Monday 4 July 2011

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)

Monday 20 June 2011

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.

Wednesday 16 February 2011

Just Upgraded Server

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