Everything about hidden people, oh, and PHP
So the title says it all, kinda …
For the next alpha release of PEAR that will happen in 2 – 4 weeks we’ll have a min dep of PHP 4.4 and 5.1.6, so basically excluding 5.0.0 – 5.1.5 Now why am I going to do that ?
As any decent PHP developer know, PHP 4 is dead so to at least stay in the latest PHP 4 release I decided it wouldn’t be worth the hassle to maintain support for 4.3 anymore (It’s also the case with PHP 4.4 but I kinda dislike abandoning people altogether) and well 5.0 nobody uses except for crazy people and everyone in the 5.1 series should be up to 5.1.6 anyway since RHEL uses that and most of the LTS distros out there.
So yeah I’m doing this so I don’t have to test on so many PHP versions as well as hopefully nudge users to upgrade their PHP if they wish to use PEAR anymore … kinda … a little known secret is that the installer still works fine on 4.3 and 5.0 – 5,1.5, you just need to do pear upgrade -f pear if you want to keep on using those old ugly PHP versions but be warned, I’ll bogus any reports that has those numbers and I can’t properly reproduce any of the newer versions of PHP.
Now some people might be wondering things like: why didn’t you put PHP 5+ dep and rewrite the damn installer to proper PHP bla bla bla bla, well we’re already doing that and it’s called Pyrus and will be PHP 5.3+, the work I’m doing on the PEAR installer is because people will take some time to upgrade from PEAR installer to Pyrus once Pyrus is stable so I think it’s important we try to maintain the old installer for a bit longer and to make that easier for us the PHP version reduction was important, for us and I believe the community.
I’m mostly making this post so people know about this beforehand and can react accordingly on their own servers when the time comes.
Also does anyone have a beef with me excluding those PHP versions ? :-) If so comment here or email me at helgi _at_ php _dot_ net and explain to me why that is.
So I finally decided that I’d attend Sebastians session, so the myth from last blog post is busted :-)
This is the first time I’m seeing Sebastian talk even tho I’ve been to couple of conferences with him so this is a new and hopefully fun experience.
I wrote parts of this blog post during the talk so some of it talks about the session parts as they are in the future, I’m way too lazy to fix it but I do expect everyone that reads my blog is smart enough to just go with the flow on this one ;-)
Another reason why this session is interesting to me is because I’ve been dabbling in phpt all my life, everytime I’ve come across PHPUnit in a software where I have some say in it, I convert it to phpt BUT those are usually PHPUnit v1 which is well … not pretty – I used to use it in some PEAR packages, felt a bit over the top.
Having only touched on v3 a weeeee bit so I’m hoping Sebastian will bring some new light on this and make my mind a bit more open for v3 and v4. Quite funny tho when I was writing the above sentence that Sebastian was talking about that unit tests should be easy to write, I’ve always found the barrier to be higher for PHPUnit than for phpt, maybe it’s just me ? I have always believed that one file per test, it feels like PHPUnit encourages putting many tests in one file which kinda feels … messy, maybe it’s done because people don’t want to be extending some class all the time and fun fun things like that.
Tho as Sebastian points out, phpt is more of a standard and it’s not a unit test framework but in my experience it’s pretty easy to throw in most of the basic functions that people will use in PHPUnit, that’s something we did in pearweb – mock DB, assert funcs and all that but no doubt it doesn’t even start to touch on what PHPUnit does but most of the times you are only playing with the basic features, I’m a bit bias about phpt tho.
While showing how important tests are while refactoring Sebastian showed people how to solve code smells, a term coined by Martin Fowler but he added a little bit that I didn’t know about it, while Martin was writing it he had a new born baby in the household and his wife kept telling him “if it smells, change it” and so he went on to adopt it for coding.
A nice feature I wasn’t aware of in PHPUnit is tagging X many tests as a certain group and then having the ability to execute a group of tests in one file (kinda makes the many tests in one file sound nicer) or across multiple files, or so I believe from what Sebastian said.
Couple of other really nice features were mentioned like: DB_Unit – port of jUnit database stuff to PHPUnit, uses PDO only atm Selenium, cool as always phpUnderControl
DB_Unit and phpUnderControl are two things I have not tried out yet but I will for sure, phpUnderControl just looks awesome and I like the whole idea behind CruiseControl just never gave my self the time to look at it even if Sebastian has been talking about it for …. ever :-)
A bit of a funny tidbit, apparently there was a smallish bug in the html output from PHPUnit and Sebastian told us that this part of PHPUnit is nigh impossible to test – or maybe even PHPUnit it self as whole, didn’t really hear it properly and he’ll shout at me if he ever reads this and wants to correct me :)
The later parts of the post might look a bit … rushed … they are, I’m sitting here in a hotel in London trying to grab it all from memory :-) Mid through Sebastians session I became distracted with fixing bugs and other food related things and thus missed out on parts of the session, which was a pity, good session, really good.
I’m definently going to give PHPUnit another chance after this session but I’m still going to follow the PHPT.info development since it might become something really useful, after all it was born from the pear run test suite (which was born from the original test runner in PHP it self, so that we have the facts right, IIRC hehe)
a note to Derick, arrange a full day workshop of xdebug next time around! I had a real hard time picking if PHPUnit or Xdebug would be the session I wanted to see, then I noticed the xdebug one was a half day one … fail …
All in all, a good day – The evening was a lot of fun, Dutch won the France people, the town LIT up – Fun times
So I have arrived to Amsterdam, finally, been on the road since 7am and it’s 7:30pm now :-)
I had my usual train problem in Amsterdam since I always forget what to pick when I’m buying a ticket to RAI, rather weird not having it as an option in the ticket buying machine, oh well … Then I forgot to print out a map so I could walk from the RAI train station to the hotel …. I ended up taking the scenic route … something some of my fellow conference people should be familiar with, it’s a the technical term for getting lost :-P But I got to see some nice looking places in Amsterdam and the weather was really good outside so I didn’t mind really … Seems they finally finished the renovations they were doing around RAI btw, everything looked … different.
When I walked paste the convention center I noticed couple of signs, really cool:
Now I’m just waiting for some other people to arrive so we can grab dinner, I love the hotel location, smack in the middle of a lot of restaurants and what not.
Tutorial day is tomorrow, still haven’t decided which one I’ll be attending so my blog post tomorrow will be a mystery :D
In just a couple of days I’ll be in Amsterdam attending the Dutch PHP Conference and I must say I’m getting some excitement butterflies in me little belly.
I’ve been trying to find a legit reason to go to Amsterdam yet again (previously went in 2005 for the International PHP Conference – IPC) and finally decided that the Dutch PHP Conference would be the reason, not only because I liked the city but also because the schedule looks damn good, ranging from Derick R., Sebastian B., Marco T and over to guys like Ivo and the infamous Terry terror (cheesy ? yes ? no ? yeah probably is) and oodles of people I’ve never seen give a talk but sure have interesting topics, I’ve already pin pointed a one or two new talks I’m going to attend.
I really like the fact that the conference is held at the RAI convention center, maybe it’s just me but I liked the place and the location, not too far from downtown and not too far from the airport either and this is coming from someone where the capital (Reykjavík) consists of mere 120.000 people.
Nota bene, I do think the IPC made a false move by going over to Germany with both their conference events so I’d not be surprised by the fact that the Dutch conference is almost full so if you haven’t already then you should go ahead and get a ticket! It’s cheap and you’ll get bang for your buck, there’s not question about it … Now if you can’t attend this year then you should mark your calendar to watch out for next years which will hopefully be a 2 day conference event with a tutorial day (common Ivo, it will make it twice as fun! :-))
I will try to post more blogs about the conference when I get there and hopefully I can also do another community coverage like for Tek, I have a feeling the EU crowed might be a tad different than the one we saw at Tek, that coupled with some notes on the sessions.
Should make for an interesting read later on, so stay tuned! :-P
Summer of code is around the corner and I hope to mentor again this year, last years experience was a blast.
Anyway we’re looking for some kick as students to apply to the PHP project so get your ass to the google summer of code page and apply your awesome mega cool idea :-)
If you lack ideas what to submit then head to http://wiki.php.net/gsoc/2008 for some ideas but we welcome new ones, so don’t be afraid about being bold.
This year we’ll be accepting PHP core ideas (internals of PHP it self), php infrastructure (websites and such), PHP-GTK, PEAR, PECL, PHPUnit and SimpleTest … Hope I’m not missing anything, but anyway if you are interested in ANY of those projects then please go a head and read the wiki to get a general idea of things and then make up a idea of your own.
Students can start submitting their applications to projects, the deadline is 31 March so get a move on people! I want to see YOUR applications in there or I’ll be hunting you down.
I decided to give Komodo 4.3 alpha1 a spin and I’ve been running it for a better part of a week now I reckon (since 9th feb) and I must say I like it, a good improvement over 4.2 by far but still has some kinks, mostly in the newly added features I guess.
1st run – Code Intelligence tried to run and do some weird stuff but it hangs, so I had to kill Komodo, startup after that is snappy, faster than 4.2 IMHO
Search in all files = Slow as heck, installing grep and running it is faster (including the installation step), wonder if it’s like a first time cache it’s building up (debunked that theory, strike through isn’t working on this theme so meh.)
The slowness persists and is in Phase 1, gathering list of files and seems to also look in my PEAR dir for some reason; look in current project suddenly became current projects + include_path I think, could be the slow down, grep (like I use it) only searches in the dir I’m in (usually the root of the project) and down. So what I’d want is a new option “search only in current project” on top of the already existing feature :)
Would be better if it displayed results as it found them, seems to hold of for too long
The Asynchronous SCC part is going beautifully, I like it, was getting a wee bit tired of the UI hangups that 4.2 had
Haven’t given the new Unit Test runner a go since none of the projects I’m actively working on at this moment use PHPUnit but I did try to make a Test Plan and it’s not showing up anywhere and a closing Komodo and opening again doesn’t find it in the Project Unit Test Result tab but picking Project -> Select Test Plan does find it and picking the test plan updates the tab I mentioned earlier.
For the fun of it I tried to pick PHP as the language I wanted to run in and in the test command line I did pear run-tests -r just so see if I could cheat past the PHPUnit part but apparently it does not work, but gives me no error or any output what so ever, quite confusing, would have expected “Can’t run” or “No ouput”, “nothing ran” or whatever, but a alpha release is a alpha release.
Now if I just could find out how I edit or delete test plans, that would be swell.
When I have a folder open in the project view which has say, tests I’m running and they fail (phpt) they generate these .diff, .out .exp and whatever, seems to hang up the UI to update the view, same goes if I have one of those files open when I’m running the tests and the contents of the file I have open changes, then Komodo becomes a bit sluggish for a while, sometimes it’s just a second but sometimes longer, I guess it depends on how many tests I’m touching and how many of them are failing or succeeding after having failed (thus cleaning up all the extra files that were added)
Sorry about the hectic sounding post, I wrote this on the fly when I first tried out Komodo 4.3 :-P I’m going to hold of reporting bugs until alpha2 or beta1 is out and if these issues still persist then I’ll try to allocate time to report any of these bugs / feature requests and hopefully other people will enjoy the fixes that will come out of it ;-)
Update: Sean and Shane gave me some tips on some hidden goodies, post updated to reflect that
Update: Sean C came to the rescue on how I should decrease indenting, shift + tab, works like a charm! thanks mate :) Still think it should be listed in the menu like all the other shortcuts
Shane told me how to do the panel hiding, apparently you can do Help – List Keybindings, now who on this earth ever looks in there ;-)
For showing/hiding the 3 panes:
Even cooler is, I can do custom keybindings
Managed to fix this somehow, managed to fix the dir in another dir but not really (a mouthful) issue, not sure how tho :)
About the folder add problem, filed a bug http://bugs.activestate.com/show_bug.cgi?id=74774 Hopefully Todd will resolve this before 4.3.0 is out
After I got my new laptop in last November I decided to get a new editor that could work in Windows & Linux and Sean C. told me to give Komodo a go; Having tried it couple of years back and having what I’d describe as blend feelings then I wasn’t really convinced but thought I had nothing better to do (was at a conference) and installed the trial for Komodo IDE and wow it had improved a TON, I must say I fell instantly in love with it.
After having used it I found a couple of flaws or well things that made the usage not perfect for me but well perfection is a rare thing ;-)
First problem I saw was it a bitch when I had HUGE projects with bazillion files and all in a SCM of one or another sort, it would basically just hang when trying to fetch all the status info for each file (Komodo does this nifty thing to show you in your file manager if the file has been edited or is not in sync with the SCM) so handling projects like the pear installer was not so … optimal but after a quick email exchange with Shane C. then he told me that Komodo 4.3 will fix that, he actually finally blogged about it today: http://blogs.activestate.com/shanec/2008/02/komodo-43-in-te.html
And it looks like 4.3 will fix another pet peeve of mine, searching for things per project, on linux it’s a breeze from the command line, grep -ri “foobar” . in the root of the project and voila, supports some regex and what not, perhaps not the most slick solution but it does work and having it straight in Komodo will be nice even tho it will be hard to break of using the cli but perhaps a good thing, can’t setup gnuwin32 on all the machines I might have to code on if they should contain a Windoze.
The Unit Test feature in 4.3 also sounds quite interesting but I’m very disappointed that they don’t seem to support .phpt tests or at least they don’t say they do, PHPUnit is all well and good but most of my tests are phpt so what I’m saying, Shane I demand you add phpt support! I mean it’s the default PHP test suite ;-) Oh and it would be nice if I could make it run the php run tests and the pear one, basically the same but different test runners it calls.
Now back to my problems and what I like with 4.2 :)
For some reason a directory in my project file listing was moved INTO another directory and I can’t for my little life move it back, even if it didn’t happen on the FS it self, it just baffles me, bugging having to remember that one bloody folder is in a different place JUST in komdo for one project :P
As Peter Griffin would put it, this really grinds my gears.
Adding a new file to a SCM via Komodo is also just a pain in the butt, for some reason I can’t add a folder unless I issue a full add on the root folder of the folder I’m trying to add … or something like that, usually end up doing it via cli.
Komodo is lacking some usability shortcuts … decrease ident doesn’t have a short cut, hiding the left / right panes don’t have shortcuts (to my knowledge) perhaps even adding something like Dynamics AX has (just started using it at work, one of the features I liked) which basically is I can hide it but I see a small bar on the left side and when I hover it it pops out and when I leave it for X time it goes away again or like Opera does it, a very thin bar which I have to click or some shortcut and it pops out, click it again it goes away, anyway just a nice feature to have because I tend to work on a 13,3″ screen in 1280×800 which is not a lot of screen space.
Ohh and I also want a way to checkout a repo; Bugging to use the run command or plain cli to do that, best would be if I could do a checkout and auto create a project for it :P
But other than that it has been rocking hard for my use cases, almost perfect ;-) Still having tried the whole debug feature, using xdebug via Komodo and all that but I will soonish, I’m told it’s a very useful and fun feature and perhaps some addons, having seen many thus far, might have been looking in the wrong place.
So all in all, big thumbs up to Komodo, and thanks to ActiveState and Shane for plugging a free license for me since I only do coding in my spare time and don’t have a company to buy it for me and so basically ActiveState has been sponsoring my last 3 months of open source work! Very cool! Would be even cooler if Greg Beaver would get a license, he’s another great OS coder that doesn’t make a living of doing programming, he told me he tried to contact someone in ActiveState with no luck, hopefully someone will see this post and fix that up :-)
Can’t wait for 4.3 /me counts the days
I just did a new release of pear.php.net which has a bunch of new features and bug fixes, most of which you can see here.
I’ve been putting of writing this entry for way too long, mostly because I’m lazy but also because at work the weeks and months after the trip were crazzzzy but I figured since I’m on my Christmas vacation and have nothing better to do then why not jot my adventure down.
Btw. Happy Holidays and a new year! :-)
So I was one of the people invited to the WebDev summit in Redmond, which was exciting for three reasons, I love going to conferences, meeting up with people I’ve been babbling to via emails, irc and all the other geeky communication ways, the second reason was that I had never gone to the States, ever. Now the third reason was the whole MS thing, seeing the MS campus, meeting MS employees, developers, marketing people, hearing about new products, how they intend to get more involved in the PHP community, etc.
Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson 