Yii framework and CloudStack and Flex and ...

For the Open-DAI project I need to create a quick and dirty consolle (I hope it will become something more sophisticated, but for now I need something functional).

The target is to manage to pilot CloudStack to create VMs. I cannot use the CloudStack interface since it does not allow for adding "user data" so I need to use API calls to di the job

The problem is that I need to do this job cross CloudStack domains.

So have to get the list of API key and secret key and other CloudStack related data and write down a small program to issue the calls.

Obviously since you need to manage creation you need to be able to see what is going on in time so a small DB will be needed and also since the architecture of Open-DAI require to create management VMs in a precise order There will be the need to manage a simple workflow.

I also like to present the user with a view of the architectural deploy model describing the state of the deployed VMs.

Since I want to do things in a fast way without having to install too many things I decided to use PHP, a SQLite DB, Flex for the "toppings".

Since I believe that reinventing the wheel is not advisable I looked over to some of the PHP frameworks around ... at firts looked at Zend 2.0 ... really nice but ... damn complicated, you surely manage to do a lot but have to overcome a steep learning curve, so after few hours of hacking I looked somewhere else and ... landed on Yii.

Well I can say I'm surprised. It took more or less three hours (following the tutorial) to have a first scratch of application, integrated with the CloudStack library and ready to receive some of the code I already prepared in the last days (tomorrow will be a day of cut and paste and fix).

I can advice to look at it.