In the interview, I talk about what I like about open source, the community, and how I feel it can impact businesses that use it. If you’re interested, go check it out.
Using a Mac, Textmate was probably one of the first apps I’ve ever purchased. And a great purchase it was. With the Textmate bundles you can extend the editor to be an editor for just about any language you want. It can also do cool stuff such as colorcoding diffs or converting a Markdown document to HTML. And there’s stuff like spelling and grammar checks. I use Textmate for quickly editting files, for comparing stuff, as a diff tool but also to write most of my blogposts or articles in. It’s a very clean interface, which is very nice. No clutter, it just works.
Obviously, when working in a linux virtual machine or when connected to an external server through SSH, I won’t have Textmate available to me. In those situations, I use VIM. Even though it is slightly harder to use (you have to remember all the key combinations) I’ve gotten used to it and most of the common combinations are in my head now. Just like Textmate, I like VIM because of the clean interface, there’s nothing really cluttering my interface. And when configured well, it will do code highlighting for PHP and any other language you want.
I guess the most important thing for me in the editors is their speed. You can very quickly use both editors for the quick stuff. For projects, I use an IDE, but for quick editting, these tools are awesome.
So I left this alone for a while, until this week. I decided I’d have a look and see what it’s all about. And it’s actually quite fun. Of course, so far, I’ve only earned the most common achievements but by just looking at the locked achievements, I see some new ways to do existing things, and I see some stuff I didn’t even know about. Pretty cool eh?
Installing git-achievements is just a matter of following the steps in the README. I forked the repository, cloned it to my local machine, and editted my .profile file to include my git-achievements clone into my PATH, and then alias the git-achievements executable to the git command. I have also set the achievement.upload setting, so that I now share my achievements. It’s fun, simple and doesn’t really interfere much with your normal day to day Git usage.
The first piece of software I want to describe is my IDE. The IDE is without a doubt the heart of my workday (even though my Wakoopa profile seems to disagree), as I spend a lot of my working time writing code. In the past, I’ve used many different IDEs. I started with Eclipse, moved to Zend Studio 5.0 and 5.5 and then on to 6.0 as well. After the move to the Eclipse platform with Zend Studio 6.0, my annoyances with Zend Studio started to build up and it started to block me in my work (Building workspaces anyone?) so I started looking around at other options. I moved to Netbeans shortly after but then was pointed to PHPStorm by Mike van Riel and stuck with that. I do realize that many of my earlier annoyances with Zend Studio have been fixed in recent versions but at the moment, I’m really happy with PHPStorm so I have no need to move.
So what makes PHPStorm good? I guess this will differ per developer, but to me it’s the great performance, very good code hinting and excellent code completion. PHPStorm also has excellent integration with other tools, but to be honest, most of the times I don’t use such integration, opting for manual use of those tools.
The only downside I can find for anyone is the price. PHPStorm is a commercial package (84 euro for a personal license) and with some very good free IDEs available as well I can understand that not everyone will want to switch to PHPStorm. But to be honest, I’ve happily paid the license fee after using the trial and would pay it again if I didn’t have it yet. So I’d want to recommend everyone who uses PHP on a regular basis to try the PHPStorm trial and see if it fits your needs.
The first conference I want to point you guys to is PFCongres. PFCongres is organized by Dutch PHP and web development community PFZ, in which I recently became an active member by joining their events committee. The PFCongres will take place on Saturday September 17th in The Netherlands, and I would highly recommend submitting to this conference because of it’s variety in topics, levels and delegates that you’ll find here. I’ve been a speaker in previous years so you can trust me when I say that they take care of their speakers 🙂
The second conference is one everyone knows. It is widely seen as THE PHP conference in the world. Of course, I’m talking about ZendCon. Santa Clara will again be the home of this year’s ZendCon, which has Cloud Computing, Mobile and User Experience and Exterprise and Professional PHP as the key themes. As you can see from the topics, make sure to submit some more advanced topics to the CfP. Want some tips and tricks on submitting to ZendCon? Read this post by Kevin Schroeder.
First of all, of course, I needed to install Jenkins. This article is not about installing Jenkins, so I won’t go into the details of that, but you can safely assume that I simply installed Jenkins on my Ubuntu VPS using apt-get. So this means that I now have a Jenkins user on my system, whose home directory is in /var/lib/jenkins (which is also the root of the Jenkins working directory). Next, I used the template of Jenkins-php.org to have a base template for my Jenkins projects. This saved me a lot of time in figuring out how to set up the build configuration for my project.
The only downside is that Jenkins-PHP assumes you want to use phpDocumentor for API documentation generation. I wanted to replace that with DocBlox, the API documentation generator built by my good friend Mike van Riel. One of the main advantages for me personally is the support for namespaces in DocBlox, that makes me want to use DocBlox over phpDocumentor. The projects that I am currently starting to use DocBlox for are not big projects, otherwise another reason would have been performance. DocBlox has been known to use far less memory and generate the documentation much faster than phpDocumentor. Anyway, I’m not here to sell DocBlox to you, I’m here to tell you what I did to set up DocBlox in the build process for Jenkins 🙂
So, to set up DocBlox is actually very easy. You just have to alter the build.xml template file that Jenkins-PHP has to replace phpDocumentor with DocBlox. Jenkins-PHP uses the following configuration for API documentation:
<target name="phpdoc"
description="Generate API documentation using PHPDocumentor">
<exec executable="phpdoc">
<arg line="-d ${source} -t ${basedir}/build/api" />
</exec>
</target>
Instead of that configuration, I now use:
<target name="docblox">
<exec executable="docblox">
<arg line="project:run
-d ${source}
-t ${basedir}/build/api" />
</exec>
</target>
You will have to make sure to remove the phpDocumentor antcall in the parallelTasks target, and call the docblox antcall instead:
<antcall target="docblox"/>
If you’ve done all this, then Jenkins should make sure that DocBlox documentation is generated. If you want to see the full build.xml that I’m currently using for my phpOpenNOS project, then check here.
The first conference I’ll be attending in May is PHPDay in Verona, Italy. The conference takes place on May 12 to May 14, though I won’t arriving until the 13th. The schedule looks amazing, with workshops by Fabien Potencier, Sebastian Bergmann and Paul Borgermans and talks by (amongst others) Kore Nordmann, Tobias Schlitt, Christian Schaefer, David Zuelke, Thijs Feryn, Daniel Londero, Juozas Kaziukenas, Lorenzo Alberton and many more. My talk at PHPDay will be about Git. The talk, Git for Subversion Users, is an introductory talk into the Git distributed VCS, specifically for people who already have experience with Subversion.
Then it’s time for something a little closer to home. From May 19 to May 21, it’s time for Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. This traditionally very high profile conference is the conference that I’m not speaking at this year. But just like last year, I will be hosting the unconference at DPC on the two conference days. I am very excited to be hosting the uncon again, as last year I was impressed with the quality and variety in topics that the uncon offered. If you are coming to Dutch PHP Conference (and you should!), come prepared with something to register into the uncon. More information on the uncon is available here and here.
The last conference in May for me is the International PHP Conference, which takes place from May 29 to June 1st in Berlin. It has always been fun to go to the International PHP Conference, and this year I’m even doing a workshop! On Sunday 29th, I’m doing an afternoon workshop on Git for Subversion Users. This workshop is similar to the talk I’m doing at PHPDay, but more extensive and also more practical. During this workshop, people will actually be doing some work with Git themselves. Then on Monday, I’m going to go deeper into Git with my talk, where I’ll go into rewriting history with Git, managing Git and Git workflows, reasons for (not) using services like Github and Unfuddle and such. This will be the first time I’m doing this talk and I’m quite excited to be doing it. It’s a great topic, and I hope it will be useful to people attending.
If you’re in the neighbourhood of one of these conferences, I would highly recommend coming by. I hope to see you at one of these conferences!
So I started searching around, and quickly found the removeStylesheet() method in the sfWebResponse class. This didn’t work however, when I called this in my controller. Googling around a bit more I found this mailinglist discussion where Alexander Deruwe describes exactly what I need to do! Instead of removing it programmatically in the controller, I can just do it in my module view.yml file. So my view.yml of the module now looks like this:
stylesheets: [-main, formdefault.css]
By negating a stylesheet that was added on a higher level of configuration, it is removed again from the set of stylesheets, and not added to the actual response. Thanks Alexander!
This first session is Getting Started With Symfony2, the beginner-level training as developed by Sensio. It will get you up and running with Symfony2 in two days. This is a great training for people who have never used symfony, or for people who have experience with symfony 1.*, but want to get a good headstart on Symfony2. It does assume you have a good experience with PHP5 and object oriented development with PHP5.2 and (to a certain extent) PHP5.3. The training session will take place on the two days before the Dutch PHP Conference, May 17 and 18.
To celebrate this first official Sensio training I’m doing in The Netherlands, I’ve arranged for a very special deal: Participants in this Symfony2 training will receive a free conference ticket to the Dutch PHP Conference! And with a discount, you can also purchase access to the DPC tutorial day if you wish to attend that one as well! Important to note though: This special offer is only valid at the minimum of 5 participants for the training session.
A similar session as this one is also being loosely scheduled for August or September, but no date or location has been set for this one yet. If you are interested in this one or any other symfony/Symfony2 training, please do get in touch. I can either do the training sessions on-site at your company, or if there is enough interest, schedule a classroom training like the one I’m doing in May.
But with the growth of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, it seems many people (to some extent even me) have put blogging on the backburner. And while Twitter is a great way to quickly ask questions and get solution to problems, it doesn’t persist this knowledge for later re-use. Twitter does not keep a long archive of tweets, and even if it would, figuring out the conversations is very hard.
So it would be good to save knowledge for later. So that Google can find it. So that the rest of the community can find it. Like I did yesterday with my blogpost about stalling SSH connections. Not every blogpost you write needs to be an elaborate journalistic masterpiece.
But even I have written less on my blog in the past year. I’ve always meant to write more and I have a huge list of topics I need to write about. I just need to actually do it. Chris Shiflett has now given me a good reason to actually do so. His Ideas of March initiative is a very good one, and is a good reason for me to pick up on the blogging again. So yes, I hereby pledge to start blogging more again.
Will you join us? You’re definitely in good company. Not just Chris is doing it, but also I just noticed Chris Cornutt has joined the initiative and Lorna Mitchell has also joined. And I’m sure many more will join! So will you?