Archive for October 30th, 2006
PHP Developer - October 30th, 2006
The Zend Framework team has officially released for download the latest version of the Framework - Preview Release 0.2.0.
The Zend Framework community has released the 0.2.0 Preview Release. This release contains many important enhancements and new features:
- New MVC implementation
- New HTTP request and response objects make it easy to automate unit testing for web apps without a web server, and also make it possible to use MVC for command-line and PHP-GTK application development
- Enhanced pure PHP Lucene-compatible search engine component
- New Mysqli DB adapter
- New JSON server
- New REST client and server
- New XmlRpc client and server
- New Acl component
- New Session component
- New Web Services clients for Delicious and Audioscrobbler
- New Registry component
- Significant improvements to many other components
You can download this latest release directly from the Zend Framework site.
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PHP Developer - October 30th, 2006
On the ThinkPHP blog today, there’s a new post that demonstrates their experience with the API of the spreadshirt.net website (a t-shirt/item printing site).
I just came across an old entry of the Exciting Ecommerce blog (German) which tells that Spreadshirt.net, one of Germany’s hottest Internet startups, has a SOAP interface. spreadshirt.net itself seems to be developed in PHP, and so I started my IDE and played a bit with it.
They include an example of the call to the API using the built in SOAP functionality for PHP5. It makes a basic connection and pulls down some articles.
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PHP Developer - October 30th, 2006
Harry Fuecks brings the next part of his “Joy of Regular Expressions” series to the SitePoint PHP Blog today with part four, building on the previous how-tos: part one, part two, and part three.
He looks at a few different topics this time - date checking, making dates more user-friendly, exploding with patterns, and capturing split delimiters. Just like in the previous articles in the series, he explains in what kind of situation the expression would be used and the sample code showing how to use it (oh, and the output too).
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PHP Developer - October 30th, 2006
Matthew Weier O’Phinney & Mike Naberezny, did a great job on this session. The talk went very smoothly, each of the speakers traded off on presenting the various sections.
The session also dealt with other collaboration topics (commincation using IM, wiki etc) however I with the PHP/Development issues.
Source Documentation
- PHPDoc is the defacto documentation standard, it can be parsed by PHPDocumentor and Doxygen
- Use @category and @package to manage your documentation
- Using PHPDoc allows all developers to immediately understand your code
Unit Testing
- Focusing on PHPUnit
- Test religiously
- Without tests, code is fragile and will regress - there is nothing to tell you when you break your code.
- You are not wasting time by creating tests, you’re wasting time by peppering your code with var_dump() and trying to debug code manually.
- Learning to write good object oriented code that is testable takes practice and discipline. Learn to design for usability.
- Test-First methodology allows the tests to become the specification of code you are writing.
- Using Classes is not Object Oriented Design
Source Control
- Source control was on the benefits of using SVN to manage your code.
- Learn to use tagging and branching instead of committing everything to HEAD
- Trac is cool (I caught up on emails during this section - great wifi)
Deployment
- Never edit code on the server
- Check out tagged branches from your svc software
- Deploy to a staging server on your production server, test first then modify the symlink.
- Write acceptance and integration tests: http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17)
- Monitor Health of Servers: http://www.plope.com/software/supervisor/
- Store schema of your database by committing the schema into your svc server - suggestion: http://www.mysqldiff.org/ and pre-commit hooks
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PHP Developer - October 30th, 2006
Over on the IBM developerWorks blog, Patrick Mueller has posted his wrapup of this year’s DC PHP Conference.
The conference was pretty small; about 80 people; in two small-ish conference rooms in the hotel. But everyone was great. Conferences are all about the people anyway. With the small crowd, it meant being able to spend time with a significant percentage of the people there. It was a mix of PHP thought leaders, everyday PHP programmers, and, since it was based in DC, a lot of folks focused on the unique industry that is DC - government.
He talks about some of the talks given - including Chris Shiflett’s security talk and Eli White’s look at high volume PHP & MySQL scaling techniques. He also mentions some of the “general chatter” that was happening around him. Check out the rest of the blog entry for more.
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