Tuesday, October 17. 2006
FIT for PHP
As I'm going to talk aboit FIT at the PHP Conference, I like to invite you to check out the preview of PHPFIT package. Simply download and install the PEAR package or tar archive.FIT stands for Framework for Integrated Test (See: FIT Wiki) realices acceptance tests with heavy use of HTML documents. Those documents do not just contain the usual blah-blah but hard facts. The factsare actually stored in (HTML) tables. This is where FIT - respectively PHPFIT - comes in. The FIT knows which testing class must be executed for a particular table and which function to call to calculate the results of a specific cell and the framework makes it very easy for you to implement concrete test-classes.
Also FIT simply handles HTML documents. As such they can be viewed a common browsers and even created with Word-a-like editors. Hence FIT goes far beyond what traditional unit testing offers (FIT is not meant to replace unit-tests) and may enrich your next project.
Hopefully PHPFIT will be available as official PEAR package. Unfortunately I lost my password. So I was not capable to push the proposal any further
But this will change.
Thursday, October 12. 2006
PHP programming with PEAR published
As Aaron blogged earlier today "PHP Programming with PEAR" has finally been published. It is a colaboration between Carsten Lucke, Stoyan Stefanov, Aaron Wormus and me. It takes a quite practical approach that showcases a lot of code to get the job done very quickly using various PEAR packages. Packages covered in the book range from Date and MDB2 to XML_Serializer and Services_Webservices. I contributed to chapters that introduce the reader to the XML and Webservice packages, as I contributed a lot of code to these categories.The book is available for order from Amazon.com or if you are living in Europe you might as well order it from Amazon.de
or Amazon.co.uk. Aaron also set up a wiki for the book, where you can find more information or even contribute.
Monday, October 9. 2006
PHP Design Patterns published
After nearly a year of work, my first very own book has finally been published and arrived last weekend.PHP Design Patterns is published by O'Reilly and introduces the reader to the world of patterns by providing practical examples. The patterns used in the book include simple patterns like the Singleton, Subject/Observer or Composite, but also more complex patterns like the Intercepting Filter or Event-Dispatcher patterns. If you never used PHP5 for object-oriented development, you might also finde the short introduction to PHP5's new features, including interceptors, SPL and exceptions, worth reading. All patterns covered in the book can be applied to web applications, and to stay on the practical side of development, PEAR, Propel and patTemplate are used in some examples.
So if you are capable of understanding German and interested in learning more about patterns and software design in general, feel free to buy it at Amazon.de. More information and code examples can be found at the book website or at O'Reilly's online catalog. If you're still not convinced to buy the book, it might help, that the book has been published as a hardcover so it will last longer than most other books
