LivingIn.at is a platform for challenging and exciting spare time activities in Austria. You can look for really unusual gifts for the next birthday of your fried or can take a look for your next personal adventure. Currently there are about 900 offers in the database which can all be contacted per mail. In the next week the presentation for each adventure will be created and you will see pictures and descriptions for them. Additionally there a links to videos to get a better impression of what you will expect.

From the technical perspective it was my first project based on the PHP5 framework Symfony. It is a really elegant MVC framework which took a lot of ideas from Ruby on Rails. It is tightly integrated with the PHP O/R mapping tool Propel and the database abstraction Creole which enables real rapid application development. Additionally there are very good ideas for reusability by using components, partials and slots. It is the first PHP framework I really like, although it even did not reach version 1 by now. I am looking forward, how stable it will run in production. We are expecting several thousand users a day and hopefully we will not get into trouble by this. I still do not use the caching functionality but perhaps than I most consider doing this.

One thing I still miss in the framework is a dependency injection container to inject services into the action and model classes. The very mature IOC containers are something I really like in the JAVA world and I still miss them in PHP. (And of course I miss a lot of outer JAVA features, apis and libs in PHP.)

I also introduced some JS libs into the project. I am using Script.aculo.us (which is made by some guys from Vienna and I am always proud of Austrian work) and some libs built on top of it. I am using the Autocompleter.local for the administrative area and it is really a very fine thing. The content editors also like it very much.

I would like to get your feedback about the project. Please send comments and suggestions to me.