Zend Developer Zone: Designing Klingon Warships Using Behaviour Driven Development
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The Zend Developer Zone has another new tutorial from Padraic Brady talking about testing your applications (i.e. unit tests). In this new article, he expands on his previous one and dives a bit deeper into the behaviour-driven development process.   In this article, I introduce a TDD related practice called Behaviour-Driven Development which has been gathering attention for over a year and gaining converts (like me!).   He briefly covers what BDD is and how it can be used to solidify code against issues that might come up down the road (and how it compares to test-driven development). Some sample code/tests are included to give you a better idea of how it all fits together - a set of scenarios for any given "story". True to the title, Padraic writes his tests around the construction of a Klingon Bird of Prey ship.
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In filtering through the mass of projects that he's collected around him, Padraic Brady has decided to cut one loose - the Zend Framework package he'd been developing to introduce YAML parsing and functionality to the framework.   I've been going through all those open source projects and cutting the dead weight. [...] One of the victims of this review has been Zend_Yaml. Earlier this morning I found an odd comment on the Zend_Translate_Yaml proposal by Thomas Weidner that he was erasing his proposal on the basis that there had been no progress on Zend_Yaml.   He's removed the proposal from the Zend Framework proposal pages after receiving an email noting that the package would not comply fully to the YAML 1.1 specification and couldn't be included. With the introduction of the Syck extension into PECL, it could support it but Padraic opted to just tell the ZF group about this functionality rather than working on the build himself.
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Andrew Johnstone has posted some of his experience he's had developing with one of Zend's latest offerings - Zend Neon. Neon is the Zend project to bring robust PHP development functionality to the community on top of the Eclipse platform.   I've been using Zend Studio for Eclipse (beta) for several weeks in a rewrite of a framework and numerous sites at work and overall I really like the IDE. Its got some great features and being based on the eclipse project makes it really extensible and customizable.   He happy overall with the IDE but has come across some bugs in his time developing in it (nine of them) with issues ranging from the SVN functionality and samba out to small syntax sorts of things (like the auto-formatting).
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In this new post to the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans talks about his meetup with Danny Kolke and Ahmad Baitalmal of Etelos where they recorded a great PHP-related conversation.   On the podcast we talked about Zend, PHP5 and Etelosâ EASE programming language. For those of you not familiar with Etelos, here is a quick blurb from their web site.   Cal gave his impression of what Etelos is creating and an opinion on the quality, stating that Etelos/EASE looks phenomenal. Especially of note is Cal's comments about not needing a computer science degree to get a website up and running with a database backend.
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Sebastian Bergmann posts about the tutorial he (and fellow developers Matthew O'Phinney and Mike Naberenzy) will be presenting at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo - a look at PHP Development Best Practices and Unit Testing.   From the official description:   PHP development by teams of developers introduces challenges beyond the mere coding of great algorithms. Agreements are needed about tools, specifications, architecture, design patterns, coding standards, testing, documentation, source code control, staging and deployment. This tutorial session aims to introduce developers to a set of best practices that will help them deliver applications fast and move them to deployment with confidence.   You can check out some of the other tutorials for the upcoming conference as scheduled here.
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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In a new post today, Padraic Brady asks the community for any kind of input as to what they've seen for behaviour-driven development in PHP:   Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is an evolution of Test-Driven Development (TDD) which pushes the focus away from the concept of testing to one of specifying behaviours in a form more easily understood.   In asking about any of the tools that might happen to be out there, he also gives an example (from a Ruby perspective) on how the behaviour-driven method is put into practice. The code describes the behaviour by what "it should" do and evaluates based on that.
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According to this quick post on the Zend Developer Zone today, the Zend Framework project has a new leader to take the place of Jayson Maynard when he left.    After a difficult search, we have found the seasoned veteran we need to track, manage, and coordinate our ever growing group of contributors and Zend liaisons, and our lengthy list of components and sub-projects on our published roadmap for ZF 1.0, and beyond.   Fortunately, we were introduced to Bill Karwin. Bill is up to this challenge, having performed similar project organization duties at several companies, including Borland and Lutris Technologies. He is also committed to the open-source community, and is a member of the MySQL Guild.    Cal has some other nice things to say about Bill, including a compliment on Bill's grasp on the Zend Framework project.
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Matt Cashner provides a high-level introduction to POE, the Perl Object Environment, examining the concepts that POE brings to bear when designing long-running Perl applications.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest podcast in their PHP Abstract series. This time they spotlight a project from Jan Lehnardt, CouchDB.   Our special guest today is Jan Lehnardt. Jan is an Open Source software consultant specialized on internet technologies. He has years of experience building both small and large scale database applications. He has a keen eye for user experience and typography. He co-founded Freisatz, a company bringing typographic bliss to everyone. Jan also contributes to several Open Source projects.   The three usual options are there for your listening pleasure - right on the page, subscribe to the feed or grab the mp3 directly.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest podcast in its PHP Abstract series. This time it's hosted by Paul Jones, developer of the Solar framework project, who talks gives an overview of the project and its place in the PHP community.   Today's special guest is Paul M. Jones. Paul is an internationally-recognized expert PHP developer and technical consultant living in Memphis, TN. On his blog, he writes mostly about his software projects, but also touches on management, business, politics, and culture.   You can grab the show directly or subscribe to the feed to get this and more great shows from the podcast (with topics covered like PHP & Java, CodeIgniter, Security and much more)
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode of the PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Cal Evans himself covering ways you can attract quality talent to your organization.   Along the way I've picked up a few truths, mainly stolen from people like Joel Spolsky. Some of these ideas can be found in an article I wrote a while ago titled "Nerd Herding", a link to which can be found in the show notes. Recently, I've had many people ask me variations of the same question, "How do I find talented programmers?" So today, I'm going to share with you some of the things I've learned.   The latest show is available for direct download or, as always, you can subscribe to their feed to get this and lots of other great shows.
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On the Zend Developer Zone, there's a new post pointing to the second part of their look at the Manning Publishing book "PHP in Action".   If you've been anxiously awaiting part two of this series then your wait is over. Here's a short introduction to the section part of this series written by the author of the book, Dagfinn Reiersol. I had the privilege of meeting Dagfinn at phpuk last week. Below the introduction is the link I know youâve been waiting for.   The new PDF they link to focus on two different patterns - the Decorator (a wrapper class) pattern and the Null Object (an object that works like the others but does nothing behind the scenes) pattern.
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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Nick Halstead has started up another programming competition today - this time it's a bit broader in scope and doesn't focus so much on just PHP.   I have a couple of licenses for Zend Studio Professional that I have been holding back to give away for a competition. So after writing yesterdays programming 'tips' I thought perhaps I should get my readers to submit their own tips and then give away one copy for what I think is the best 'tip' and then I will also hold a online vote for the second copy.   The basic process is to submit your favorite tip to Nick and he'll pick his favorite of the day. This happens each day and at the end of the week, there'll be a drawing for the licenses from each day's top tips.   Submit your entries via his contact form.
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Killing two birds with one stone Hands on Iâve been fascinated by cross-platform programming for more years than I care to remember, and my interest has recently been sharpened by the acquisition of a number of Apple Macs â both Intel and PPC (PowerPC). This article focuses primarily on some technical aspects of Qt, Trolltechâs cross-platform C++ toolkit which, as you may know, is the architectural core behind the KDE desktop on Linux. At the end, I show how easy it is to create a simple application without writing a line of code.â¦
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As posted over on the Zend Developer Zone, Marc Gear has posted a new review over on his blog of the guide that php|architect magazine has created to help prepare developers for Zend's PHP 5 Certification.   I brought the book to make sure that my knowledge was sufficient to take the test [...] however, having read most of the book last night, I think it would be a good addition to my bookshelf, especially to lend to other developers on my team.   He briefly covers the topics in the book (including basics, functions, stream, security, etc) and a general impression of how the book presented them overall. His opinion of the resource is definitely a good one, summed up well by the above comments.   His only complaint was a small one (and not even about the content of the book) - that the spine was printed upside down so it looks a bit odd on the shelf.