Software development produces products as any other industry. It is an interesting issue that products produced by the software development industry are not always as well tested as in other industries. One of the main reasons is due to the fact that in most companies software is manually tested by the same developers who built it.

Developers are not necessarily good testers. Good software developers while sharing some traits are different from good testers.  A good developer may be excellent at software design but won’t notice spelling mistakes. Developers tend to take the testing path that usually works while cutting corners on special cases. It is also known as happy testing.

Most reasons why software is tested manually boil down to:

• Not knowing how
• Not having the time
• Maintaining legacy code

Hardly any of these reasons are valid excuses. Truth be told automated testing is not easy. It is a skill that has to be learned and doesn’t come naturally. It’s a skill that takes years to master. It may seem that automated tests take too much time and at first it will. Due to the same fact that it’s a skill and takes time to master. In some way it is like skiing. Before going down a steep mountain racing the wind one has to learn how to otherwise it’s an unpleasant struggle climbing down with your skis across the shoulder. Automated testing won’t do miracles but when done properly it may increase productivity by 10 – 20%.

There are many types of software testing with their own benefits and downsides. Bellow are the three most important and common types of testing.

Unit Testing

Unit testing is about testing the smallest individual parts of an application. For example instead of testing the whole engine of a car all individual pieces are tested separately as units. All dependencies are replaced with stubs or mocks or fakes. Unit tests are meant to be lightning fast and execute thousands of tests in a few seconds therefore they shouldn’t connect to the database, web services or send emails. Unit tests are most effective when executed very frequently during development to inform the developer of any broken parts allowing to fix the problem immediately without losing line of thought.

Integration Testing

Integration tests ensure that all of the application’s parts work correctly when they are assembled in a simulated production environment. An example of an integration test can be a batch job executing against a database with test data. Integration tests are a lot slower than unit tests and usually work best integrated with a continuous build system. While integration tests are not good at identifying broken parts they are excellent at testing if an overall group of components is correctly wired together and produces the desired outcome.

Acceptance Testing

Acceptance testing also known as functional testing or QA testing involves testing a complete system that is usually identical to the user’s anticipated system. Acceptance tests can be automated or may be carried out by a QA team. In agile software development terms an acceptance test tests a business story. For example a simple story may be “As a manager I am able to list invoices, filter them by name and date and approve or reject them” An acceptance test would test that scenarios mentioned in the story can be done on a completed system. Automated web application development acceptance tests can be carried out by selenium that simulates recorded browser actions or by asserting HTML structures. Acceptance tests shine in proving if the user story scenarios can be completed but are usually not very good at pinpointing the nature of a problem. They tend to be slow and complicated to set up. Even testing a relatively simple back office application would require to set up an up to date test database, provide datasets for every possible scenario, provide a way to test sending out emails and their contents.

Software development testing is a vast topic that deserves more attention from the the ever growing industry. Automated software testing is often times disregarded as boring, time consuming or ineffective. Mainly because of lack of knowledge and skill to make it work for you and not against you.

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Recently I’ve set myself of a new journey since I’ve decided to help my friend’s business to  battle the crisis back home by creating them a new website. It’s a bit ironic but I didn’t know where to start, because at work I usually work with custom made websites which very rarely use a content management system.

The content management system I’ve chosen to use is Drupal – a widely adopted opensource content management system written in PHP. It has a vast community and enormous amounts of modules developed by other people. It took me about a week’s worth of evenings to get to know the system and launch the website. Here are the steps involved to create a Drupal website:

• Install Drupal. The installation was really easy and simple. Put it on your webserver, access the website, follow an easy guide and you’re done.
• Configure Drupal. To a new user Drupal configuration may seem hectic or chaotic at first. It may take a while to get the hang of things. Figuring out how to change website information, setting up menus, changing themes, hiding things that you don’t want to display.
• Pick a theme. It’s generally better to pick an already made theme and modify it to fit your needs. Themes are designed to integrate with Drupal nicely. They will likely look the same on all popular browsers, will be HTML standard compliant, optimized for SEO and may even be optimized usability wise. I found it very easy to pick a theme using theme garden.
• Install modules. Drupal is a modular content management system and comes with a few useful bundled modules it self. One of the strongest Drupal’s key points is that it has a vast community actively developing modules for it. If you ever need to do something on your website most likely there is a module to do it.

More about modules

Drupal has many useful modules such as Blog, Comments, RSS, Forum, Search, Localization, Content categorization. But the true power lies in modules developed by the Drupal community. A few examples:

• CCK. Content construction kit allows you to add custom fields to content nodes.
• Views. One of the most essential modules for Drupal. Alows to change website’s representation in many ways.
• Pathauto. Allows to configure how website’s URL’s are constructed. A very powerful module for anyone interested in SEO.
• Nodewords. Allows to change meta tags. Very useful to provide custom meta descriptions for content pages. Descriptions are important for SEO.
• Page Title. Another useful Drupal SEO module that allows to provide custom page titles.
• Lightbox2. Very nice plugin to display images on the website. Also supports slideshow.
• Wysiwyg. Allows to replace a simple content text editor with a rich text editor of your choice.
• Google Analytics. Adds google analytics tracking. Provides powerful per user configuration.
• Node Gallery. A nice lightweight image gallery for Drupal. Still in alpha stages but very easy to use and provides lot’s of configuration. Integrates with Lightbox2.
• Backup and Migrate. Creates scheduled website backups in case there’s an emergency.
• And many other modules…

Pros and Cons of Drupal

Drupal has many pros:

• Extremely easy to install on any webserver.
• Has a vast community developing modules and providing technical help.
• Has a huge amount of freely available themes to pick from.
• Is very well adopted and maintained which means that bugs are fixed, security patches are released and new cutting edge features are always on the horizon.
• Drupal is fast. Maybe it’s not the fastest content management system in the world but it certainly is fast. It’s very easy to set Drupal cache settings which give an immediate boost to the website.
• It’s relatively easy to set up a website that is Search Engine Optimized aka SEO.

Like everything in life Drupal has a few cons:

• For new users Drupal may be overwhelming somewhat chaotic and hectic. It’s still very easy to set up a theme and enter content. But you may have to scratch your head for a while how to add localization support to Drupal.
• Drupal is quite old and even it’s actively developed lot’s of it is written in procedural PHP. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in some way means that it’s not a top cutting edge software modelling masterpiece.
• Even though Drupal has a huge community which develops modules for it some of the modules don’t have very good documentation. More often than not these are the less used ones. It’s not Drupal’s fault but it’s still confusing and somewhat frustrating to try and figure out where and how you can configure some module you’ve just installed.

All in all I’m happy with Drupal and I think it’s an amazing project and I’m giving my thanks to the Drupal community for all the greats things they are doing.

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PyDumpy is a simple Python utility that might be helpful for developers struggling to get fast and partial database snapshots from production databases. It does it’s job by checking the database information schema to find out the approximate rows count available in each table and limits the table if needed to avoid dumping too much data as some databases may have hundreds of gigabytes of data. It then passes all the limits information it gathers to mysqldump a tool created by MySQL to do the actual dumping.

Python does not have a built in package to connect to MySQL as for example PHP does and therefore PyDumpy relies on MySQL for Python package to work. PyDumpy also relies on mysqladmin to do the actual dumping.

PyDumpy is very simple to use. For example to dump a maximum of 50 000 rows from each table type:

./pydumpy.py -H host -u user -p pass -n dbname -limit=50000

PyDumpy also allows to specify row limits and sorting preferences for each table specifically:

./pydumpy.py -H host -u user -p pass -n dbname -limit=50000 –ask-to-limit –ask-to-sort

If you find this tool useful please feel free to provide feedback by leaving a comment.

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It seems that I will continue reviewing books for Packt publishing. Spring Persistence with Hibernate is a book about a different development world. Spring web development framework and Hibernate persistence framework are both well known Java technologies. Even though I have little to do with Java I believe it has a great world wide community of software development experts. Not surprisingly lot’s of innovation comes from the Java world. I believe it is because Java developers know a lot more about proper design principles and coding practices than an average developer of let’s say PHP or .NET.

This book should cover such topics as getting a grip with hibernate, integrating hibernate with spring, spring IoC, spring AOP, transaction management, unit testing. I believe it will be a worthwhile read with high hopes that it will give me new ideas what I could implement or use in the PHP world.

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As I mentioned earlier guys from Packt publishing asked me to review a recently published book Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development. The title says it all – it’s a book about designing and developing PHP web applications using Zend framework.

This book doesn’t require the reader to be familiar with zend framework and explains all concepts in proper detail, though it will be easier to read the book if the reader is familiar with the framework and/or has experience with MVC and OOP in general. This book should be interesting to all developers who design and develop day to day web applications using MVC frameworks or not yet familiar with them as it may improve their insights towards web applications modelling, testing , optimizations and more.

Even though I am fairly familiar with the framework I found the book to be an interesting, easy read, plentiful of examples explaining the intricacies of the framework.

The first though a very important chapter teaches the concept of bootstrapping using Zend_Application and shows how to write and run a simple hello world program using controllers and views. As well it introduces the use of controller utility methods such as _getParam(), _forward(), _redirect(), action helpers, view helpers which are very valuable and a lot of developers miss them entirely. This chapter also shows the proper use of the response object which also tends to get forgotten.

The second chapter dives straight into the Front Controller pattern explaining how the framework routes, dispatches requests and responds to the client. I have never been bothered to understand the whole thing and was quite surprised to see how simple it all is. It is worth mentioning that this chapter explains in great detail how the router and various routes work and how elegantly it integrates with Zend_Config. Last the chapter covers the request object and it’s external API which provides lot’s of valuable functionality.

From the third chapter author Keith Pope starts building the main application of the entire book, the Storefront. It’s a relatively simple “real life” application that serves the purpose of being an online products catalog. This chapter shows how such an application is structured on a file system and bootstrapped and configured.  Even more the chapter covers the creation of Zend_Log and various logging writers and database profiling. Extremely valuable features that not many developers know of. If every zend framework application would start as the chapter describes I believe a lot more developers would be eager to start their IDE’s 9:00 AM straight.

Next is my personal favorite chapter – Models. Zend Framework does not have a base Model class and there’s a pretty good reason why it doesn’t. Models are specialized for a certain business task and as such it is arguably impossible to make a generic model implementation that would fit all sizes well. It then might raise a question what’s there to read about? It is my personal belief that web applications modelling has lost focus during the years by the ever growing development community. Developers got their minds focused on the next “new” thing. Let it be template engines, ORM’s, rise of active record and ruby on rails, ajax and javascript frameworks. While the majority of the models “out there” are deeply crippled. Hundreds of books were written explaining how to manage the complexity of the problem so a single chapter is a mighty challenge. I believe the author made a great choice by explaining the concept of the fat model, skinny controller, explaining the benefits composition over inheritance, data access layer separation from the business layer and my deepest respect for introducing domain model design, Martin Fowler’s book Patterns of Enterprise Application and Eric Evan’s book Domain Driven Design also known as DDD.

Next five chapters describe the implementation of the Storefront application. Each chapter highlights a major component of the framework. Use of resource autoloaders, plugins, Zend_Form, Zend_Auth, Zend_Acl. Before saying anything else it is very important to say that books rarely ever show hardcore “real life” applications as examples. Even Fowler himself likes to skip certain topics like validation in certain sections of his famous book just because they complicate things too much. This book is no exception to the rule. It’s a pretty straightforward application. There isn’t a single join to another table or a GROUP BY statement in SQL, forms implemented with Zend_Form are rather simple with little if any javascript / ajax. I found it a bit disturbing that class create other classes having both business and factory logic. One of the ugly examples was where a getPrice() method on a product model creates it’s own Taxation service which could not be mocked if that class would need to be unit tested. In most of the cases author provides injection methods for unit testing but I would argue that it does not show class dependencies explicitly which is very valuable for unit testing. Besides that I really enjoyed how the author decided to go with ACL in the domain layer. This would more often than not be implemented in the controllers making the model tightly dependent on the controllers. All in all keeping in mind that it’s a tutorial application introducing the framework I’m highly satisfied of it’s overall quality. Repeating myself. If every zend framework application would be so well written..

Another chapter worth mentioning is regarding optimizations. I was surprised to learn about such things like plugin loader cache, table gateway metadata or various Zend_Cache frontends which I have never bothered to look up. Not to mention widely known tricks using APC, stripping zend framework of all requires and setting up an optimized include path.

And last but not least again one of my favorite topics – testing. I strongly agree with Misko Hevery that test driven development is a skill. It’s definitely not easy to start or learn. One would fool himself to think otherwise.  This topic deserves many books of it’s own. I can only share from my own experience – once I started unit testing applications that I work with, I have never looked back. This chapter explains different types of testing, shows how to setup PHPUnit and provides examples of controller testing using Zend_Test. I believe this chapter deserves more attention on how to do testing with a database in mind, debugging failing controllers, avoiding complicated mocks, implementing continuous integration. But again it is worth to keep in mind that the book is about Zend Framework and not testing in general.

All in all I enjoyed reading this book. I would and will recommend it to my colleagues and friends. I hope that this hopefully not too boring review convinced you to buy the book and learn something new. Once again – big thanks to Packt Publishing for a free book. Happy reading. Over and out.

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I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review a copy of one of their books called Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development book. This book is about designing, developing and deploying feature-rich PHP MVC based web applications using Zend framework. Guys from Packt Publishing were generous to send me a hard copy of the book. I owe them a thanks.

Even though I feel fairly familiar with Zend Framework I believe this book will be a great opportunity to dwell into the darker corners of the framework. The fact the Zend Framework is now at version 1.9.5 and version 2.0 is on the horizon is a bit worrying but having had a quick glimpse at the table of contents I see that some topics of particular interest to me like chapters about model design, optimizations and testing are not the ones that change at the same pace as the framework does which makes this book even more worthwhile to read.

I believe I will have a great time reading and reviewing this book.

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This is my summary of PHPNW09 conference that I was lucky to attend. This was my first real conference and I was blown away. Talks that I enjoyed most are the keynote about the uncertainty principle, Lorna’s talk about the Joel Test and Rob Alen’s talk about project management. It was also very interesting to hear about the state of the PHP project and it’s internal development teams. Did you know that PHP has only about 100 active developers of whom only ~10 are core developers?

The event itself was perfectly organised. I don’t have a single complaint. Timings were perfect and don’t get me started about the food. It was delicious!

I also had an epic opportunity to see how Microsoft fails to demo their flowchart software which was highly amusing. Though I feel highly thankful to these guys because they were the major sponsors of the event not to mention their help on PHP windows builds.

In the evening we were invited to a SUN sponsored bar where I had an opportunity to meet and chat with really interesting people. Met a PHP star Derick Rethans, had a really great conversation with the event’s organizer Jeremy Coates and even met people from my own homeland.

All in all this was a great experience and I’m definitely coming back next year. There are also other conferences coming up in Barcelona and London which I hope to attend.

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Finally came to my senses to update the blog’s appearance and add more readability. Hopefully new content will follow. As much as I enjoy writing every time it’s a struggle to start.

To not make this post a shallow rant if you are interested in domain driven design check out Greg Young. I believe he has some very interesting insights towards domain driven design. Honestly I think he’s a software prodigy. I especially enjoyed few of his talks:

• Unshackle Your Domain
• State Transitions and best DDD practices

Enjoy.

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I’ve been using Windows as a development platform for more than three years now. Couldn’t say I find it always productive, but I also wouldn’t say that it is very troublesome.

I have been a Linux user for a few years quite a while ago. Tried debian, redhat, slackware and gentoo. Went through the pleasures of compiling kernels, trying to enable the right audio drivers, not being able to make my ATI video card work, experimenting with Wine, going through a guide to setup hibernation, trying to set the right opacity for my terminal screen. I would dare to say Linux systems were still in dark ages. It was challenging to get everything right and have all the shizzle that Windows users had by default. At some point I just couldn’t be bothered anymore and started using Windows again.. Next, Next, Finish.

And Windows is great. Up to a point. First you get all the default stuff taken care of like for example enabling a printer over network, plugging in a new USB device, setting up hardware drivers, sharing files. Setting up a development environment is as easy as downloading Xampp, an editor of your choice and you can start whipping some source code. And Cygwing helps a lot by delivering a lot of every day use tools to a Windows based platform.

Until you hit the rocks. For example a famous Xdebug PHP extension has problems working with Windows Vista and will often crash PHP processes. Extensions like ffmpeg-php are not maintained on Windows and are only available on Linux and it makes matters worse when you for some reason can’t do without them. Or for example good luck developing Drizzle on windows and building it using Cygwin, when some networking library just won’t compile. Suddenly you realize that your whole career is built on top of opensource tools which most of them were built and are maintained on Linux systems.

That is why I’ve decided to give Linux another go. I have selected Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 to carry on my experiments. Here follows my list of pros and cons of using Ubuntu as a development platform.

I’ll start with cons:

1. The latest version of PHP is 5.3.0. Ubuntu package management system offers 5.2.6. I found this a bit dissapointing. I really don’t want to be bothered to compile PHP or to search for 3rd party packages. I understand the philosophy behind this, but it still saddens me as a developer. Especially when PHP 5.3.0 builds are available on Windows as next, next, finish packages.
2. Same goes for Eclipse IDE. Not only there were no packages for Eclipse 3.5 but I had to download Eclipse myself, find out which other dependent packages are required (like Java runtime) and then follow someone’s guide to make it work by passing magic parameters to the launcher.
3. My favorite broswer Chrome is not available on Linux. There is ofcourse Chromium which still has problems with Flash and Printers.
4. Trying to set up dual screens was a bit troublesome. Ubuntu couldn’t identify the best native resolution for my external display and I had to find out how to add the resolution myself. Not to mention about setting which display is primary and what is the location of the other display compared to primary one. It’s still a complete mistery to me.
5. Configuring apache. Don’t get me started. How to start apache? Where’s the main config file? Oh it’s different from Windows! How to enable mod rewrite? How to add a virtual host? Had to learn about the a2* utilities familly to solve my problems. It’s easy when you know how they work and that they exists, but if you don’t …
6. When my laptop suspends and recovers it has problems accessing samba network shares. Still not solved.
7. What is the shortcut to go to Desktop? What is the shortcut to logout? Was hoping it would be the same as on Windows. It’s not. Though it’s not a big issue.
8. Ubuntu has no nice default screensavers (joking)

Enough with the bashing. The pros:

1. Superior speed. Starts a lot faster that Windows. Especially if compared to my Lenovo laptop which comes with a lot of preinstalled crap applications which I didn’t want in the first place.
2. Lot’s of problems solved. Audio, USB, printers, network sharing, video playing just works.
3. Amazing package management solution. Whatever you need, just search and install. And you are sure the packages are clean from viruses (hopefuly)
4. All opensource tools are available. When a package is not available it’s possible to find a 3rd party build or build it yourself. Helps a lot when you need that one magic extension.
5. A lot more easy to set up a development environment than it was before. I have never installed phpmyadmin that easy.
6. Virtualization is easier than ever. You can even have windows applications running along with Linux ones.
7. Some applications are more well built. Like Skype for example allows me to disable contact request spam notifications. Which is a huge problem on Windows nowdays.
8. Completely FREE.
9. Looks nice! Has lovely eye-candies! The Cube!

So far that’s my experience. I’ll keep using Ubuntu at work seeing how it goes. My main wish for Ubuntu is for it to be 3 times more faster than it already is. Just like Chrome.. All in all I must say Linux desktop has advanced a lot further than expected by me. I would highly recommend it for schools, universities and home users who don’t play games.

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Internet Explorer has a strange issue regarding http referers. If you would have a link and would follow that link $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] value would get populated. But if a redirect is done using javascript like this:

top.location.href = 'page.php';

The HTTP_REFERER will not get value populated. I tried to figure out why is this happening but seems it’s just the way it is. All other browsers Firefox, Chrome, Opera will set the referer properly, but IE6, IE7 and IE8 will not.

Though it is not a good practice to rely on HTTP_REFERER and you should probably not use it if you can, but nevertheless such kind of behaviour may cause strange bugs. If you happen to know why Internet Explorer behaves like this or know workaround to still have a referer value set when the browser redirects using javascript please leave a comment.

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