Yesterday I finally got around to sitting down with the Canvas and Processing.js tutorial in last month’s issue of .Net Magazine (Issue 202, page 82). I’ve been wanting to play with Canvas since the HTML5 special of the ExplicitWeb podcast we did back in March (subtle plug) and this tutorial seemed like a good way of getting started.

When working with large and complex datasets in Symfony, there comes a point where the ORM layer (Propel or Doctrine) causes more problems than it solves. Sometimes it’s necessary to debug large SQL queries built using the ORM layer, and at other times it’s appropriate to bypass the ORM layer entirely.  The following snippets come from projects using Propel, I realise a lot of folks will have moved on to Doctrine but I hope there may be one or two useful things for that here too.