PHP & PEAR things
Here are some updates from my personal PHP-world from January of 2008.
Writing tests
Tests are hip, tests are cool. Lately everyone does it. So I looked at phpUnit and phpt. So far phpt wins for simplicity, though I am sure phpUnit has its use cases as well (and there is this awesome tool called phpUndercontrol puts all your tests, docs and CruiseControl into shiny graphs). But for now I am sticking to phpt to cover some packages with tests. For a dead-simple entry to the phpt-world, check this: http://qa.php.net/write-test.php
For starters I will write a test with phpt for Net_CheckIP2; and see how that works out.
I can haz article
I got published in this month's php|architect. Woohoo! I wrote an article about RoundCube (which by theway is the coolest webmail on the planet). Thanks again to Steph Fox from php|architect for the opportunity and her über-patience, ... and for correcting my name online.
(Surprisingly someone managed to put an Umlaut (ä) into my name but still screwed up on Till vs. Tim.)
RoundCube
In other RoundCube-related news - no, RoundCube is not dead. Development struggled a bit last year since the project's future seemed not so bright for a while but we made it past that and current
ly work on merging my devel-vnext back branch into trunk. The steps are to apply patchsets from trunk; rc1 to rc2 and then rc2 to current trunk. What a load of work. Argh. :O I hope I can write up another post (as a status report) on Monday.
Writing documentation
Documentation is just as sexy as tests are. At least that's another trend. And that's good because some of PHP seems to move away from a PHP-script-kiddy-image to more thoroughly well-tested and well-documented applications (or packages for that matter). I also managed to write some docs for HTTP_Session2. Woohoo! Thanks to everyone who helped out.
Which reminds me that I need to roll a new release of HTTP_Session2 as well and include Thorsten Roehr's awesome additions. (Sorry for not getting to it earlier!) Also speaking of HTTP_Session2. I am currently using it to handle sessions on a small cluster (three servers) and we handle 4Mbit/s on average. It's working pretty well!
Along with HTTP_Session2 the Contact_Vcard_* packages are due for a new alpha.
Services_Plazes
During plazecamp (early January, 2008), I wrote an API wrapper for the plazes.com-REST-api. It's called Services_Plazes and a PEAR-style package and soon to be proposed (once I get those sexy docs and tests done). And someone's using it already.
That's all, kidz.
