On a personal level I had a talk about Active Record which is an implementation of ORM(Object Relational Mapping)
Below is my power point presentation and I hope you like it
My blog has been missing me alot because of my love for AfroVisioN Group(www.afrovisiongroup.com) and my other projects that you can read on my birthday blog review on blackamphi.com . Ok enough with the excuses because they dont do the job lol. lets get back to the topic at hand....my meeting with Prof Monekosso Lobe, a top Star Cameroonian Elite who has served as African Regional President of WHO(World Health Organisation) and also served Cameroon as a Minister of public health and for the record he is the person that launched Cameroon foremost Medical Institution locally known as CUSS.
While I was in Yaounde at the Ministry of youths and Sports, talking with the national president of Athletic Federation in Cameroon about their need of a website, I had a call from a friend in Buea. The phone call was demanding me to meet with Prof Monekosso and coming back to buea I scheduled the meeting with him this morning.
I was at his place for an hour and we talked about a couple of things relating to empowering Cameroonians and not only making them depend on foreign Aid but also start working and ferning for themselves.
I was very very happy to be on the same table with this 80yr old Cameroonian who has alot of experience and archievements in his portfolio(thanks be to God).
The meeting was about his Global Health Dialogue Platform. www.globalhealthdialogue.org.
We are going to be working with villages and local councils, empowering them with health related information and needs along side supervising their activities.
Where I fit in is the IT department, I am going to define how a platform similar to what I did for Link UP www.villagediary.org (coming soon), but this one will be more geared towards health and the sub urban communities in Cameroon to start with then later spread into other parts of Africa(remember he has once served WHO and he innitiated the project of all District Hospitals we have in Cameroon and most parts of Africa). So the platform will work more with health and our people in the less previledged regions of Cameroon and later Africa.
I will end this blog post here and get to work, but I will keep you posted as things unfold. Dont forget to keep up with what I have been doing for the past three months on www.blackamphi.com and watch out www.naijaborn.com and www.villagediary.org, I built those platforms on this same laptop in this same office right here in Molyko, Buea, Cameroon.
thanks for your time
Once more, the results have been released and still not legal for someone to host them online.
I wonder why, but I am still hopping that one day this will change. Last year I wrote a blog post here http://mambenanje.blogspot.com/2008/07/cameroon-gce-results-2008.html
detailing some of the advantages and disadvantages of having the results online.
Which included:
-Raising ICT awarness amongst youths
-Introducing a new source of revenue to the GCE Board by using licenses and paid subscriptions to the results access platform
-Introducing a new source of revenue to cyber cafe owners nationwide
-Increasing the ICT usage amongst youths in Cameroon
The project we had at AfroVisioN Group that involved hosting the Cameroon GCE results online has been canceled (www.passgce.com) and we have continued with www.ubstudents.com as a replacement project targeting the youths of Cameroon, while hoping that one day we will get an opportunity to publish the results using the internet.
Its still So So SAD
Kohana is not only my new found love when building applications with php, its also rock solid MVC (Model View Controller) Object Oriented Framework for php developers.
Just like the .NET Framework and Java SDK, Kohana can be referred to as some sort of SDK for php developers, it brings a lot of order into php codes which have been referred to as spaghetti codes for years .
With Kohana php or other php frameworks like Codeigniter, you can build your application with objects just like in Java and any other developer who knows how to use the framework will easily follow your code without asking you questions. if you ever wanted to use php in a team environment, I will ask you to consider Kohana due to the following reasons:
True Object Oriented:
Everything in Kohana SDK is an object, the helpers are objects with static methods, the libraries are all objects and you can create your own classes/objects, the views are objects (which is strange but programming wise very interesting), and of course the controllers and Models are all objects.
In other frameworks, I had never wanted to create controllers and extend them but in Kohana I realized that sometimes I have to build some ABSTRACT CONTROLLERS (I feel am back in Java), and then extends these controllers in the various sections of my website. For instance there is a Template Controller that helps developers using Kohana easily create master templates for their pages.
Best ORM in PHP:
ORM or object relational mapping is a technology where in you can map your database tables and their relationships in objects (Models) and then instantiate those models and call functions to get the data without writing SQL. In Kohana, I find ORM very easy to use and fun. Before ORM in Kohana, I tried ORM in Cakephp and Codeigniter but they all proved to be buggy or were too difficult to comprehend.
Templating made easy:
Templating is something most web developers in Africa will have to consider, it makes your life easy as a developer and makes the life of designers you work with super easy. In Kohana you create a single template.php file which can constitute the site's logo, navigation, sidebar and footer. Then fit in some variables that will change from control function to control function. This way my web apps all have one master template and just small view files that I set as variables. It makes my life easy to edit and also to change the design of the whole site in minutes. Check out the templating in Kohana at www.kohanaphp.com and you will be amazed
I8n aka internationalization:
Before Kohana I had to figure out how to hack Codeigniter to do internationalization but with Kohana, everything that appears on the screen as text you can use the i8n folder found in application/i8n and make sure you have text in every language possible. Coming from Cameroon, just like Canada we have french and english as official languages which means most of my apps have to be internationalized from day one.
PHPDOC and Code Hints, Code Completion:
In Kohana, since everything is an object, it simple means using phpdoc very well and a good IDE like Netbeans 6.5, you will get code hints and completion for both in build Kohana libraries, helpers, other classes and your own built classes. I use Netbeans 6.5 and when I code, I get a lot of speed reading the code hints and getting code completion for the functions in every helper or object I want to use. It makes my life easy and I just feel I am coding using .NET C# or Java. But other than Visual Studio, and like Eclipse, Netbeans is free and its light weight (in terms of memory consumption) and easy to install and configure to coding with php.
Those are some of the reasons I think I will go with Kohana.
Another question is:
why use php at all?
Well php is cheap for me and the server I have bought runs only php and most of my clients don't care which technology we use so we go with php. Hey with php I get to train and employ talents in the space of 6months, something I cant do with .NET or Java.
What do you think about Kohana php ?
Nowadays I am more of a developer than a designer though I love doing both. A few days back I tried coming up with some designs as required by clients but I was always stuck and not liking the things I did. I turned to the internet and I found this cool link that talks about 100 sites that can help you come up with just the best designs. Even if your brain is tired it will be inspired by simple looking at these sites.
check out the link and if you got a better way a designer like me can search for inspiration please post it as a comment.
http://designm.ag/inspiration/design-inspiration-toolbox/
hello, my blog is kind of scanty with fewer posts coming up lately. Men AfroVisioN Group is on the fast lane and you know how it is. Anyway no room for excuses because they don't do the job.
Last year I wrote a very controversial blog post about Google Adsense Not Working In Africa. Now I decided to come with a follow up because I noticed some improvements(++ to Google Africa).
Check out this picture then we proceed.
The picture is a screen shot from www.ubstudents.com my Cameroonian youths network for students of university of buea. I have been seeing these ads lately and I was like: Is this MTN Africa using Ad words Network ?? if so men the ads are getting real in the sense that they will make more sense to my users.
My cry about Adsense - Adwords in Africa was the fact that most of the ads were not about things African internet users could relate to in their daily lives compared to the ads they see on TV or Magazines. Imagine an ad about hotels in California on ubstudents.com, can the students pay for a hotel in USA? Hence they don't click on such ads and we make nothing form our traffic. [ Seun Osewa do you see where I was coming from ].
But with Ads like the one in picture above, Google adsense begins to make more sense to my users and it begins to generate more money. If you own an African web portal and you are an adsense publisher, I guess you might have noticed these ads from MTN. I found them on ubstudents.com and on bushfalling.com . Gradually Google adsense is working in Africa but not yet up to 20%, we need more companies to start using adwords which I am currently advocating and slowly but surely, we will be making some money from our traffic.
reading this blog post I was totally shocked. How come Rasmus of php.net writes something like this to the public. If its for traffic generation then I am totally disappointed. read the post below
http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/38-The-no-framework-PHP-MVC-framework.html
My comments about his post:
How can he prefer his own framework to other frameworks that make the work easy for us. Its like me telling him I will never use php because it wraps everything together in one language rather I will build my own server scripting engine that will let me support .net, java and php where necessary. HOW DUMB IS THAT ??.
These frameworks might be bad but the overall success is the fact that they are documented for teams to work together and also ask questions to community on one common platform. For instance the codeigniter framework has documentation and if I am building my application and somewhere I get called for something else, I can outsource it to any php developer and tell him my code base is on codeigniter.com. This way any developer can update my codes by learning codeigniter and then working from where I stopped given the specifications and UML diagrams. But using his so called no framework framework. How is he going to explain things to other developers when he gets stuck along the way. THIS ONLY SHOWS HE IS NOT A TEAM PLAYER OR HE HAS A LOT OF TIME TO TRAIN GUYS TO UNDERSTAND HIS NO FRAMEWORK FRAMEWORK AND WORK ON PROJECTS WITH HIM.
Men Frameworks like the .NET framework is what php has been lacking for years and no true programmer will lean more to procedural and individualistic ways of doing things than a team way of doing things.
I don't have the time to create my own framework, before building my application, then spend time writing documentation for my team members to learn and then start developing. I want to use a framework that has done a lot of stuff for me and can also help me outsource work to others and still be able to modify their codes even if they are thousands of miles away from me. I don't need to send them mails or get conference calls with them just to ask what they use to validate codes or connect to the google api. I will just follow the programming principles in the framework and understand their codes and they too will understand mine.
Men Rasmus, that your toy post was a total mess and please try to upgrade and follow the current trend of things
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