Bev's News

Eclipse Helios (3.6) and Zend Studio 7.1 (and above) include a new version of Eclipse PDT, labeled 2.2. This new release uses a new repository for storing code reference information. With these simple tips you can significantly improve the performance of this repository which will speed up code completion, searching for definitions, type hierarchy views and more.

After a major cleanup of the structure and logic due to a handful of issues, v4.1 of the Project Importer is now available!

You can download the latest version here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/web2project-mod/files/Project-Importer/

The purpose of the Project Importer is to allow users to import their project plans from other systems. Currently Microsoft Project and WBS Gantt Chart Pro are supported.
The significant changes in this release include:

• Fixed a major issue where dependencies weren't being imported properly or sometimes at all.
• Added a tweak to the MS Project processor to make sure the project title is retrieved properly.
• Fixed an issue where the Project Start Date was not set properly in the MS Project import
• Tweaked the import process so that if there's no Company match, it default's to the current User's Company. This resolves the issue where a Project could accidentally get assigned to no Company and therefore disappear due to permissions.
• Changed the licensing to align with the coming web2project license shift.

There is a goal to support additional file type imports. At present, CSV - as an Excel export - is one option but is the most difficult due to a lack of formal/official column/field structure that a user could create. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to share them in our forums.

The Project Importer can be downloaded here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/web2project-mod/files/Project-Importer/

I am using Zend Studio for my everyday PHP work, and I like it. I know many others do too, or use PDT. It has one very cool – though not widely known – feature that allows you you to add unknown extensions to code completion. I.e., if you have some extension, create stub file with PHPDOC descriptions – i.e. something like this:

/**
 * Do stuff
 * @param string $arg
 * @return array
 */
 function dostuff($arg) {}

for each extension function, Studio will know to pick it up. You can put this file into Studio’s prototypes directory – easiest way to find it is just write something like chdir() anywhere, select the name and press F3, the directory of the file that you’ll get is the one you need.

However, the problem is how to create this file. E.g., I’m doing some work with MongoDB lately, and PHP has great Mongo extension – which Studio doesn’t know yet. So how do I create those stubs? Obviously, I am too lazy to manually write them. I went to look for a tool that would allow me to make one – and found none. At least not in 15 minutes I spent looking, so I decided to write my own.

What came out is the Reflector. It uses PHP reflection and PHP’s manual XML sources in order to generate stub file (see example mongo.php on git to check what comes out). Right now it’s not very smart and handles only classes/methods, not functions (probably will fix that soon), but maybe it will be useful to somebody.

Or maybe somebody points me to a tool that does that even better in comments

Update: Roy Ganor (who is leading the Zend Studio project) in comments pointed me to the source of the Studio generator script. It will generate stubs for all extensions you have, as I can see. Try it out. Thanks, Roy!

Tagged: extensions, PHP, reflection, reflector, Zend Studio

Same stupid debate as so often before. Just the topics are different from time to time. Found via the Swedish Utvbloggen, RWW, highscalability och myNoSQL.

We're about to launch a new product, and this time it's pretty client-side-intense. The application is powered by a lot of JavaScript(-mvc) and jQuery, which do xhr calls to a ZF/CouchDB powered backend. While js-mvc has unit-testing sort of covetred, I was also looking for some integration testing, multiple browsers and all that.

Selenium vs. Saucelenium

I can't really say if you want one or the other. Revisiting Selenium in general, it's IMHO the only viable and suitable thing for a PHP shop. Primarily of course because all those nifty test cases will integrate into our existing suite of PHPUnit/phpt tests. And while I use Zend_Test already or find projects like SimpleTest's browser or even Perl's www::mechanize very appealing, neither of those executes JavaScript like a browser.

Selenium and Saucelenium have the same root — in fact Saucelenium is a Selenium fork. While the Selenium project seems to focus on 2.x currently, stable 1.x development seems to really happen at Saucelabs. That is if you call a commit from January 22nd of this year active development.

In the process of selecting one or the other, more people recommended that I'd use the Saucelabs distribution than the original one, and so I forked it on github.

Installation

Along with a script to start the damn thing, my fork also contains a README.md. Said README covers the installation part in detail, so I won't have to repeat myself here. All of this is pretty Ubuntu-centric and has been tested on Karmic Koala. I expect things to work just as well on Lucid, or on any other distribution if you get the installation right.

One thing that took me a while to figure out was the following error message:

till@testing:/usr/src/saucelenium$ sudo ./start.sh 
[...]
[config/dbus] couldn't take over org.x.config: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied (Connection ":1.17" is not allowed to own the service "org.x.config.display0" due to security     policies in the configuration file)
(EE) config/hal: couldn't initialise context: unknown error (null)
13:17:23.166 INFO - Writing debug logs to /var/log/selenium.log
13:17:23.166 INFO - Java: Sun Microsystems Inc. 16.0-b13
13:17:23.166 INFO - OS: Linux 2.6.32.1-rscloud amd64
13:17:23.176 INFO - v1.0.1 [exported], with Core v@VERSION@ [@REVISION@]
13:17:23.296 INFO - Version Jetty/5.1.x
13:17:23.306 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver]
13:17:23.306 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server,/selenium-server]
13:17:23.316 INFO - Started HttpContext[/,/]
13:17:23.326 INFO - Started SocketListener on 0.0.0.0:4444
13:17:23.326 INFO - Started org.mortbay.jetty.Server@7526e85f
^C13:18:09.796 INFO - Shutting down...

After Google'ing for a bit, I came to the conclusion that the above means that I didn't have the xserver installed.

The fix was rather simple: aptitude install xserver-xorg.

Example test

The following is an example test case. It'll open http://www.php.net/ and make sure it finds "What is PHP?" somewhere on that page.

Then it will continue to /downloads.php (by clicking on that link) and will make sure it finds "Binaries for other systems" on that page.

To run this test, execute: phpunit ExampleTestCase.php.

<?php
class ExampleTestCase extends PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase
{
    protected function setUp()
    {
        $this->setHost('localhost');
        $this->setPort(4444);
        $this->setBrowser("*chrome");
        $this->setBrowserUrl("http://www.php.net/");
    }

    public function testPHP()
    {
        $this->open('/');
        $this->waitForPageToLoad('30000');
        $this->assertTextPresent('What is PHP?');

        $this->click('//a[@href="/downloads.php"]');
        $this->waitForPageToLoad('30000');
        $this->assertTextPresent('Binaries for other systems');

        // check this out, especially useful for debugging:
        $this->assertEquals('http://www.php.net/downloads.php', $this->drivers[0]->getLocation());
    }
}

That's all.

Thanks for reading, and until next time.

It's time for another mtrack update; here's what's new:

• Add "Snippets" feature; works like pastebin, but allows for comments to be supplied in wiki syntax in addition to the code or text snippet that you're pasting
• Add Custom Field support. This is implemented by modifying the schema (custom fields always have an "x_" prefix).
• Improvements to the "custom ticket query" screens, including ability to select which columns (including custom fields) are included in the results
• Fix an issue with sorting the "Remaining" time column
• Fix some IE compatibility issues
...

Continue reading on wezfurlong.org

In which I present some analysis of what Brooks' Law implies for scheduling on late projects. Read on for an overview of Brooks' Law, its components, how to model its effects on your schedule, and some caveats and conclusions to the analysis.

Today Facebook released a HipHop l33t shizznizzle of a tool for PHP but sadly it’s not the PHPVille I was hoping for. PHPVille is probably a game that encourages PHP community members to work on the PHP project (over at php.net). Much like FarmVille, users simply cannot stop playing! Possible game features: Each SVN commit [...]

Paul has written a few posts about members of the PHP community and this inspired one by me. It’s about a guy few hear about but all benefit from and his name is Felipe Pena. Somewhat anonymous in the PHP community, he’s a true superstar within the PHP.net project itself. His path began with several [...]

While exploring ways to improve how the PHP project finds and teaches new contributors, I wondered how other projects do it so started the process of evaluating several. So far I’ve fallen in love with the Ubuntu approach because they offer a ton of information and promote it well. The PHP project does neither of [...]

This week Kevin Yank chats with Matt Magain and James Mansfield, User Experience Designers at SitePoint and 99designs, respectively. They discuss recent comments by ThinkVitamin founder Ryan Carson claiming that ‘UX Professional’ isn’t a real job. Related Posts

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Devil is a supernatural thriller with M. Night Shyamalan’s signature touch.

The directorial debut of Oscar–nominated actor Casey Affleck, I’M STILL HERE is a striking portrayal of a tumultuous year in the life of internationally acclaimed actor Joaquin Phoenix. With remarkable access, I’M STILL HERE follows the Oscar–nominee as he announces his retirement from a successful film career in the fall of 2008 and sets off to reinvent himself as a hip hop musician. Sometimes funny, sometimes shocking, and always riveting, the film is a portrait of an artist at a crossroads. Defying expectations, it deftly explores notions of courage and creative reinvention, as well as the ramifications of a life spent in the public eye.

Based on Posy Simmonds’ beloved graphic novel of the same name (which was itself inspired by Thomas Hardy’s classic Far From the Madding Crowd) this wittily modern take on the romantic English pastoral is a far cry from Hardy’s Wessex. Tamara Drewe’s present–day English countryside—stocked with pompous writers, rich weekenders, bourgeois bohemians, a horny rock star, and a great many Buff Orpington chickens and Belted Galloway cows—is a much funnier place. When Tamara Drewe sashays back to the bucolic village of her youth, life for the locals is thrown upside down. Tamara—once an ugly duckling—has been transformed into a devastating beauty (with help from plastic surgery). As infatuations, jealousies, love affairs and career ambitions collide among the inhabitants of the neighboring farmsteads, Tamara sets a contemporary comedy of manners into play using the oldest magic in the book—sex appeal

Holly Berenson (Katherine Heigl) is an up and coming caterer and Eric Messer (Josh Duhamel) is a promising network sports director. After a disastrous first date, the only thing they have in common is their dislike for each other and their love for their goddaughter, Sophie. But when they suddenly become all Sophie has in the world, Holly and Messer are forced to put their differences aside. Juggling career ambitions and competing social calendars, they'll have to find some common ground while living under one roof.

Barry Munday, a suburban wanna–be ladies man, wakes up in the hospital after being attacked in a movie theater, only to realize that he is missing one of his most prized possessions– his testicles. To make matters worse, Barry learns he's facing a paternity lawsuit filed by a woman he can't remember having sex with. With this being Barry’s last chance to ever be a father, Barry reaches out and embraces the journey of parenthood and the onslaught of bumps that face him along the way. Filled with an ensemble of unusual characters, "Barry Munday" is the surprisingly heart–warming tale of a guy who finds it took losing his manhood to be a better man.

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An assassin (George Clooney) hides out in a picturesque Italian town after an assignment ends badly.

A blade-wielding former Federale (Danny Trejo) seeks revenge against those who betrayed him.

A detective (Matt Dillon) hunts a gang of elusive bank robbers (Hayden Christensen, Paul Walker).

A clergyman (Patrick Fabian) faces the ultimate test of faith when he encounters Satan.

A journalism student and her boyfriend try to navigate the pitfalls of a bi-coastal romance.

Mercenaries embark on a mission to overthrow a South American dictator.

A forensic accountant and a trigger-happy detective attempt to improve upon their "B team" status.

A married woman who seemingly has it all and is trying to get pregnant, realizes that she's not living the life she wants.

Christopher Nolan's sci-fi thriller centers on the premise of corporate espionage by way of dream invasion.

A nanny (Emma Thompson) uses magic to teach mischievous children a lesson.