Developer Tutorials Blog: Why you should be using YAML for config
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The Developer Tutorials blog has a new post mentioning the use of YAML structure for creating configuration files in your application.   YAML, or YAML Ain't Markup Language, is a "human friendly data serialization standard". It's essentially a very basic format for storing data, and uses far less syntax than standard PHP. [...] It's almost like English; it's as basic as you want. Of course, that's not to say it doesnÃ¢ÂÂt support complex structures - this example demonstrates the power of the format.   He also points out the spyc extension that makes working with the files in PHP a breeze.
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In his travels as a PHP developer, Jamie Wong has gathered some helpful debugging tips that are shared in this latest post to his blog.   Here are some bugfixing rules and tips Iâve learned working all these years with PHP. I emphasize mostly on fixing bugs than preventing them, which is another subject worth of its own article. Iâve moved to Rails, but I wanted to finish this post as a farewell and thanks to every article and documentation that was useful to me. Hope this is useful to you too.   Topics covered include:  Assume nothing Turn Error Reporting to show all errors Read the error message Understand the bug "Scooby-Bug, where are you?" Get as much information as possible  Each has some explanation below it and, in some places, a bit of code to clarify the point.
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Although frankly I really didn't feel the need to read the entire thread, I can tell you that the posting to the PHP 3 mailing list is related to the Smarty Templating Engine back in the day. In fact, I believe this was the original spec Andrei proposed before Smarty even existed. Although I don't remember the exact e-mail, this posting reminded me that there was a point in time I thought exactly this way... quoting myself:
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Mike Naberezny has posted about the latest release he's made - a 1.0 released too - of the Horde/Yaml library for working with YAML files/information inside of PHP.   This is the package's first stable release. Chuck Hagenbuch started the library as an adaptation of Spyc around six months ago. Since then, he and I have been quietly using and improving it. Along the way, we fixed many issues, added support for pecl/syck, and wrote a test suite with PHPUnit.   You can find the latest download of the package over on the Horde PEAR channel and you can find out more about the YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) spec over on the Yaml.org website.
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Jared White has released the latest Developer Preview of his application framework for PHP 5 - Willowgarden DP2.   I'm so pleased to announce that Developer Preview 2 is ready. This is where the project is really starting to solidify and settle into a cohesive whole that can be used for hands-on development. I've been working on several Web site and applications using the DP2 codebase, and it has made my life as a PHP developer so much more fun than the bad old days of cobbling together scripts nearly from scratch.   A new wiki for the project has also been launched with content already being added - a User Guide and areas for tutorials and howtos. Jared also puts a call out to PHP 5 developers out there looking for something to get involved with to take a good look at the Willowgarden project and send him an email ("remove everything after jared before the @ sign").
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In response to a previous article from the Symfony blog, Paul Jones has pulled together some thoughts to some of the comments they made.   As the author of a relatively popular benchmarking article, I feel compelled to respond to this bit of misguided analysis from the Symfony camp about benchmarks.   Paul talks about the "straw-man arguments" presented in the Symfony article, including some references to Paul's previous benchmarks. He's even broken it down into a point-by-point response to make each point clear.
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The symfony project asks the community on their blog what sorts of projects they're using the framework for:    We are trying to get a better view of the use of symfony, and of what people think are its strongest and weakest points.   If you have five minutes to spare, we'd love to have your feedback on the matter. There is a poll thread in the forum where you can express your opinion.    If you're a user of the symfony framework, be sure to head over to the post and grab the list of questions they'd like to hear about. Tons of developers have already responded, so add your answers today!
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A lot of things are happening in the Ruby world right now, and I wanted to highlight a few of them here:  At FOSCon this year, Amy Hoy has asked people to start writing more instructive articles about parts of Ruby or Rails so that newbies would have more "fine manuals" to read.  I've tried to do my part with two short series (so far), one on RubyInline and the other on ruby-prof.  The RubyInline articles are: RubyInline, making making things faster easier, and RubyInline: Going a bit Further.  The ruby-prof articles are:  Profile and ruby-prof, ruby-prof and call graphs, and Profile and ruby-prof:  getting specific. Another blog related event is the current blogging contest being run by Ruby Inside.  They're offering $100 US to their favorite informativ, ruby related blog post this week (Aug 14-20).  There have been a lot of interesting entries so far.  It would be pretty cool to see more contests like this crop up. We're getting close to a couple of Ruby conferences, I wrote about RubyConf*MI in my last post.  RailsConfEurope is also comingu up quickly.  If you're reasonable close to either of these, you should consider registering. O'Reilly has released the Ruby Cookbook.  It's a massive tome, chock-full of Ruby goodness.  I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but what I've read looks good, and I'm hearing good things from folks I trust.  Looks like another good book to add to your Ruby bookshelf. APress is getting ready to jump into Ruby and Rails in a big way.  They've got ten titles listed on their 'Rails Roadmap', and have lined up some well known Ruby names to write for them.  They're still looking for some Ruby authors according to this blog post. No Starch Press is also starting to make some Ruby related noises.  I can't be specific yet, but there's a good looking Ruby book on its way into their catalog.  If the book is half as good as what they've talked to me about, it's going to be another 'must have'. The Pragmatic Programmers also look like they're set to add some more titles to their Facets of Ruby line.  James Gray has said that he's writing a book for them that should be announced soon, Ezra Zygmuntowicz also has a book on the way, and I've recently signed a contract with them for a Ruby related book.  It looks like the PragProgs aren't going to be content to sit on their Ruby laurels. Finally, Developerdotstar is close to announcing a couple of books about programming.  Neither of these is Ruby specific, but from everything I've heard I think they're going to be solid, language independant books about becoming a better programmer.  Just the kind of thing you'd expect from these guys.
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Mark your calendar: November 22. That's the day, barring something unforseen, that OPML 2.0 will move from a draft to a final frozen spec. If you plan to use OPML 2.0, or you're already using it, please set aside a few hours to carefully review the spec, between now and the end of September, or at the latest early October, to be sure it makes sense to you.  We're doing this very slowly and carefully so people will believe in the quality of this spec. If you don't think it's a good spec, now is the time to say why. Speak now or forever hold your peace. You may not like the format, that's not the issue now -- it's the spec we're trying to finalize.  Thanks for your help!
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In this new post to his blog, Tobias Schlitt shares some VIM tips with the PHP community, specifically about PHP Documentor integration functionality. He's gone back and documented the functionality now to make it that much easier to use.   Because I had a talk about how to use VIM in respect to PHP source code editing, I took the time during the week, to write some extensive documentation for PDV, the PHP Documentor plugin for VIM.   He's also documented the VIM file type plugin as well, and both are available through his SVN of PDV. There's also to updates mentioned - one about splitting up the .vimrc and file type plugin and added the repository to the official SVNServe list making it easy to check out.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:The Bakery: Six New Articles/Tutorials PostedEvert Pot's Blog: PHP: Arrays vs. ObjectsDevArticles: Learning AJAXInternet Super Hero: PHP: mysqli_fetch_all()David Coallier's Blog: PHP Namespaces (Part 1: Basic usage & gotchas)I/O Reader: 15 Cool Things & 12 Things to Dislike About PHPProPHP Podcast: Newscast - August 16, 2007PHPBuilder.com: Dynamic XML with PHPSite News: Popular Posts for the Week of 08.17.2007PRADO Watch Blog: PRADO Watch: Interview With Timani Tunduwani - Why I Moved From CakePHP to PRADO
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Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.   There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.   He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.   He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.
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Many useful programs take arguments and configuration options. It's easy to add one or two, but as your program grows, the difficulty of allowing configuration concisely and intelligently also grows. Jon Allen demonstrates how to unify argument and configuration processing in a way that lets you write good code and your users get on with their work.
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As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.    He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".   Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.   Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).
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Krystian Hoffman has posted to his blog today a few reasons (10 to be exact) that he likes and uses PHP. Fortunately, most of them are some of the best reasons for anyone to use the language.   ended up with ten points on why I use PHP and I guess this would be a good post here on my blog, as it seems people like lists in general and maybe I could get some people out there that aren't really sure about whether PHP is good or bad, to get some insight at least.  Here's some of his list:   The PHP Community The (language's) Performance Its Portability It has strong Object-oriented support   Other things got a mention as well - the low learning curve, low cost, included libraries - but the above few seemed the strongest.
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Greg Beaver, PEAR guru extraordinaire, has added a new post to his blog encouraging the use of the PEAR installer to help manage and deploy your website to a production server.   One of the most common tasks that we experience as web developers is synchronizing a development web server with a live site. There are many solutions that have been tried before. [...] However, every single method (described above) has the potential for immediate and catastrophic failure, even with a backup.   He suggests the use of the PEAR installer functionality along with version control to easily deploy a site, allowing for things file dependencies and versioning. So, if files are handled through that package, how is the database managed? Through another PEAR-related feature - the post-install database initialization the Installer makes possible. Check out Greg's post for the full details on how to get you and your site started.