I built Hitgeist using Merb, a Ruby framework which brings fun back into web development. In fact, the fun is taken by Symfony, which just doesn’t feel elegant anymore. Merb also has less magic than Ruby on Rails, and is a lot better architected. In fact RoR developers liked Merb so much they started to unify both frameworks.

So, what are the updates?

First, I rewrote all templates from ERB to HAML. I should have done this before. Code becomes so much cleaner—tags are closed automatically, and visual clutter is reduced:

ERB (before, 9 lines)

<div id="container">
  <div id="sitemap">
    <span class="letters">
      <% ('A' .. 'Z').each do |letter| %>
        <a href="/trends/<%=letter%>"><%=letter%></a>
      <% end %>
    </span>
  </div>
</div>

HAML (after, 5 lines)

#container
  #sitemap
    %span.letters
      - ('A' .. 'Z').each do |letter|
        %a{ :href => '/trends/' + letter }>= letter

Second, I changed site structure to use grid system, a method to construct visually appealing page layouts using columns and rows which was used in newspapers for decades, but started getting its way to web only around 2005. Usually grids are implemented using one of CSS frameworks, which mostly solve cross-browser and printing issues and add niceties such as vertical rhythm and beautiful typography.

There are several CSS frameworks available to implement grids, most famous ones being Blueprint (which is used by sites like QuantCast), 960.gs, and Yahoo UI Grids. There are also others, like this high-quality small CSS framework.

I chose Blueprint because it’s complete and integrates nicely with Compass, a CSS meta-framework for making CSS shorter, much like HAML does for ERB. It also allows to do computations, for example:

.bright
  :font-color !main_color + #663300

Did these changes improve the website? Visit new version, and send your feedback.

PS: Do you know anything like HAML but for PHP?

Some highlights:

• Around 2x performance increase in many cases, thanks to YARV-based code
• Nice syntax enhancements, like (1..10).reduce(:+) # => 55
• JavaScript-style literal hashes: {var: “value”}
• Lots of other enhancements

Ruby 1.9 is a development release, and contains a lot of experimental features. For production, it’s recommended to continue using 1.8 branch.

At first sight, implementing these looks almost impossible, but after a quick look at extensions we notice that SPL could offer something similar, if combined with magic methods. Let’s implement ArrayAccess interface and see how it works:

$fruits = new Chain(array(
           new String('apple'),
           new String('mango'),
           new String('kiwi')
)); 

echo "First fruit: ";
echo $fruits[0];
echo "\n"; 

echo "All fruits: ";
echo $fruits->toUpperCase()->join();
echo "\n";

Outputs:

First fruit: apple
All fruits: APPLE, MANGO, KIWI

Beautiful, eh?

Here is a complete listing:

class Chain implements ArrayAccess {
    private $items = array(); 

    public function __construct($items = array()) {
      if (!is_array($items)) return;
      $this->items = $items;
    } 

    public function add($element) {
      $this->items[] = $element;
    } 

    public function __call($method, $args) {
      if (count($this->items)
            && !method_exists($this->items[0], $method)) {
        throw new BadMethodCallException();
      } 

      $returnChain = new Chain();
      foreach($this->items as $item) {
        $returnChain->add(call_user_func_array(array($item, $method), $args));
      }
      return $returnChain;
    } 

    public function rewind() {
      reset($this->items);
    } 

    public function current() {
      return current($this->items);
    }
   public function key() {
      return key($this->items);
    } 

    public function next() {
      return next($this->items);
    } 

    public function valid() {
      return $this->current() !== false;
    } 

    public function offsetExists($offset) {
      return isset($this->items[$offset]);
    } 

    public function offsetGet($offset) {
      return $this->items[$offset];
    } 

    public function offsetSet($offset, $value) {
      return $this->items[$offset] = $value;
    } 

    public function offsetUnset($offset) {
      unset($this->items[$offset]);
    } 

    // convenience method
    public function join($separator = ', ') {
      return implode($this->items, $separator);
    }
} 

class String{
    private $s; 

    public function __construct($s) {
      $this->s = $s;
    } 

    public function toUpperCase() {
      $this->s = strtoupper($this->s);
      return $this;
    } 

    public function __toString() {
      return $this->s;
    } 

} 

$fruits = new Chain(array(
              new String('apple'),
              new String('mango'),
              new String('kiwi')
)); 

echo "First fruit: ";
echo $fruits[0];
echo "\n"; 

echo "All fruits: ";
echo $fruits->toUpperCase()->join();
echo "\n";

Here are a few links for those who want to make their own Google Suggest, Gmail or Flickr:

• Sajax – allows to call PHP functions from JavaScript
• JavaScript O Lait – make XML-RPC and JSON-RPC (its own proprietary protocol) calls to server; some SVG examples too
• DWR – Direct Web Remoting, for Java
• JSRS – JavaScript Remoting, with PHP and Perl samples

Do you know other frameworks with similar functionality?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/httponly_cookies.asp

Since this option is well-supported (AFAIK MSIE, Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko and Konqueror support it) it’s unclear why PHP doesn’t support it yet. Here’s a patch to add HttpOnly support to PHP:

http://rotanovs.com/php-session-httponly.patch

After applying the patch, add this string to your php.ini:

session.cookie_httponly = 1

Enjoy!