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PHP in 2009 - A year in retrospective

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 4:09pm MST by Ibuildings Blog

2009 just ended, and since we've only just commenced work in 2010, there's still time to look back at 2009 and see what events have shaped the way we work with PHP and what happened in the general PHP ecosystem. PHPdeveloper.org has a nice overview from a community perspective. I'll cover some community aspects briefly as well, but will focus on the broader PHP ecosystem, including its adoption in the enterprise and industry participation.

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2009: A Year of Startups, Conferences & Open Source

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 9:47am MST by Echolibre

A lot has happened in the last 12 months. It being the first day back at work of the New Year, I wanted to write a post about some of the highlights of our first full (calendar) year in business.

Startups

The year started off well enough. We’d just finished a two month project for Mobivox, a Canadian VoIP startup. We’d been building their billing system and integrating it with their VoIP system since our first day of trading in October. The project went well, and Mobivox was later sold to Sabse Technologies, a company founded by Sabeer Bhatia one of Hotmail’s Co-Founders.

In early January we decided to shake up our business model a bit. We’d previously taken the route of web developers / PHP guns for hire. Ireland is a pretty small market, and we found that sufficiently differentiating ourselves from all the other web developers in the country to be no easy task. Given the broadness of the term itself, we decided to focus on our strengths on those that need them the most: startups. We also decided that in order to do this, we’d need some extra brains.

David had been working in the Open Source community for number of years, spending a lot of time working on PHP and PEAR. Through PEAR he met Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, and was convinced he’d make a great addition to our team. In January, I met with Helgi on Skype and we talked through the possibilities.

By St. Patrick’s Day, Helgi was working with echolibre. This would mark the end of a difficult quarter for most small Irish businesses. It seemed that many businesses were experiencing difficulty in collecting payment. This was due to a wider knock-on effect whereby everyone seemed to be waiting for invoices to be paid, and could not themselves settle creditors invoices. We too experienced difficulties in this area, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, eh?

In April, one of our clients appeared on Dragon’s Den with an app we had built for them called RentCollectors. It’s a service that allows landlords to outsource and monitor the collection of rent. RentCollectors has collected almost €2M in thirteen months, not bad for a difficult economic period.

In April, we started working on VidCollege, an app we built in a week. VidCollege was co-founded by Sean Fee, himself featured on Dragon’s Den UK for his other venture, iFoods / Look And Taste. VidCollege is an web based service that gives third level institutions the ability to provide video access to courses and materials, and offer full accreditation.

The launch of VidCollege was put on hold by Sean and his co-founders, while they decided to focus on the development of a sister web app, called VidSchool. This would be a service that creates a new market place for teachers to connect with students seeking extra tuition. This was a two month build, and we worked hard on it over the summer. We were delighted to see it being launched and showcased at TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco in September.

In May, Helgi was made a partner in our company, bringing to four the number of co-owners in the company.

In June we met with Dave McAvinue of Pixel Lab, to talk about their new venture, Tender 3D. He and his team have been supplying high-end 3D models to film, tv, design and engineering sectors over the last number of years and they spotted an opportunity for a web app that effectively created a new market place for 3D work. Tender 3D connects potential buyers with suppliers of 3D animations, models and graphics. It’s also a project management tool that ties in with the buying process. Tender 3D is supported by
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Database Testing with PHPUnit and MySQL

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 9:00am MST by Matthew Turland
I recently made a contribution to the PHPUnit project that I thought I’d take a blog post to discuss. One of the extensions bundled with PHPUnit adds support for database testing. This extension was contributed by Mike Lively and is a port of the DbUnit extension for the JUnit Java unit testing framework. If you’re interested in learning more about database unit testing, check out this presentation by Sebastian Bergmann on the subject.

One of the major components of both extensions is the data set. Database unit tests involve loading a seed data set into a database, executing code that performs an operation on that data set such as deleting a record, and then checking the state of the data set to confirm that the operation had the desired effect. DbUnit supports multiple formats for seed data sets. The PHPUnit Database extension includes support for DbUnit’s XML and flat XML formats plus CSV format as well.

If you’re using MySQL as your database, CSV has been the only format supported by both the mysqldump utility and the PHPUnit Database extension up to this point. My contribution adds support for its XML format to the extension. While this support was developed to work in the PHPUnit 3.4.x branch, it won’t be available in a stable release until 3.5.0. In the meantime, this is how you can use it now.
1. Go to the commit on Github and apply the additions and modifications included in it to your PHPUnit installation.
2. From a shell, get your XML seed data set and store it in a location accessible to your unit test cases.
```
mysqldump --xml -t -u username -p database > seed.xml
```
3. Creat a test case class that extends PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_TestCase. Implement getConnection() and getDataSet() as per the documentation where the latter will include a method call to create the data set from the XML file as shown below.
```
$dataSet = $this->createMySQLXMLDataSet('/path/to/seed.xml');
```
4. At this point, you can execute operations on the database to get it to its expected state following a test, produce an XML dump of the database in that state, and then compare that dump to the actual database contents in a test method to confirm that the two are equal.
```
$expected = $this->createMySQLXMLDataSet('/path/to/expected.xml');
$actual = new PHPUnit_Extension_Database_DataSet_QueryDataSet($this->getConnection());
// Specify a SELECT query as the 2nd parameter here to limit the data set, else the entire table is used
$actual->addTable('tablename');
$this->assertDataSetsEqual($expected, $actual);
```
That’s it! Hopefully this proves useful to someone else.
PHP Is Like A Handgun?

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 7:48am MST by Paul M. Jones

PHP is like a handgun. On its own, it is simply an inanimate tool that has no moral leaning. In the hands of a responsible citizen, it can be used to the benefit of society. But in the hands of someone who is untrained or mentally unstable, it can be used to commit horrible atrocities. Whenever [...]

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Planet PHP

PHP in 2009 - A year in retrospective

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 4:09pm MST by Ibuildings Blog

2009: A Year of Startups, Conferences & Open Source

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 9:47am MST by Echolibre

Database Testing with PHPUnit and MySQL

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 9:00am MST by Matthew Turland

PHP Is Like A Handgun?

Posted: January 4th, 2010, 7:48am MST by Paul M. Jones