Lightweight Continuous Integration for PHP

This post describes a simple, lightweight strategy for implementing Continuous Integration on PHP-based software projects. This approach happens to use Subversion for version control, PHPUnit for unit testing, and Phing to automate the processes involved, but hopefully the principles are generally applicable.

The post won't strive to be exhaustive or encyclopaedic, rather it will present a simple proof-of-concept and a brief overview of the tools that are available to PHP developers. But first some background...

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 3: Subversion Properties

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the basics of command-line Subversion, and Part 2 covered importing, branching and merging. In this third part I'd like to introduce a useful and very powerful Subversion feature, which isn't always terribly well understood by developers: that of Subversion Properties.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 2: Importing, Branching and Merging

In Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 1: The Basics, I covered many of the more common svn commands, and hopefully illustrated a typical SVN workflow.

This time around I'd like to tackle some of the commands involved in managing a project within a Subversion repository, specifically those that you'll need in order to import a project to a repository, and to branch and merge a project's codebase.

A First Look at the New WURFL API for PHP

About a month ago, the New WURFL API for PHP was officially released. While the code had been available in one form or another for some time, the official release coincided nicely with the early stages of a new project at work, so it seemed like an appropriate time to have a look at the API and see if it was something we wanted to use.

By way of a refresher, WURFL is a "Device Description Repository" - a huge open-source XML-based database of information regarding mobile handsets and their capabilities. I've discussed WURFL in the past, for example here. Prior to this release, the only practical method of querying WURFL in real time from PHP was via a library named Tera-WURFL, which I blogged about here. In fact, both WURFL and Tera-WURFL were covered in an article I wrote for php|architect magazine last year.

We've generally been very happy with Tera-WURFL, but it's always worth considering one's options, so what follows is an overview of my experiences with, and first impressions of the New WURFL API.

Unit Testing Code which Consumes SOAP Services

One of the trickiest aspects of unit testing or Test Driving an application's code is testing those parts of the system which depend on an external system, such as a database or a SOAP service.

In this post I'll outline an approach to testing a class which happens to communicate with a third-party SOAP service using PHP's built-in SoapClient class. Hopefully, the principles involved will be applicable to the more general case of testing code which relies on an external system.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 1: The Basics

I'm constantly surprised by how many experienced developers are completely unfamiliar with using version control - such as Subversion or CVS - from the command line, instead preferring to rely on graphical clients such as TortoiseSVN.

Don't get me wrong - Tortoise has its uses - but I strongly recommend that any professional developer familiarise themselves with command-line version control. It's simpler, quicker and a thousand times more powerful.

In this post I'd like to help those developers out by covering the basics of command-line Subversion usage, via the svn command. I've optimistically named the post "Part 1" in the hope that I'll manage a follow-up post one day, covering more advanced issues such as merging and resolving conflicts. For now though, let's have a look at the basics.

Adding a Doctype Declaration to a DOMDocument in PHP

I've recently been spending quite a lot of time with PHP's DOM extension, which is extremely useful for both generating and parsing XML.

In this particular case, I'm generating XML, and it's imperative that the XML markup which the code is generating should contain a Doctype declaration (DTD). It isn't hard to do that using DOM, but it did take a little bit of hunting around in the manual and online, so here's a quick overview of how to add a Doctype declaration to a DOMDocument.

PHP Closing Tags Considered Harmful

It may be obvious to some, but this is a mistake I still see being made a lot, and I think it's high time we got over it.

Stop using PHP closing tags. It really is that simple, and here's why.

Syntax Highlighting with GeSHi

On this very site, I've recently started using GeSHi, to implement the rather nifty code syntax highlighting you see in posts like this and this.

I had previously been using PHP's built in highlight_string() function, but that function is only of use for highlighting PHP code! As I often seem to need to highlight other languages, it was time to turn to GeSHi.

Since I did, a couple of people have asked about ease of use, implementation and so forth, so this post is my attempt at answering those questions.

More Mono: mod_mono and Apache

In Getting Started with Mono on Linux I mentioned that my next plan was to get Mono integrated with Apache HTTPD by way of mod_mono.

This turned out to be a bit of a wrestling match. The process itself is remarkably simple, but the poor - or at least outdated - documentation combined with a few minor teething problems made it all much harder than it could have been.