Typically when working on code that has tests, you would want to make sure your tests pass when you share your code with other people. It’s generally a good idea to run the tests once in a while too, but why do it manually when you can automate?
In this post I’ll show a simple shell script you can use to plug into git, and automatically run your testsuite and optionally reject a push with failing tests.
I recently updated the ZF modelform generator to include an adapter compatible with Doctrine 2.
It’s otherwise completely functional, but it ignores many-to-many relations when generating forms (because I didn’t need this feature yet ;) ).
Usage example after the jump.
Here’s a counterpoint to the currently popular view of “fat controllers are bad”, and the current fad of everyone and their cousin implementing service layers:
You don’t need one. Fat controllers are okay too.
Since PHP 5, there has been a bundle of built-in exceptions – the “SPL exceptions” – in PHP. However, the documentation for these classes is quite lacking in examples, and it can be difficult to understand when you should be using them.
The short answer is always. You’ll find a longer answer if you continue reading :)
There is also a french translation of this post, by Frédéric Blanc.
Broken LCD monitor. Doesn’t turn on, or maybe it doesn’t stay on once turned on, or perhaps it makes an annoying buzzing noise.
Sound familiar? One of my monitors recently broke and became like that, in fact it had all the symptoms above.
I thought I would have to waste a two-three hundred euros to get a new one, but turns out it might be possible to very easily (and cheaply!) repair it yourself.
HTML and CSS are relatively straightforward languages. Yet there’s a certain amount of elegancy to them – I think you could even call well written markup art.
I quite enjoy writing HTML and CSS from time to time. Despite being simpler than programming languages, writing HTML still provides a challenge: How to put a design into code in the most elegant and functional way.
In programming you typically consider architectural things like classes and design patterns, how to separate concerns nicely and so on.
In HTML you don’t have these questions. Instead you face some different ones, like how do I do this part? Is using a h1 enough or do I need to wrap it into a div? What if I did it like this, could it save me some of that extraneous markup?
In programming having less code is usually good, but it also applies in markup, perhaps even more so. In programming, you can achieve benefits from abstracting, which leads to some more code but is justifiable from the benefits. In HTML, you don’t have things like this, so all extra is usually that – useless extra.
What takes away from being able to make your HTML and CSS elegant or nice is often the issue of cross-browser compatibility, particularly Internet Explorer. When things need to work in IE, you can’t take advantage of many of the CSS features which allow you to make the markup better. This also takes away the fun from it, and instead everything becomes horribly, horribly frustrating.
In this post I’ll introduce you to extending Doctrine 2 to provide ways to use custom data types and DQL functions.
We needed a simple way to store locations and calculate distances between points on maps and some other stuff for Wantlet. Since we are using MySQL, we decided to use MySQL’s Spatial Extensions for it since they seemed suitable.
We’re using Doctrine 2 as the ORM layer in the application, but it didn’t have any sort of data types or functionality for storing and operating on spatial data. Thankfully though, Doctrine 2 is very easy to extend to accomodate new data types and new DQL functions. It did require a small workaround for an issue not yet addressed in it, but in the end it worked out quite well.
XHTML was the fad for a while – you were a bad coder if your markup wasn’t valid XHTML. Now it’s fading out.
Giorgio Sironi’s recent look at what happened to XHTML got me thinking: What was the point of all this? Why was XHTML useful, or was it?
So what’s up? It’s 2011! Well yes, it has been 2011 for almost a month already, but I’ve been kinda busy with stuff.
Here’s some statistics from Codeutopia in 2010 and what interesting things have been going on lately.
RV David has an interesting post on his blog about refactoring a service class for better separation of concerns compliancy. I also left some ideas in the comments as I’m currently working on something similar.