Having a Geekie Whale of a Time...

...building local VM development boxes using vagrant, virtualbox and puppet.

Maven for PHP Plugin alternatives?

The maven for php plugin is proving a bit unpredictable. That leaves me with three options:

1. Start some local dev on the plugin itself and get access to the project that way,


2. Fork the project and start developing the bug in.


3. Use maven assemblies and ant tasks to create a pom template to build a php project.

Whilst option 1) is the best long term, I'm thinking option 3) more immediately. One of the benefits of option 3) is that it should be easy to tweak for other dynamic languages (e.g. ruby, python, perl) etc without having to stamp out a new plugin for each.

Th reasons I'm going to all is effort for my php development is:

• I want a tool chain that allows me high degree of confidence that any code tweaks/ additions are not going to break the app.


• I want to be able to consistly employ all the best practise techniques for deploying a high performance web app (e.g. Steve Souders)

PHP and Maven

I've recently been exploring how I might use Maven with PHP. Whilst the maven-php needs a little TLC, the main thing that struck me was that by moving to a none-php based build tool (I know, I know, Maven is more than a build tool), I am able to take advantage of so many other plugins such as Cucumber for BDD running on jRuby, YUICompressor on Java, and others. And by using Maven I can throw the POM at Jenkins.

I also noticed that by using a build tool that can do lots of pre-processing for me before deployment, I can create more responsive web apps (e.g. reduce apache re-write rules, version resources such as js, imgs, css as well as minimise them). A consequence of employing such techniques is the production of greener web apps as they use less resources (therefore energy) on a per request basis due to the tools doing the work before deployment.

Just Upgraded Server

Just upgraded server with hosting provider. Hoping blank pages will be a thing of the past. Hoping anyway.

PHP versions

Just noticed my host provider supports php/5.2.6 on Apache/1.3.41. ZendFramework supports 5.2.4 and above so I should be ok. I'd better be careful with the php features I choose to use for other php coding adventures or my code won't be working when served from my host provider :(

Blank Site Pages

When surfing around this site lots of blank pages just keep being displayed. Fasthosts have been unable to sort it out... they visit a few pages and when none show blank declare it a non-issue.

I thought disabling the php compression might help and it seemed to a little, but the wordpress powered blog pages (particularly the admin ones) are still affected. So I think I'll have to record a screen session and open a new problem ticket, and then may be find new php hosting facilities.

Preparing for Zend resurgence

With my current contact working indirectly for Vodafone on their mobile portal platform coming to an end, I found myself at the crossroads of having to decide whether to continue to develop my server side skills in JSP, JSTL, etc or re-build my server side skills on the PHP Zend Framework (ZF).

The roles that recruiters are contacting me about seems to suggest that I'm best to focus for the next few weeks on Zend. So this weekend I started to set up my environment.... and what a nightmare!! I'm there now but to give a sense of the effort; earlier Saturday evening I put two hours into setting up ZF 1.11 with NetBeans 7.0 M2 using xampp as the server n windows XP.  I had to stop after hitting problem after problem to spend sometime with my children. NetBeans just refused to register the ZF provider.

At midnight having had some thoughts from the various blogs I'd read about the problems, I decided I'd give it half-an-hour before going to bed... I ended up locating ZF in a directory path that had no spaces in the names, I installed a latest version of the PHP engine (5.3.3), I set up PEAR and PECL, XDebug got included... and by 3am it was all working:  NetBeans 7.0 M2 registered the ZF provider and created a new project; and PEAR and PECL would respond to the command line (after I'd altered php.ini so that phar.require_hash was set to off).

Having had a lot of experience man-handing apache and some experience with mysql, I think it's time to drop xampp (which has served me well) and just use the components I actually need.

Anyway, this week I need to install and re-familiarise myself with phpUnit and get back into the swing of ZF. Thankfully there are couple of great resources out there that are focused on 1.8 and above rather than the frustrating tutorials for 1.6 and before (the bootstrapping and loading changed significantly).