Do you want automatic completion for remote paths when using svn in bash? Do you want to switch easier between branches? I’ve written a small script that gives you autocompletion for all remote paths. (more…)

The last couple of months I have been playing around with elasticsearch, an open source, distributed, RESTful search engine built on top of Apache Lucene. To interact with elasticsearch in PHP I have been using a client called Elastica. This was all fun and games until I needed to do actual queries, which is what our users will be doing most of the time.

Elastica’s documentation does not (yet) say anything about how to search using the client, so I needed to dig through the code to see if I could find some solutions. Some different methods exist, and I’ll present some of them here using different types of queries.

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The Bootstrapping process in Zend Framework isn’t perfect. You’ll often end up bootstrapping a lot of resources that you don’t need to complete the request. Depending on the resources this can be really expensive and hurt your overall performance.

The worst kind are resources that open connections to external services like MySQL and Memcached. Both Memcache::connect() and MySQLi::__construct() will try to connect to the server immediately and this can, and usually will be, “slow”. Even worse, if the services are down they will end up blocking the execution. (more…)

Some time ago I saw a tweet from Sean Coates about not using a hardcoded path to the PHP executable. With the volatile nature of Twitter, I decide to write a blog post repeating his advice. (more…)

The latest version of PHPUnit (3.6.4 at the time of this writing) does not play well with the Zend Framework extensions (Zend_Test_PHPUnit). After asking Matthew Weier O’Phinney about this he answered that they had standardized on PHPUnit-3.4 for ZF1.

Having just upgraded to the latest version of PHPUnit on our servers we were no longer able to test our Zend Framework applications. One option was to downgrade PHPUnit, but since we were already using some of the new features this was not going to happen.

One solution to this problem is to run multiple versions of PHPUnit and use specific versions for specific test suites. Not optimal, but at least it gets the job done. (more…)

Some of you have probably heard the “Fat models, skinny controllers” mantra with regards to developing MVC applications. Recently we figured out that the routes (not part of MVC, but a crucial part to the application nonetheless) could take some weight off the controllers. Since we use Zend Framework (ZF) at VG I will use ZF when describing this solution.

You need to be familiar with some ZF basics to follow along with all the code presented in this post, but fear not, the idea itself can easily be transferred to other frameworks/languages.
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Using a recursive function or joining in SQL usually are the most common ways for creating tree structures. Both these solutions are of exponential time complexity 2^O(n) and therefore very expensive in computational time. For every element you add to the dataset the computational time theoretically doubles.

While researching in best practices for building tree structures I found this method using references. Using references, the tree is built with only one pass. This gives a time complexity of O(n), which is completely linear. For every element you add to the dataset you get only a small and constant increase in computational time. (more…)

Using the memory/temporary stream provided by php:// stream wrapper you  can create a stream with read and write access directly to RAM or to a temporary file.

This gives you the possibilty to write unit tests that does not rely on a specific file, resource or stream, but rather on data provided by the test itself.

Creating a memory stream is easy; $fp = fopen('php://memory', 'r+');. Now you have a resource that can be used and manipulated just like any other stream or file.

This article is about how to mock the file system when writing unit tests, and it will be rather code-heavy. If you are not familiar with the concept of unit testing this article might not be the best place to start. There will be other articles regarding unit testing on this blog, so keep coming back for more. (more…)