In a new post to his blog today Keith Casey has voiced some of his opinions on where he thinks most Open Source software efforts fail in their goals of making good, quality software that’s well-developed and useful.
Earlier this week, I unsubscribed from the mailing lists of a pair of Open Source projects. About two years ago when I found the projects, they involved fascinating topics in under served niches. One of those niches – the one customer/user-facing – is still there and under served, but that’s not relevant in the current discussion. In reviewing the activity on the mailing list, I noticed some interesting things: activity was very high, there were some smart people involved in the discussions and there was a lot of discussion on what should be done but nothing actually getting done.
He notes that without a codebase to work from, there can’t be any direction because no one knows where things are headed or what can be done to improve it. Writing up a spec to guide the development can help, but then you still have the pitfall of who should write that spec.
Phil Sturgeon has a quick new post with a code snippet that could make your debugging life a bit simpler – a “dump” function that can give you a bit more information about your error than a standard var_dump.
When trying to work out what the hell is going wrong in your PHP application the first thing most of us start doing is madly start var_dump()’ing everything possible to work out where the problem is. var_dump() is fine, but by default it comes out in one line. So then we need to echo <pre> tags. Then we can’t always see whats going on, especially if the background is black and bla bla bla so it goes on.
He mentions an alternative like XDebug, but that also requires access to install it on the server. His alternative, the “dump” function, catches the error, pulls out a backtrace of the path your script took to get there and echoes it out with the line number of the error and filename.
On PHPBuilder.com today there’s a new tutorial from Jason Gilmore about working with Zend Framework applications and how to test its functionality with the help of a library he’s created.
Thankfully, the software community has put a great deal of time and effort into developing automated testing approaches. In fact, most Web frameworks incorporate a native testing solution that can be used to test a wide variety of website attributes and behaviors. One such framework, the Zend Framework, integrates the de facto PHP testing solution PHPUnit (introduced in an earlier PHPBuilder.com article).
He shows some first steps of testing an “About” controller and that you end up on the right action – “index”. After that he gets a bit more complex with a test on a form complete with POST information to ensure that the user is either redirected to the user’s profile page or back to the login form.
The PHPClasses.org site has released their latest podcast in their “Lately in PHP” series. This episode features an interview with Jason Roberts as well as the usual host of PHPClasses-related content.
On the episode 5 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert have as guest Jason Roberts, developer of the upcoming Web based application generation AppIgnite. They have discussed several topics of interest like PHP code generation tools for speeding up PHP development, the video of Rasmus Lerdorf talk on PHP performance optimization techniques.
The AppIgnite software helps you to build web applications without having to write any code. If you want to find out more about this service and a few other interesting topics, you can either download the mp3 directly, use the in-page player or subscribe to their feed to get the latest episodes as they come.
On the Zend Developer Zone there’s a new interview with Michaelangelo van Dam, the guy running the show for this years Zend/PHP Conference‘s unconference. Cal asks him three questions about him and his involvement with the event.
It’s really hard for me to interview someone like Michaelangelo van Dam, it’s like interviewing a celebrity. He is so well known in the Zend Framework community and the PHP Community at large. he is one of the organizers of the PHPBenelux User Group and their annual conference. As difficult as it was thought, I powered through it to bring you, my valued reader, 3 questions with Michaelangelo van Dam
He asked the obvious “why you?” questions first, asking about the choice the Zend folks made to have him be the host. He also mentions the three talks Michaelangelo will be giving and how the average attendee can get their talk approved for the unconference once you arrive.
While at TechDays Vancouver, Carl and Richard talk to Mark Relph from the Microsoft Windows team about building Windows applications.
On the PHPMagazine.net site there’s a new article about PHP user groups and some of the resources that can be used to help find one in your area.
Part of this community a lot of core developers, documentation editors, web application developers, hackers, Quality assurance team, tons of open source projects, PHP UG around the world, and many many other people contributing each one in its category, and even friends and family! Users Group are an active element of the PHP ecosystem, and I believe that everyone should be involved to contribute and keep these UG active around the world.
Some of the efforts that he’s pointed out from the past are the phpgroups.org site, phpusergroups.com as well as the sharemymap.com effort to map the groups out. Unfortunately there’s no single resource that you can point to that has a full listing.
On PHP-Code.net they’ve posted the second part of a series looking at securing your PHP applications from potential problems that security flaws could cause for your site. (You can find part one here).
There are a lot of books treating this issue. So, why another post about this subject. Well, here a try to cover this problem in a short way so that you don’t have to read hundreds of pages or to search all over the Internet for this. These being said, you must know that securing a PHP application is not an easy process, as you may think and involves a lot of other things, not just your code.
After introducing some of the topics in the first post, they move on to other concerns in part two like:
- SQL injections
- Code injections/includes
- Improper error handling
- Authentication and Authorization
- Shared hosting issues
On the Amazon Web Services blog there’s a new post about the release of their new AWS SDK for PHP that use can use to directly access their web services features from your PHP applications.
The first release supports a large subset of our infrastructure services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SimpleDB, the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), as well as Amazon Identify and Access Management (IAM).
The SDK for PHP includes all of the libraries you’ll need to directly access the mentioned services, some code examples to help you get started and some documentation to fill you in on some of the finer points. There’s also a few code snippets included in the post to show you a sample SNS connection that creates a topic, subscribes to it and publishes a notification.
On the Zend Developer Zone there’s a new tutorial from Vikram Vaswasi about working with the configuration data from your files (in multiple formats like XML and the more traditional INI) with the help of the Zend_Config component of the Zend Framework.
Thus far, I’d been using a hand-rolled library for this task; however, this library was now fairly dated and didn’t take advantage of many of the newer PHP 5.x features and so, I’d been looking for a more modern replacement. Zend_Config seemed to meet my needs, so I played with it a little and then deployed it in a couple of projects. It did everything I needed it to, and was easy to integrate with both framework and non-framework PHP projects. It also has a couple of neat features, such as the ability to merge multiple configurations together.
His “crash course” starts with an example of pulling in the contents of an XML-based configuration file with dialer information (like for a modem). He talks about setting up rules, formatting the results, working with more complex nested data and much, much more. The Zend_Config component allows you to be hugely flexible with how you handle – and translate – the data that comes out of your config files.