phly, boy, phly (Entries tagged as best practices)

Autoloading Benchmarks

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:30:00 -0400

During the past week, I've been looking at different strategies for autoloading in Zend Framework. I've suspected for some time that our class loading strategy might be one source of performance degradation, and wanted to research some different approaches, and compare performance.

In this post, I'll outline the approaches I've tried, the benchmarking stategy I applied, and the results of benchmarking each approach.

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Model Infrastructure

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 07:35:01 -0500

In the last two entries in this series on models, I covered using forms as input filters and integrating ACLs into models. In this entry, I tackle some potential infrastructure for your models.

The Model is a complex subject. However, it is often boiled down to either a single model class or a full object relational mapping (ORM). I personally have never been much of a fan of ORMs as they tie models to the underlying database structure; I don't always use a database, nor do I want to rely on an ORM solution too heavily on the off-chance that I later need to refactor to use services or another type of persistence store. On the other hand, the model as a single class is typically too simplistic.

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Autocompletion with Zend Framework and Dojo

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:07:29 -0500

I've fielded several questions about setting up an autocompleter with Zend Framework and Dojo, and decided it was time to create a HOWTO on the subject, particularly as there are some nuances you need to pay attention to.

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Tidings of the Season

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:07:13 -0500

Just about every day, I have an idea for a blog post, and most days, by the end of the day, I just don't have the time or energy to actually write anything up. The inner writer in me screams, "no excuses!" while the aging adult in me whispers, "time for bed, dear."

So, to keep my hand in the game, here are a few things running through my head, or that I'm working on, or that I'll be doing soon.

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ZendCon08 Wrapup

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:11:30 -0400

I'm a bit late on my ZendCon'08 wrapup; the conference left me both exhausted and with a backlog of email and work that has consumed me since it ended. However, this, too, is good, as it has given me time to reflect... and to finally get my slides up on SlideShare.

ZendCon was alternately exhausting, rewarding, educational, fruitful, infurating, and ultimately wonderful. I've been to every single ZendCon so far -- I started at Zend a scant month before the inaugural event -- and have spoken at each. My first time speaking was a fluke; David Sklar had just started at Ning and had to back out of his "Configuring PHP" tutorial session. Mike Naberezny and I were drafted to take it over, and we had N+1 attendees, where N was the number of speakers. Since that inauspicious beginning, I've gradually taken on more sessions and stuck around to participate in the conference more. I can honestly say that this was the biggest, busiest, and most community focussed ZendCon I can remember.

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git-svn Tip: don't use core.autocrlf

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:16:27 -0400

I've been playing around with Git in the past couple months, and have been really enjoying it. Paired with subversion, I get the best of all worlds -- distributed source control when I want it (working on new features or trying out performance tuning), and non-distributed source control for my public commits.

Github suggests that when working with remote repositories, you turn on the autocrlf option, which ensures that changes in line endings do not get accounted for when pushing to and pulling from the remote repo. However, when working with git-svn, this actually causes issues. After turning this option on, I started getting the error "Delta source ended unexpectedly" from git-svn. After a bunch of aimless tinkering, I finally asked myself the questions, "When did this start happening?" and, "Have I changed anything with Git lately?" Once I'd backed out the config change, all started working again.

In summary: don't use "git config --global core.autocrlf true" when using git-svn.

Setting up your Zend_Test test suites

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:00:00 -0400

Now that Zend_Test has shipped, developers are of course asking, "How do I setup my test suite?" Fortunately, after some discussion with my colleagues and a little experimenting on my one, I can answer that now.

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Testing Zend Framework MVC Applications

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:00:00 -0400

Since I originally started hacking on the Zend Framework MVC in the fall of 2006, I've been touting the fact that you can test ZF MVC projects by utilizing the Request and Response objects; indeed, this is what I actually did to test the Front Controller and Dispatcher. However, until recently, there was never an easy way to do so in your userland projects; the default request and response objects make it difficult to easily and quickly setup tests, and the methods introduced into the front controller to make it testable are largely undocumented.

So, one of my ongoing projects the past few months has been to create an infrastructure for functional testing of ZF projects using PHPUnit. This past weekend, I made the final commits that make this functionality feature complete.

The new functionality provides several facets:

Stub test case classes for the HTTP versions of our Request and Response objects, containing methods for setting up the request environment (including setting GET, POST, and COOKIE parameters, HTTP request headers, etc).
Zend_Dom_Query, a class for using CSS selectors (and XPath) to query (X)HTML and XML documents.
PHPUnit constraints that consume Zend_Dom_Query and the Response object to make their comparisons.
A specialized PHPUnit test case that contains functionality for bootstrapping an MVC application, dispatching requests, and a variety of assertions that utilize the above constraints and objects.

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Migrating OOP Libraries and Frameworks to PHP 5.3

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:00:00 -0400

With PHP 5.3 coming up on the horizon, I'm of course looking forward to using namespaces. Let's be honest, who wants to write the following line?

$viewRenderer = Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::getStaticHelper('viewRenderer');

when the more succinct:

$viewRenderer = HelperBroker::getStaticHelper('viewRenderer');

could be used? (Assuming you've executed 'use Zend::Controller::Action;' somewhere earlier...)

However, while namespaces will hopefully lead to more readable code, particularly code in libraries and frameworks, PHP developers will finally need to start thinking about sane standards for abstract classes and interfaces.

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Speaking at the Dutch PHP Conference

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:08:33 -0400

I've known for some time, but was reluctant to blog about it until the plane tickets were purchased and in hand: I've been invited to speak at the Dutch PHP Conference this coming June:

I'll be presenting two separate sessions: an all day tutorial on 13 June 2008 covering Zend Framework, and a regular session on 14 June 2008 covering Best Practices for PHP development, which will focus on how to utilize Zend Framework coding standards and methodologies to help deliver efficient, high quality code for your organization.

I'm looking forward to meeting old and new friends alike at the conference!

Vim Productivity Tips for PHP Developers

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 10:41:26 -0400

I use Vim for all my editing needs -- TODO lists, email, presentation outlines, coding in any language... everything. So, I thought I'd start sharing some of my vim habits and tools with others, particularly those that pertain to using Vim with PHP.

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Submitting Bug Reports

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:06:13 -0500

Full disclosure: I am employed by Zend to program Zend Framework. That said, the following is all my opinion, and is based on my experiences with Zend Framework, as well as answering questions on a variety of mailing lists and with other OSS projects (PEAR, Solar, and Cgiapp in particular).

One of my biggest pet peeves in the OSS world is vague bug/issue reports and feature requests. I cannot count the number of times I've seen a report similar to the following:

<Feature X> doesn't work; you need to fix it now!

If such a report comes in on an issue tracker, it's invariably marked critical and high priority.

What bothers me about it? Simply this: it gives those responsible for maintaining Feature X absolutely no information to work on: what result they received, what was expected, or how exactly they were using the feature. The reviewer now has to go into one or more cycles with the reporter fishing for that information -- wasting everyone's time and energy.

Only slightly better are these reports:

<Feature X> doesn't work -- I keep getting <Result X> from it, which is incorrect.

At least this tells the reviewers what they reporter is receiving... but it doesn't tell them how they got there, or what they're expecting.

So, the following should be your mantra when reporting issues or making feature requests:

What is the minimum code necessary to reproduce the issue or show the desired API?
What is the expected result?
What is the actual result?

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2007 Retrospective

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 16:49:26 -0500

2007 was a busy year, both personally and professionally. I won't go into the personal too much, because, well, it's personal, and some of the details are simply inappropriate for blogging material.

Here's the short version:

One trip to Belgium and The Netherlands.
Two trips to Israel.
Two trips to Atlanta, GA (not counting the return trip from Europe, when I was stranded for a day due to storms in the Northeast).
Three different user groups attended, with three presentations.
One major Zend Framework release
One PEAR release.
One podcast.
One webinar.
One book published.
One conference attended.

What follows is my month-by-month breakdown:

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PHP Anthology, 2nd Edition is out

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:33:07 -0400

Well, it's now official: The PHP Anthology, 2nd Edition is finally out, and, as you'll see if you follow the link, I'm listed as an author on it. It's a pleasant surprise to see it out -- I finished my chapters back in January, and had almost forgotten about it.

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ZendCon is over at last

nospam@example.com (Matthew Weier O'Phinney) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:50:47 -0400

ZendCon '07 is finally over, the dust has settled, and I finally find myself with some time alone... practically the first I've had since Sunday. The week was fantastic, and I had many good conversations and brainstorming sessions. Oh, and I ended up giving three different sessions, so it's time for links to slides and materials:

Best Practices of PHP Development. Sebastian, Mike, and I presented a full-day tutorial on PHP development best practices, focussing primarily on testing and testing strategies, but also covering coding standards, usage of SCM tools, and deployment. There were a ton of questions from the attendees, and Sebastian even whipped out some extra slides at the end showing new and little-known features of PHPUnit. Basically, reading the slides won't really indicate what we covered, but is more of a general outline. It was an honor and pleasure to work with Sebastian and Mike on this, and I hope we can do it again in the future some time.
Zend Framework MVC Quick Start. This was basically the same session I did in my webinar a couple weeks ago, with a few corrections and a small demonstration. Cal put me on directly following Terry Chay, in the largest of the four session rooms -- the one where all the keynotes occurred -- talk about intimidating! Amazingly, the session was really well attended -- others I talked to estimate between 100 and 150 people showed up. The most amazing part, though, was that when I asked how many people knew what 'MVC' was, I don't think there was a single person who didn't raise their hand -- definitely a sign of how well accepted the pattern now is in PHP.
AJAX-Enabling Your Zend Framework Controllers. I did this talk for the Unconference, mainly because its a topic I've been interested in and wanted to present. In it, I detailed how to ajax-enable an application through some easy tricks with Action and View Helpers and using JS to decorate your existing application. The reference app I used was a pastebin, and I've got code for both Dojo and Prototype flavors available:
- Dojo pastebin
- Prototype pastebin

The two highlight keynote speakers, for me, were definitely Joel Spolsky and Cory Doctorow. Neither spoke about PHP, but both spoke about topics that PHP developers should take to heart. Perhaps I'll elaborate on those in another post.

Another bonus for me was the number of old and new friends alike I got to see -- I had many good conversations with Paul M. Jones, Nate Abele, Ivo Jansch, and Ralph Schindler, and opportunities to finally meet fellow co-author Lig Turmelle, Ben Ramsey, Chris Shifflet (dude, we've been to four conferences together, and never yet met!), and many, many others. I was also overwhelmed by the number of Zend Framework users who sought me out either to ask me questions or simply thank me and the others on the team for the project; I'm deeply honored that I can work on a project that affects so many developers.

And now for some down time to recuperate...