Matthew Weier O'Phinney has another post full of Dojo/Zend Framework goodness today - this time he looks at making proper layer files by combining the two.
During my Dojo and ZF webinar on Wednesday, Pete Higgins of Dojo fame noted that I could do something different and better on one of my slides. This particular item had to do with how I was consuming custom Dojo build layers within my code. I contacted him afterwards to find out what he suggested, and did a little playing of my own, and discovered some more Dojo and javascript beauty in the process.
The improvement replaced the need for a manual commenting/uncommenting of an addLayer call with a bit of namespaced layers that, based on the environment, adds a dependency for the right file. One less manual process, one less thing to go wrong on deployment.
For the Eclipse PHP developers out there anxiously awaiting the next major release of the extension, you'll have to wait just a bit longer. Max Horvath mentions a few of the reasons why:
As expected by many, Eclipse PDT's next major release has been postponed. While two milestones couldn't be released, it became clearer and clearer that the release date of September 15th 2008 couldn't be met.
The new deadline has been set though - December 29th, 2008. New improvements in this release will include a type hierarchy view, new PHP explorer functionality, code templates and a code assist for dynamic variables. There was also a large change to the API that set things back a bit.
Sebastian Bergmann has posted some details about an update that's been made to the test runner for the PHPUnit (3.3) unit testing suite - an allowance for directories instead of just files on the command line.
Given a directory, the test runner will recursively scan the directory for *Test.php files, build a test suite out of the *Test classes, and run it.
PHPUnit is framework that makes writing tests for your code easy and also includes functionality to run the tests and analyze their results.
The SitePoint PHP Blog has a new post from Matthew Magain spotlighting the release of the latest version of one of the more popular PHP CMS systems out there - Drupal 6.
The Drupal development team surprised everyone when they released version 6.0 last week, ahead of schedule.
Over sixteen-hundred issues were corrected and major changes (like usability improvements, security and an expanded development framework) were introduced. They've even created a screencast to help you set up your own CMS site even faster than before.
The latest version of the CodeIgniter framework has officially been released - version 1.6:
EllisLab is proud to announce the release of CodeIgniter 1.6, our open source web application framework. The release marks a new turn in the development of the framework, and has received considerable attention from both EllisLab developers and the community.
There's lots of new features in this new release including a Database Forge class, improvements to their Active Record implementation, an extendable Model class, and the addition of extendable Helpers.
Sebastian Bergamnnspotlights one of the features of the upcoming version of PHPUnit (a unit testing software suite for PHP) - the Selenium integration. Specifically, he looks at improvements made to the SeleniumTestCase extension.
Probably the most important improvement to SeleniumTestCase is the fact that you can now run each test using a set of browsers instead of just one browser. [...] Other improvements to SeleniumTestCase include more robust error handling and better error messages.
To illustrate the "run each test in multiple browsers" feature, Sebastian includes the code for a test that runs three times, once for three different types of browsers - IE, Safari, and Firefox.
In a new post on the PHPKitchen blog, there's information about the latest release of their framework - version 0.6.2 of the Seagull Framework.
The main focus of 0.6.2 has been managing module resources so that they are completely independent from the core framework and are easy to install. To that end, everything a module might need can now be bundled in a single archive which can be unzipped in the modules directory, and Seagull will take care of everything else during the install process.
Modules can now additionally contain any template or data resources, which include HTML, CSS, js and a range of data files. With the possibility of adding additional include paths, and config or setup files on a per-module basis, it's much easier to incorporate advanced features into your projects without touching the core.
They list out some of the new core features the framework now has to offer including:
web-based installer now easier to use (Dmitri Lakachauskis)
Improved Ajax integration with Prototype with new docs added (Julien Casanova)
Added ability to add custom data to your modules, makes it easier to diverge from svn code, create file called data.custom.my.sql for this purpose
Input URL parsing strategies now configurable
Added an overlay debug block, displays system info
Along with these, there's also a few new module improvements including enhanced RSS support, allowing members to select their own theme, and an Ajax username check included.
On Richard Davey's blog today, he has his first looks at one of the more popular PHP IDEs out there (and its latest version, none the less, version 5.0) - PHPEd from NuSphere.
"PhpED 5 is now available. It's the biggest release ever in our 7-year history, with all-new tools for PHP code folding, embedded Mozilla browser, a powerful database form wizard, a completely new look and feel and so much more."
Alllrighty, I'll have me some of that! I logged in, grabbed the new version, backed-up all of my config settings, and installed with fingers crossed. Here is what I've found so far, along with the answer to the million dollar question - are the new features worth the upgrade fee?
He goes through some of the "more needed" features that a lot of developers look for - code folding, a nice, clean, easy to work with interface, and some new features to make it worth the upgrade. Of course, nothing is perfect, so there are a few recommendations he makes - versioning support (CVS and Subversion), the ability to locally stage files, and a useful search and replace.
Matt Wade has posted a quick item to APress' Inside Open Source blog today mentioning an update to an item he'd previously mentioned - issues with the Zend_Cache module.
One of my complaints was the Zend_Cache did not accept lifetimes on a per object basis, but rather the lifetime was at an application level. I just received notice in my inbox that the issue has been fixed! The change is currently in svn, and should be in the 0.80 preview release. Thanks go to Fabien for the fix.
The Zend Developer Zone has posted part seven of their series covering the development of an Ajax chat application. This time,. they're focusing on some of the final touches - usability improvements.
To start we need to make the chat messages automatically refresh at fixed intervals without requiring user input. We will also add a small message to let the user know when a background request is active. To finish up we remove the necessity of using the "Say It!" button to submit new chat messages.
They show how to make the chat window refresh at an interval (rather than manually), how to have the application tell the user it's doing something (like "loading"), and adding a keypress event to handle the user pressing the enter key to send off their message.
