Get To Business.

This post was originally published at Found|Read, I’m reposting it for our readers.

Continuing from where I left in my previous post: Founding in a War Zone, I and my cofounder Eran Galperin had both just been sent to the Israel-Lebanon border with our Army Reserve units. It was July 2006 and our units were unexpectedly deployed as part of an Israeli military action during the 2006 War with Hezbollah. The timing couldn’t have been worse for us. We had just taken up some web-development projects that were supposed to provide us with some financial support. Uncertain if we’d even make it back to our homes in Tel Aviv, we’d called our clients and told them their projects were “on hold,” indefinitely. They weren’t happy. We did make it back, after 25 days of fighting, and immediately took up the challenge of completing our projects on a much tighter schedule.

(more…)

This post was originally published at Found|Read, I’m reposting it for our readers.

Recent developments in Gaza and ongoing violence elsewhere in the Middle East remind me of the instability of my company’s home country: Israel. It is hard enough to run a start-up, and there are plenty of things that make entrepreneurship a high-risk proposition. But there is nothing like the ultimate security risk, life vs. death, to galvanize a team, to re-invigorate priorities, and ultimately, to inspire performance. I live in Tel Aviv, about three hours from Syria and southern Lebanon. Here the Army is a constant–if sometimes inconvenient–teacher of this important life and business lesson. Eran Galperin and myself have gotten this tutorial more than once while cofounding Octabox.

The Army has a huge role in educating Israelis, and played a huge role in making me a better entrepreneur. For starters, living in a war zone matures you a lot. It also breeds a nature for risk-taking. But the Army creates some big obstacles for start-up founders, too.
(more…)

[This is part three of a three part review. Part one can be found here and part two here]

In previous parts I’ve covered some of the main components of the Zend Framework, including database abstraction and the Model-View-Controller pattern for separation of logic from presentation.

This time I will go over some of the smaller modules in terms of scope, yet still some of the more important and useful in my opinion.

Zend Filter and Zend Validate - Data validation and filtering

Validation and filtering of information are integral parts of a dynamic website operations. User generated input (received usually via a GET or POST request, e.g from an HTML form or a URL address), should be treated with caution. The input should be filtered as to not contain harmful data (see: SQL injection attacks) and validated to ensure it is what it should be - for example, in the case of HTML forms checks are made to ensure that all required fields are filled out and contain the expected type of data.

Filtering and validating is a common procedure for web developers, so naturally the Zend Framework includes components to handle such tasks. Those components are the Zend_Filter and Zend_Validate class hierarchies.

The base classes are of Zend_Filter and Zend_Validate are extended by specific filters and validators, each implementing a filter() or validate() method accordingly. The filters/validators class names are self-explanatory, for example Zend_Validator_NotEmpty checks that a variable is not empty, and Zend_Filter_HtmlEntities uses the htmlentities PHP function to filter a string.
(more…)

A Few days ago I wrote an article about my past experience with Offshore Outsourcing for Found|Read .
I am re-posting it here for our readers.

As a project manager, I frequently have had to deal with outsourcing work, and offshore outsourcing, specifically. From my past experience, I can only say that while sometimes the costs are very low and, therefore, somewhat seductive, in the long term you generally end up paying more than you expected to.

In early 2005, a friend contacted me and requested that I design a website for his company. He also asked me to take on management of the project, and find the appropriate coder(s) to do the work. The specifications were really simple: build a dynamic website with a few, simple, administration capabilities and a Content Management System.

“That’s not rocket science,” I told him. “It should be completed within few days,” and I hung up. (Would that it were so!)

At the time I had no available coder to work on the project, and while I could have rented a local freelancer to ease my own pain of overseeing the project as manager, I decided to outsource this simple task to an offshore freelancer.
(more…)

After four months of endless meeting and numerous agreement’s revision,
We’re glad to announce that we just gave birth to Lionite LTD.

Lionite will be focusing on developing our main product, The Octabox Web Platform and act as incubator for other great ideas.
In addition, Lionite will be working with a selected group of clients on their own enterprises, sharing our expertise in the web development field.

If you’re interested to hear more about our start-up and services, you can contact me at adam at lionite dot com.

[This is Part two of a three part review. Part one can be found here]

When I wrote the previous part of this review, covering the Registry and Database classes of the Zend Framework, the Framework was still at version 0.9.3 Beta. It has since reached version 1.0.0 Release Candidate, and interestingly enough, most of the changes affect the components I’ll be reviewing this time.

Zend_Controller, Zend_View - Model-View-Controller architecture

A Model-View-Controller implementation seems to be all the rage these days in web-development, and for good reason (though some wonder whether it realy is so). Briefly on the Model-View-Controller pattern - In a (web) application of growing complexity, it becomes paramount to separate logic from the presentational layer, allowing logic to be changed without requiring change in the presentational layer. Anyone who has developed for web in a straightforward manner, mixing client side code (e.g PHP) and presentational code (HTML, CSS), probably has noticed an increasing difficulty in making changes to a script as it grows in size and complexity.
In a manner of speaking, Style Sheets apply the same logic behind the MVC pattern - allowing separation of information from styling, and for reusability of styling code (Style Sheets). For more on the MVC pattern read the Wikipedia page or this article on PHPwact.

The Zend Framework provides the View and Controller parts of the MVC scheme, with the Model layer provided by the web developer according to the needs of a specific web-development project. Most models involve database access, and the Zend_Db_Table provides the building blocks for such models as I’ve mentioned in Part 1.
(more…)

Hosting companies are like fortune cookies: “you never really know what you’re going to get”

I remember the time I uploaded my first homepage to the internet, it was with Geocities, the service was free and built a community around itself, but overall, it was just the MySpace web 1.0 (Think of a huge collection of horrible designed WebPages grouped together under one domain but without the web 2.0 features).

Through the years, while I gained experience and felt I had enough of the host-your-site-while-we-make-money-with-annoying-popups model, I began to deal with paid hosting packages. Prices ranging from 3.99$ to 20$ a month, experiencing the services of small resellers and larger resellers that call themselves “web hosting companies” and have a template they bought for 40$ from template sites.

My main problem with them apart from the poor performance (lot of them were overselling their servers), was the slow service and response times since resellers act as an additional contact point between you and the hosting provider.
(more…)