The Developer Day | Staying Curious

CAT | Reviews

Mar/12

9

My top 5 QCon London 2012 talks

I was attending the conference for the first time and wanted to share my top list of talks. There might have been other good ones but I didn’t get a chance to see them therefore can’t comment on them. All of these talks will be released on InfoQ in the next 6 months for your viewing.

#1 Lock-free Algorithms for Ultimate Performance

by Martin Thompson and Michael Barker. Talk Download slides

This has to be my favourite talk. These guys know they’re hardware well. They showed how it’s possible to create lock free algorithms which run in nanoseconds if you apply some mechanical sympathy to your code.

#2 Decisions, decisions

by Dan North Talk Download slides

A really entertaining, insightful and somewhat shocking talk. Not an unusual talk by Dan North in anyway. He talks about decisions (obviously) and that each one of them is a trade-off. Sometimes we forget to weigh these trade-off’s.

#3 How GitHub Works

by Zach Holman Talk Slides will be available later.

A great talk and visually beautiful as well. Even has some singing in it! Zach is a wonderful presenter and explains how github does what it does so well. Their approach is very unusual and alien from the one we see in the corporate world yet it works so well.

#4 Developers Have a Mental Disorder

by Greg Young Talk This guy does not need slides!

A non technical talk by a very technical person. It was Greg’s comeback to the QCon stage and a great one. He delivers a speech on many of the disorders developers carry with them in their work. The best one so far being: solving problems no one has.

#5 Concurrent Programming Using The Disruptor

by Trisha Gee Talk Download slides

It would be enough to say this talk was delivered by a beautiful lady packed with a room of geeks but it deserves more praise. It’s a quite technical talk on an innovative and great piece of software or rather a framework: The Disruptor a concurrent programming framework. If you’e unfamiliar with it or even more so unfamiliar with concurrent programming you might find it interesting.

Special Mention - Scalable Internet Architectures

by Theo Schlossnagle Talk Slides will be available later.

Haven’t attended this one myself but have heard that it was great. Managed to only see a few minutes of it where the author said: “Don’t be a fucking idiot!”. This sentence alone makes a talk good.

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Jun/10

26

Expert Python Programming Book Review

Expert Python Programming BookI’ve finished reading Expert Python Programming written by Tarek Ziade. This book is written for Python developers who wish to go further in mastering Python. Expert Python Programming covers a range of topics such as generators, meta programming, naming standards, packaging, continuous integration, writing documentation, test driven development, optimizations and design patterns. Even non Python developers will find this book useful since it covers best practices which are well suited to other programming languages.

There’s a sample chapter available which covers the topic of documentation. We all know how frustrating it is to write documentation. It’s boring, often it feels pointless and it tends to get out of date. The 7 rules of technical writing presented in the book changed my mind. It’s actually one of my personal favourite chapters in the book.

The first chapter of the book is very friendly and covers installation of many Python flavours, packaging tools such as EasyInstall and setuptools, prompt customization and choices of editors.

While the first chapter is very easy going the second chapters dives deep into syntactic intricacies of Python with it’s iterators, generators, decorators and context providers. If the second chapter won’t make your head spin then the third one on class level Python best practices certainly will. Author of the book does a great job at explaining the pitfalls of multiple inheritance, inconsistent super usage, Python’s method resolution order and finally meta programming which allows to change classes’ and objects’ definitions on the fly.

The rest of the book is a lot less confusing but nonetheless rewarding. Chapter four gives some very good advice on naming standards, building API’s and tools that ease might help along the way. Chapter five explains how to create python packages, distribute and deploy them.

What I really like in every book is examples. One example can explain more than a thousand words could. The examples in the second and third chapters are very valuable and help greatly to understand the concepts explained. The book goes even further and provides a complete example of a small application called Atomisator. This example is implemented following the best practices of previous five chapters.

Chapters eight and nine will be very interesting to team leads which explain distributed version control systems such as Mercurial, continuous integration and managing software in an iterative way.

Another very important topic on Test Driven Development or TDD is presented in chapter eleven. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable test driven development is. Though even today it’s not a widely adopted practice and not a well understood one either. This book will try to convince you why you should be doing TDD and if you’re already convinced it will present you with tools that you can use to do TDD. I was very interested to find out about the available unit testing framework alternatives. Further an interesting idea on doc testing is described which while seems a little exotic may be a very efficient way to keep your documentation up to date.

Reading further there’s a great chapter on optimization which describes general principles of optimization and various profiling techniques. Measuring performance may prove difficult on different hardware such as local development machines and stage servers. I was very intrigued to find out about pystones and the general concept behind it which helps to deal with the problem described.

Together with optimization techniques, various profiler tools which you never knew of, the book describes some generic optimization solutions available. Some are well known such as the Big-O notation, some are less known such as Cyclomatic Complexity. I think this book explains the concepts behind multi threading, multi processing and caching very well. Making an informed decision whether to use threads or multi processes for your Python application may as well mean if it’s going to be successful or not.

And finally the last chapter talks of design patterns. While it’s not the most mind blowing chapter of the book it provides some very interesting details why Python doesn’t have interfaces or how certain GoF patterns can be implemented in a Python specific way.

Conclusion

Should you read this book? My answer is yes. Especially if Python earns your bread and butter. Not only you will know the syntactic intricacies of python it will introduce you to many must know concepts of software development. Even if you’re not a day to day Python developer but you do write an occasional Python script or application by all means read the book and read the first six chapters. I will go even further and recommend this book to non Python developers. Simply because it explains concepts that every developer should understand. And as an extra it is always interesting to learn new ideas and to see how things can be done differently.

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Feb/10

27

Expert Python Programming Review

Expert Python Programming BookI’ve always been interested in Python. Python is a dynamic programming language with a very clear and readable syntax, strong introspection, intuitive object orientation and so on. It’s been used in many successful projects such as Trac, Django, Mercurial, YUM. It’s used in companies such as Google or Yahoo. Python has a vast standard library allowing to solve almost any domain problem. From the early beginning Python had a design philosophy behind it which is probably one of the reasons why Python is such a successful programming language now days.

All these and other reasons make Python an interesting and valuable language to learn. I’ve chosen to review Expert Python Programming as my next book. Having used Python for personal projects such as or work related tasks such as continuous integration with BuildBot I hope it will be an interesting read that will help me to improve my understanding of Python.

For those interested Packt Publishing offers a sample chapter of the book.

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Feb/10

12

Spring Persistence with Hibernate Review

Spring persistence with hibernate Just recently I’ve finished reading Spring Persistence with Hibernate. It’s a book about two major Java technologies Hibernate and Spring. Hibernate is a powerful object/relational persistence framework and Spring is a Java application platform that includes an MVC framework. The book is primarily meant for Spring and Hibernate developers but it may also be useful to developers who are interested in object relational mapping and advanced MVC frameworks. The topics covered in the book include object relational mapping, aspect oriented programming, inversion of control, MVC. Even though these topics are advanced the book does not require the reader to understand them beforehand. All examples are written in Java and should be understandable to anyone with a solid development background.

The book is quite lengthy consisting of more than 400 pages in total. First half of the book introduces the reader to the Hibernate persistence framework. It explains how Hibernate works in general and how it is configured. The most important chapters on Hibernate cover mapping to entities and entity collections, describe the life cycle of persistent objects, cascading operations, querying and lazy loading. The other half of the book focuses on topics such as inversion of control, aspect oriented programming also known as AOP, transaction management, Spring MVC framework and testing.

Before reading the book I didn’t have any enterprise experience with Java or it’s technologies. Working as a PHP developer I appreciate the Java community and technologies made available by it. Through many years of being exposed to enterprise application development Java community has developed powerful tools which are a great resource to developers with different development backgrounds such as me. I’ve found the book to be an excellent insight into the object relational mapping world. I’ve enjoyed reading about Spring’s AOP framework which opened my eyes in a few ways how AOP could compliment OOP. Spring IoC container which is used by Spring itself is an amazing piece of software setting new standards for other dependency injection containers out in the wild.

Even though I believe the book is a worthwhile read it can seem to be too detailed at times. For example describing all available bean factories and all other lists of available bells and whistles can seem to be dull or hardly memorable. Maybe it would be better to introduce to the idea that there are multiple factories, describe few most important ones and provide directions as to where it is possible to learn about other types of factories. The book provides many examples which is a great way to grasp the concepts quickly. Provided examples are individual pieces explaining a certain concept. It may have been better to provide examples by trying to build a real life application throughout the entire book. I believe it is a fun way to learn allowing to see how real life development issues can be solved.

I believe it’s every developer’s duty to be familiar with the latest development technologies and to know when to use them. Too many applications are written using improper tools. Object relational mapping technologies are discussed frequently and not everyone is a fan of them. The fact that Hibernate is commonly used by Java developers and .NET developers proves that persistence frameworks have their place and are worthwhile to familiarize with.

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Jan/10

17

Creating websites with Drupal cons and pros

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.
  • 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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Dec/09

9

Spring Persistence with Hibernate

Spring persistence with hibernateIt 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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Zend Framework 1.8 book 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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Zend Framework 1.8 bookI 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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