phpDay wrapping up

Some last considerations on phpDay 2010 and then I'll stop annoying you with these informations.

First, if you were at phpDay and attended my talk, feel free to leave feedback on the specific joind.in page. Feedback is important for the organization, to know which events raised the interest of the crowd, and for speakers to improve and fine tune their talks.

Second, my slides for the Architettura e testabilità talk are online:

Php day2010

View more presentations from piccoloprincipe.

Finally, there are a few interviews to some of the speakers (a group that also comprehends me) on html.it (in Italian).

I would like to thank you all the attendees. Given the reception, I'll propose my talk (and maybe new ideas) to other conferences... Trying cannot hurt.

Expert PHP 5 Tools review

The book I'm reviewing today is Expert PHP 5 Tools, which in the last month has gained a lot of momentum in the blogosphere.

One of the first part of this book makes a great deal (correctly) of coding standards. Although this focus on the code, this is not a book on how to write code (with topics like object-oriented design for example), but as the title suggests on tools that supports the development, and on how to deal with the infrastructure necessary to maintain a project.

Some of the main topics treated by this book are version control (with Subversion), and debugging/error management in PHP (Xdebug). Sure you'll never introduce breakpoint in PHP, debugging is much simpler than in other languages as a script terminates after every request; but having the right tools can speed up you very much. I still prefer thorough testing to debugging.
Another interesting topic is the use of PHP open source frameworks, with a panoramic of the available solutions and a Zend Framework example. Don't worry about the particular technology since MVC stacks of the different frameworks (which are the innovation that makes a framework different from a library, as it manages HTTP requests and responses) are usually equivalent.
 
The second part of the book goes on to cover topics such as testing (a delicate topic for me), and deployment of applications. PHPUnit is introduced from the ground up, with all its features like annotations, fixtures and code coverage reports. Even Test-Driven Development is discussed to some extent.

A bit out of place was the introduction to Uml, a dangerous standard when applied in the large or at a great level of detail. Remember though that understanding of basic Uml (class, sequence) diagrams is a requirement since many patterns are explained with this kind of documentation. Moreover, small and focused Uml diagrams can communicate very much about a design.
The practice of Continuos Integration is explained with a nice idea: setting up a CI server for Zend Framework. Leveraging open source projects gives some points to this book.

Some points I did not like was the idea of favoring IDEs very much, which is quite the contrary of the toolbox metaphor, a set of small tools you can combine instead of a monolithic one. Another minor point is the large preference for PHP tools over the ones written in other languages: after all the author is using Eclipse, which is certainly not written in PHP.

I'm not severe on this type of readings, because I always have to remember that a book is a starting point: you have to actually use the practices described here and gain experience to be effective. Thus, if you are a project manager which wants to really empower his developers instead of limiting them, check out this book.

Weekly roundup - phpDay 2010 edition

I've been at the phpDay conference until today, so I haven't had time to write the usual roundup. Hope you enjoy these articles.

DZone
Practical PHP Patterns: Row Data Gateway
Ajax and MVC
Practical PHP Patterns: Active Record
Test-Driven Development with OSGi

php|architect
ORM Designer

I will write more about the experience at my first conference in the next days.

Packing for phpDay 2010

I'm packing for phpDay, which starts tomorrow. It seems we will have a powerful Wifi connection, and an hotel near the Adriatic sea.

If you read this blog and will be at phpDay, look for me at the conference center (it's likely that I follow yours, too), I will be glad to meet you. I will arrive tomorrow around 1 PM (local time).
Anyway, stay in touch with the hashtag #phpday2010...

Weekly roundup: preparing for phpDay

The upcoming week will be very intense: after three full days spent in university and my thesis, I'll leave for phpDay, a voyage of 500+ kilometers.
As always, I have some original articles of mine that were published in other websites.

php|architect
phpDay 2010 - a presentation of the international speakers.

DZone
Practical PHP Patterns: Service Layer
Evolution of a programmer (eek! 10000+ people read this article)
Practical PHP Patterns: Table Data Gateway
PHP 2.x frameworks and Ruby on Rails

Small steps

Today I was working with a Java framework which runs on top of OSGi (another framework, and yes, Java is verbose even from the platform stack point of view.)
After having prepared a (hopefully) failing acceptance test which used httpunit to extract the content of a dynamic page and verify that the world "Hello" is contained in it, I was ready to run the test, see the assertion failing and start writing our beloved production code.
Unfortunately, the test failed not because of the assertion, but because the JUnit Plugin runner, which takes a JUnit test and run it over a configured OSGi framework, was saying "No tests found." How that was possible?

When tests that should drive the development leave you without a clue on what is happening, chances are that you are taking big steps when you should walk carefully. I was taking big steps because it takes two minutes to run such an acceptance test due to all the infrastructure noise, but I'm not an expert in OSGi applications and I should have taken smaller steps towards my goal of a failing test. The same is true for production code: if I can't get a green bar maybe my failing tests are not fine-grained enough.

Thus I run a git reset and perform the following baby steps to build confidence:

• create an empty bundle (jargon for package), and write an empty test in it. Run and see Warning: no assertions, but nothing explodes.
• Add a test method with a assertTrue(true) call. Run, and nothing explodes still.
• Add httpunit in lib/ and set it up with the Bundle-ClassPath directive, which basically says where the runtime can find the library JARs in the bundle. 

Ok, it was that. After a quick search on Google, I found out that I was specifying the classpath as I've always done via command line or ant scripts:
Bundle-ClassPath: .:lib/httpunit.jar
while OSGi has a different opinion of classpaths:
Bundle-ClassPath: ., lib/httpunit.jar
So I lost even the current directory (.) from the classpath when introducing the first, malformed directive.

After having located the problem with a test-first approach, I was able to (slowly) run my red test and return writing production code.
Automated testing and incremental development save the day again - imagine what would have happened if I had to debug this mess manually, with a framework that takes some minutes to start, and no idea of where the error was...

International Workers' Day roundup

Every weekend, I have some links I'd like to share with you. They point to articles of mine originally published out of this blog, during this week.

php|architect
First beta of Doctrine 2 released

DZone
Practical PHP Patterns: Domain Model
Vim for PHP development
Practical PHP Patterns: Table Module
Synchronization in PHP

Hope you enjoy them. Anyway, today is the International workers' day here in Europe. Happy useless Saturday holidays!