Lately I’ve followed some developments in the Symfony2 corner of the PHP community with great interest. One of the most enticing developments is the usage of a Content Repository as a backend for your CMS. There is some work being done on the Symfony CMF, combining Symfony2, Doctrine2, PHPCR and Jackalope into a set of [...]
Tag Archives: php
Unit testing and Drupal; what’s wrong with this picture?
I guess the guys at Drupal.org didn’t really understand the concept of unit testing. In comparison to the Zend Framework 1.13 and Symfony 1.4 test suites, of which some tests did not pass mainly due to some configuration issues (98.6% and 99.9% respectively), Drupal had some, let’s say, surprising results. Though it reported 100% of [...]
PHPUnit style dataProvider in Python unit test
PHPUnit has a handy feature with which you can provide testdata to your tests. This is called a data provider, and is implemented by annotating a test with @dataProvider methodName. Python’s unittest module doesn’t seem to have such a feature.
Introducing Spritzer: A CSS sprite generator
CSS sprites are pretty useful in web development. The general idea is you use one big image that contains all your icons and other interface-related images and use that image as a background for your HTML elements, shifting it’s position such that the right portion of the sprite is displayed. This technique is becoming more [...]
About MySQL, UTF-8 and saving headaches
One of the most confusing topics ever in web development history is character sets. MySQL has a lot of features to help you with this, but when things go wrong, it can be a real pain to get it solved. Read this and fear no more.
Python: an introduction for PHP (and other) programmers
I love Python. It is clean, it simple and it evolves in a natural and healthy way. I have been working with PHP for over 10 years now, but Python stole my heart. Ahhhww
Linux Devbox: Running multiple PHP versions
Ever since PHP5 came out, there is some need to run multiple PHP versions on your local development box, or at least make it easy to switch from one version to another. Derick Rethans has posted a solution based on your PATH environment variable. I have devised an alternative approach which changes the system wide [...]
My top 5 dos and don’ts of self-explanatory programming
I have gathered some of the less obvious do’s and don’ts in how to make your code more explanatory to your coworkers. I left out the more obvious like writing doc-comments, using coding standards, etc. Those go without saying. This might be considered “drm’s php tiplist revisited”
Twig, the next generation template engine for PHP
I’ve been using Smarty 2 for about 7 years, and, while Smarty 3 is still in beta, Twig just popped up in the scene. Notable Smarty opposer Fabien Potencier was apparently converted by this template engine, so Twig must either be magic, or excellent, or both.
HipHop – The talk of the day
Today I read about HipHop, the talk of the day in the PHP community. It is basically a PHP to C++ compiler, developed by Facebook to have all benefits of compiled binaries (improved performance, more efficient memory management, less overhead), without having to train their PHP developers into C++ developers or do a big round [...]