or written in a terestrial language (which the writer claimed as English). I am pretty sure this blog will be one of them!