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The UG Rollercoaster

October 15, 2009

User Groups are today one of the greatest driving forces behind PHP, together they form PHP’s greatest triumph, the community. Around the world everyday we see new groups coming together and starting new activities, sharing knowledge, promoting PHP, contributing to PHP Projects, or just plain having fun and drinking. Its really a wonderful environment, especially for the members, who get to experience and benefit from various perks brought to them by the UG.

Iterating over life with SPL Iterators I: Directories

October 8, 2009

PHP, SPL

In the past i have already talked about SPL and how it makes PHP Developers’ life a breeze, since then i have felt a lack of SPL recipes around the web, if you are getting into SPL now, using some of the available classes can be a real mystery, so I decided to add more posts to google’s list of SPL articles. So this is the first in a line that i will be adding as i come by the examples.

PHP Security: Are you paying attention?

September 29, 2009

Development, PHP, Security

Security is a recurring topic when the talk is about Technology, or any other area for that matter. To take security for granted when you are developing an application, as simple as it may be, is a huge mistake which can take a turn for the worse. I have ran into lots of excuses for ignoring security in the past, one of them is the recurring “This is just a simple application, it has no sensitive data”, this may be a valid point for the person repeating it like a mantra, especially because this person is generally suffering of great pressures , short timeframes and a lack of proper management ready to deal with web development. Cal Evans in his Open Teams session gives a perfect example of this when he tells us about a project with an impossible due date. Upon questioning the due date to the marketing department their reply was straight forward: “Because that’s when the brochures are done”. This is an example of the lack of perception around web development and all the issues we need to take into consideration when developing applications.

PHPT: Writing tests for PHP

August 23, 2009

This year the PHP Community promoted the PHPTestFest in various places around the globe and it was a success. I participated in the event promoted by the PHPSP UG which ended up as the team with the most committed tests, after participating in the event I kept on going and have since obtained a SVN account and karma to be a official test commiter to PHP. So if you did not get the chance to learn how to write tests in your local TestFest I will now go over the steps taken so you can be ready for next year.

PHPT is a extremely simple test framework designed to test PHP. Its atomic nature and independent test execution make it perfect for the kind of tests needed, so tests can be really focused and test specific function and/or bugs.

What do I need to know?

The beauty about PHPT is that you need to know very little other than writing PHP code. A little knowledge into the inner workings of PHP will of course help you in finding areas of code that need testing, and how best to test them, but just knowing PHP is enough to start.

I have divided this post into 5 parts so we can get started:

Preparing the Environment
Choosing what to test
Writing a test
Executing a test
Submitting a test to PHP

Escrevendo testes com PHPT e contribuindo com o PHP

August 19, 2009

Este ano esteve em destaque a PHPTestFest09, sendo realizada em vários cantos do mundo e destacando-se a participação do PHPSP que contribuiu com o maior número de testes. Ficou de fora? Então já comece a se preparar para ano que vem.

O PHPT é um framework extremamente simples de testes criado e usado internamente pelos desenvolvedores do core. Ele é extremamente atômico e centrado em testes como os que esperamos do PHP, como testar funções e bugs específicos.

O que preciso saber?

A grande vantagem do PHPT é que para poder escrever um teste, tudo que você precisa saber é: como escrever código PHP. Claro que um pouco de conhecimento interno do funcionamento do PHP vai te ajudar a procurar detalhes para testar, mas sabendo escrever PHP você já pode contribuir com uma grande percentagem dos testes que precisamos.

Vamos então atacar por partes:

Preparando o ambiente
Escolhendo um teste
Escrevendo um teste
Rodando um teste
Enviando seu teste para o PHP

Book Review: Guide to Date and Time Programming

July 6, 2009

Books, PHP

This review has been pending for a while, but recently I finished reading Derick Rethans’ book: Date and Time Programming. A first look at the topic (Date and Time) might get you thinking, “Why the hell do I need a book to teach me about time?” But further investigating, and some life experience will show you that dealing with Date and Time is not always as straightforward as “Its twelve o’clock”. Derick’s book gives you an in depth look into handling various factors of date and time such as timezones and days that did not exist, as well as finally delivering something missing from php.net: documentation of the DateTime Object.

SPL: a hidden gem

June 3, 2009

By a show of hands, how many people here ever heard of SPL? How many already used it? Chances are most of you didn’t raise your hands, and some might even have a confused look on their faces. Indeed that is the sad reality when it comes to SPL, but What is SPL?

php|tek 2009: The community in action

June 1, 2009

Conferences, PHP

This year I was abel to attended the 2009 php|tek conference in Chicago. This conference is hosted by MTACon, the company behind php|architect magazine, one of the most influent PHP publications in the world. php|tek is a unique event in its overall “feel” and purpose - for those that read my post on ZendCon'08 you may be able to pickup this difference yourselves. Tek is a community oriented event, as opposed to ZendCon which is much more aimed at companies. Is this good you ask? Yes, its perfect, it in no way falls short of the content in ZendCon, but on the plus side it gives one many more opportunities to mingle and meet the central PHP Core Developer Team, and most importantly, it inspires attendees to work with and give back to PHP.

php|tek09 Day #4

May 25, 2009

Conferences

And so comes the final day of the 2009 php|tek conference.

php|tek09: Day #3

May 22, 2009

Conferences

The beeping alarm begun another exciting day at php|tek09.

My usual breakfast buddies were around once again for a great meal to start it out right. The first session was High performance APC with Brian Shire from Facebook, and it was really interesting to see the APC improvements and what is in their roadmap, influenced by Facebook and their needs, working as a boost for APC development, defintively gonna kick our testing server into apc mode to run some tests. Parallel to this session Sara Golemon gave a PHP 5.3 session.. and from what i hear, those slides are golden! go find them! (i’ll post a link if i find them myself)