Having said this – we didn’t have enough time to train all our developers on the system and simply asked them to test the waters themselves. As developers and users of Linux – we hoped the learning curve would be simple. As they say ignorance is bliss one of our early users was trying to setup Python / DJango on the system when accidentally he did :

chmod –R 777 /usr/bin

and voila “sudo” simply stopped working.It kept throwing an error saying that sudo must be setuid root.

Solution: Most files in /usr/bin should have 755, but some require the setuid bit set. /usr/bin/sudo is one such command After some research we realized the problem was the wrong file permissions. Setting the right permissions was simply not possible without the help of sudo.

Steps we followed to reset the permissions were :

1. Shutdown the computer

2. Boot into Recovery Mode –After BIOS load, hold down Shift key to access the grub menu –Once in grub menu, select the entry ending in “(recovery mode)”

3. From the next menu selected option to enter Root Session

4. At the root session, execute command mount -o remount,rw / to remount the filesystem as read-write

5. Following commands were executed

mount –o remount,rw /

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/sudo

chmod 0440 /etc/sudoers

chmod u+s /usr/bin/sudo

shutdown –r now

After booting back in normal mode “sudo” started working well !

Lesson learnt : NEVER change the permissions of system folders away from root*.

Symfony2 Framework

Last year we had written an article on Symfony2 and how we planned to use it on all our Php based projects. Well – we have successfully completed three large sized projects and we are pretty satisfied with the components and the overall working of the framework. The grudge we still have is that the learning curve is extremely high and it takes a good 2-3 months of time for even a fairly skilled developer to understand the nuances of the framework.
All said and done we now have a fairly skilled team to confidently handle the framework. SonataAdminBundle and the FOSUserBundle cover up for the absence of the admin generator application found in the earlier versions of the Symfony. A lot of bundles are being created in the community – we have used some of them safely in our projects- one of the more important ones being the ElasticSearch bundle – ElasticSearch is based on the famous Lucene Search Tool.
Do feel free to contact us if you have any queries , doubts regarding the usage and our team will gladly help you out.

DRUPAL 8

DRUPAL 7.0 and it’s earlier versions have been monstrous in size though they have been doing a great job as an open source CMS. The news of integrating Symfony 2 components like HttpFoundation, HttpKernel, Routing, EventDispatcher, DependencyInjection, and ClassLoader. Fabien states that it will be easy to interoperate Symfony2 applications with DRUPAL and vice versa. It sounds interesting – and we look forward to reading more on this marriage. Hopefully we will get a chance to implement them in one of our projects soon.

Play2 Framework

Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture based framework. It has been designed and architected keeping in mind the advanced frameworks like Rails, Symfony2 and Django , this can easily be called the easy to use Java / Scala Framework. Play is architected around a reactive model: based on event-driven, non-blocking IO.
There are no runtime errors and performance is really high. Play2 uses the Scala compiler to type check everything. This greatly improves the performance of the application.

DJango Framework

2012 was the Django year for the Siddhatech team. We received a fair number of projects in Django as compared to the other frameworks. Pinterest seems to have a hand in this . Rails has a tough competition in Django. Python being the language of Googlers there will be a fair amount of demand for this framework in the coming years. The developers of Django have done a commendable job in keeping the framework easy to learn as compared to the daunting Symfony2 and the “not-so-complex” Play2. We will be updating our portfolio soon and the number of sites developed in Django will be evident. We would love to encourage students to study this language in addition to C++ , Java because it could be the top two to three most used language on the web in the coming years.

A small peak into what we, Siddhatech plan to move forward in the year 2012 –

• PLAY Framework – we have a lot of interesting projects starting this year. We even managed to complete a large project recently.

• SYMFONY 2.0 – A new polished version of SYMFONY was released in September 2011. We jumped onto it and managed to complete a relatively large application. All new projects lined up for SYMFONY will be developed in version 2.0

• DJANGO – The love for DJANGO never dies once you get your hands onto it. Though there are a few projects in DJANGO – we promise to continue working on this platform simply for the love of it.

• HTML 5 / CSS3 / JQUERY / Ext – New demands to develop applications compatible with the mobile platform probably may make life simpler!

• Mobile development already gained momentum in 2011 – some interesting API development with Web and Mobile underway in 2012.

Having said this – we also plan to retain our skills in WordPress , Expression Engine and CMSMS.
We currently have a longer waiting period before commencing projects. Wireframing and Graphics designing activities can start immediately. But development now is more organized and planned. Our developers prefer to pay dedicated attention to work on hand rather than jump the gun to new projects. We avoid working with clients who come with the ASAP tag – hey – that just doesn’t work ☺
Software development is an art that continues to evolve in the developer as he matures along. Maturity leads to stable output and better focus on quality.

So this is wishing all our readers and clients a very happy 2012 ! Hope everyone enjoys their jobs!

aditi at Siddhatech dot com

Play makes use of several popular Java libraries:
▪ JBoss Netty for the web server
▪ Hibernate for the data layer
▪ Groovy for the template engine
▪ The Eclipse compiler for hot-reloading
Apache Ivy for dependency management

Play leverages the advantages of Agile development processes and targets restful architecture.
The integrated test runner makes it easy for you do test-driven development. You can write all kinds of tests, from simple unit tests to full acceptance tests, and run them directly in a browser using Selenium. Code coverage can also measured.

At Siddhatech we have successfully completed more than 3 large portals in PLAY. The richness of the framework and the advantage of a JAVA environment definitely have raised the bar for PLAY.
It is difficult though to compare it against the other well know frameworks like SYMFONY , DJango and Rails since PLAY provides all the features that these frameworks also offer . Though this is not an apples to oranges comparison – PLAY still is relatively new – but it wont be long before the seasoned JAVA developers embrace it. JAVA with the simplicity of RAILS , DJango and SYMFONY – a dangerously winning combination.

If you are passionate about coding – remain a developer – we dont convert developers to managers

Learn to get passionate about coding again – no excel spreadsheet jobs here

Learn to confidently deal and handle clients

In short if you have the talent – be your own boss.