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.

cons, Linux, migrating, pros, windows Hide

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.

JavaScript, referer, tips, tricks Hide

Setting up virtual host on windows using apache and possibly XAMPP is easy but may cause some trouble to the inexperienced. To setup a virtual host follow these steps:

1. Locate your vhosts file. On my PC it’s: D:\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
2. Uncomment the following line: NameVirtualHost *:80
3. Add your virtual host definition:

     DocumentRoot "D:\www\myproject\"
     ServerName myproject.com
     
          Allow from all
          Options +Includes +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
          AllowOverride all
     

4. Open a file name hosts located at: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc
5. Add the following line: 127.0.0.1 myproject.com
Check that for project path correct slashes are being used. Apache seems to not understand \ slashes and instead wants /. If you try and start apache from a command line it may output something like this:

Syntax error on line 45 of D:/XamppLite/apache/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf:
DocumentRoot must be a directory

Apache, host, virtual, windows, xampp Hide

Internaly GoogleTalk uses XMPP messaging protocol. XMPP - The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. Often also called as Jabber. Since it’s an open protocol means it’s possible to develop your own clients to connect to other XMPP servers.

There are quite a few xmpp libraries that provide client functionality. The one I tried myself is XMPPHP. It’s usage is really simple. For example to send a message you would do something like this:

require_once('XMPPHP/XMPP.php');
$conn = new XMPPHP_XMPP('talk. ', 5222, '[email protected]',
'password', 'xmpphp', 'gmail.com', $printlog = false,
$loglevel = XMPPHP_Log::LEVEL_INFO);
try {
    $conn->connect();
    $conn->processUntil('session_start');
    $conn->presence();
    $conn->message('[email protected]', 'Hi!');
    $conn->disconnect();
} catch(XMPPHP_Exception $e) {
    die($e->getMessage());
}

I find this to be quite valuable. Who these days does not keep their IM live all the time? I imagine it’s like a cellphone. Meaning you can use it for many different services.

For example I developed a small application that checks if every one of my collegues is “Working on a task” in FogBugz and if not it sends an automated message to them to remind them that they should select a task they are working on. I also have a small tracker that tracks a local torrents network looking for high rated IMDB movies. I have an idea that it would be nice to integrate my tracker with GTalk so that it would inform me when a new episode of House MD is available or a new highly rated movie appears. The sky is the limit

, integration, jabber, PHP, xmpp Hide

A while ago I blogged about an XML Beautifier Tool which is able to tokenize an XML string and output it in human readable format. Strangely enough I noticed that I get quite a few pageviews from people searching for such a tool. Though this tool may be useful to a lot of people I think it is flawed and has serious issues with formatting, speed and memory consumption.

This inspired me to write a new version of XML formatter. It’s based on a SAX parser which is kind of “ugly” to implement and build around but because of it’s event based nature it’s super fast and has a very low memory footprint. The new version of the formatter shouldn’t peak higher in memory than 200 - 300kb even when the XML files start to weight over a megabyte. It also should not have any problems with indentation because it no longer tries to tokenize the XML itself and uses libxml to do the job. I also tried to make the tool documented and extendable.

It’s usage is really simple. All you have to do is initialize an object of XML_Formatter by passing an xml input stream, xml output stream and an array of options and call the format method. You might wonder why it requests input and output streams instead of a file name or a string. It does that to avoid high memory consumption. Here’s an example of how one might use XML_Formatter:

require('XMLFormatter.php');
$input = fopen("input.xml", "r");
$output = fopen("output.xml", "w+");
try {
    $formatter = new XML_Formatter($input, $output);
    $formatter->format();
    echo "Success!";
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo $e->getMessage(), "\n";
}

Nevertheless this tool is quite powerful in what it can do  (I was able to format other website’s XHTML or tidied HTML sources) it also has some problems which are not actually related to the formatter but may seem odd to the user. The PHP xml parser does not understand such entities as   or unsescaped ampersands like in ?x=1&y=1. So it’s the user’s responsibility to provide “correct” XMLs to the formatter.

Other than that I hope it will prove useful to someone. Download the latest version of the XML_Formatter.

beautifier, formatter, PHP, xml Hide

It’s been quite a while i have this sort of desire to offer my help for some opensource project i like. One of my most favorite candidates is Drizzle. I should say my knowledge of C is really poor and there’s a whole crazy world out there full of C applications and build tools.

Nevertheless i decided to atleast try and see if i would be able to build it and maybe change something, run some tests. As I am a Windows user i found out the only way for me to build Drizzle is through Cygwin. I started with installing the latest stable version of Cygwin 1.5.25-15. I must say that their installer is really nice but i would offer to add a package search feature. Might help when you want to install numerous packages.

So what’s next? I found this wiki page about building drizzle and figured first thing i should do is get Bazaar. I installed the following packages using Cygwin installer:

• bison
• bzr
• gettext
• readline
• libpcre0
• pcre
• pcre-devel
• libtoolize
• gperf
• e2fsprogs

And then went on to get the Drizzle sources:

mkdir ~/bzrwork
bzr init-repo ~/bzrwork
cd ~/bzrwork
bzr branch lp:drizzle

Now onto building. Here’s where all the fun begins.

Drizzle requires a tool named libevent which is not available through Cygwin installer and you must build it yourself. And still you can’t build libevent with the latest version of Cygwin because it lacks certain functionality. After some googling i found a patched IPV6 version of Cygwin that fixes these issues. Added the #define EAI_SYSTEM 11 to http.c and finally were able to ./configure && make && make install libevent.

You also need protobuf installed. And there’s no package for that either. Actually this protobuf is quite nice stuff. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

Now that we seem to have all the packages installed we can start building drizzle. It should be as easy as this:

cd drizzle
./config/autorun.sh
./configure
make
make install

It is not. First to be able to compile Drizzle you need to have gcc4. And even if you do, ./configure must need to know where it is. So we need to use additional flags CC and CXX. Then you need to show ./configure where libevent is installed by adding a flag -with-libevent-prefix=/usr/local or any other place you have it in. I also found a really ugly problem with warnings. I wasn’t able to compile drizzle because it stopped somwhere in gnulib complaining about some warnings that were treated as errors. Funny enough there is a sarcastic option to disable these warnings: -disable-pedantic-warnings. You also probably want to install Drizzle somwhere else than usual by using:  -prefix=/some/deploy/dir.

In the end you come up with something like this: 

./configure CC=gcc-4 CXX=g++-4 -with-libevent-prefix=/usr/local -disable-pedantic-warnings -prefix=/some/deploy/dir

That’s how far i’ve got with it. Though i’m still not able to compile it.  I get an error somwhere in mystrings library that is related to some datatype casting issues. Hopefully i’ll be able to hack through this

c++, cygwin, drizzle, MySQL Hide

Every web developer probably at some point heard something about MVC unless he or she was living in a cave. I definately have heard and read a lot about it. I won’t probably lie too much to say that most people know that MVC is the nowdays defacto design pattern for web applications. Atleast for PHP it is.

If you have ever had interest in design patterns and did some research on them you may know that design patterns may be interpreted and implemented different every time one tries to. And MVC is no exception to this rule. In my own career path I have seen many projects that claim to implement the MVC design pattern. And if it actually doesn’t - it may be called a hybrid of MVC. As ridiculous as it may be I think because of the MVC hype and everyone trying to be able to claim “yes we use MVC” it is one of the most misunderstood patterns of them all. And because of this … There are a LOT and i mean a LOT of articles and blogs and forums trying to explain MVC the way it should be.

And I myself have read a lot of versions of these blogs and articles. And to be honest I couldn’t answer to you for example what a controller should do and should not do. Well ofcourse I know it shouldn’t contain any business logic. If you would try to research that you would probaly find people saying that the controller should initiate the model, do something with the model and pass the result to the view and render it. You can even find some examples..

But to some extent I find it all synthetic and not very realistic. Most examples are of the level of Hello World program. I think the devil is in the details. If you would try to find any sample php mvc applications you probably wouldn’t find much. There are a few very simplistic sample MVC projects but I don’t find that to be an eye opener that goes deep into details.

I think the PHP community needs such an example. I believe Zend Framework is a great start for MVC. But it isn’t enough. It still doesn’t show you how a real life model or controller would look like. What each part of MVC would do and would not. I believe that one good example is better than a thousand words. I feel trully interested to try and find the “Equilibrium” of the famous MVC design pattern. Don’t you?

controllers, design, Model, mvc, Patterns, PHP, views Hide

Reading planet-php.org I found this great post about how to solve PHP session clustering in an easy way. Though it’s no silver bullet but it’s definitely worth knowing about. It uses few insantances of memcache that stores the same copies of sessions. And if one instance gets down the other keeps serving the sessions. It’s nice to have such kind of failover. Ofcourse after recovery you have to sync the instances. And your performance is going to suffer more and more if you add more memcache instances.

Though myself I feel this is a great poor man’s solution Might end up using it myself.

cluster, memcache, PHP, session Hide

Most developer teams work with version control tools like SVN or Git. Most of those teams use certain project management tools like Basecamp or Fogbugz in our case.

We came up with an idea to require developers to write down SVN revision numbers in commit messages. This helps to relate code changes to actual tasks if such a need arises. To do that we’ve created a pre commit hook that requires developers to insert internal project management tool task number to the SVN commit comment field.

A pre commit hook can be a simple bash script. In our case it was this script:

#!/bin/sh
REPOS="$1"
TXN="$2
# Make sure that the log message contains some text.
SVNLOOK=/usr/bin/svnlook
$SVNLOOK info -t "$TXN" "$REPOS" | grep -P 'FB:\s*\d{3,6}' > /dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo -e "FogBugz case number is missing in the comment.\n" 1>&2
echo -e "Please add text 'FB: CASE_NUMBER' to your comment." 1>&2
exit 1
fi
exit 0

hooks, post-commit, pre-commit, SVN Hide

I have been a user of FireBug for quite a long time and it saved me a lot of hours of pain debugging AJAX applications. When I see developers trying to figure out why their AJAX applications are not working without using FireBug it sometimes looks like an inexperienced woman trying to park a car without any luck whatsoever.

And then recently i found FirePHP while reading php|architect and it seems to me a such a nice tool it’s well worth to blog about it. If you want to debug ajax applications with FireBug you must do your own variable dumps which break the output. While FirePHP is capable of sending all this data through http headers without breaking the response of your json, xml, image responses. It also provides a very nice library for logging various stuff.

One of the things I really liked is the ability to easily view backtraces through FirePHP. Though it seems to me it can only view backtraces of your own defined local php function calls. It would be nice to see FirePHP integrated with Xdebug. Then it could do a full stack trace with all the parameters involved and even memory usage.

I also love the fact that there is a Zend_Log_Writer for Firebug. It also can send information to firebug console. But it’s not as “sweet & cute” like FirePHP.

I believe that FireBug, FirePHP, Xdebug are the must have tools for every php web developer. It saves more than a reasonable amount of time spent debugging.

debugging, firebug, firephp, PHP Hide