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Giorgio Sironi01/11/11
4526 views
0 replies

Practical PHP Testing Patterns: Lazy Setup

Shared Fixtures are useful to save time, and speed up execution: a resource is shared between many tests and is not recreated from scratch everytime. The typical example is always a database connection, which sometimes has an heavy bootstrap.

Giorgio Sironi01/11/11
4430 views
1 replies

Why Twitter is not an RSS replacement

We are all familiar with feed aggregators like Google Reader, or Netvibes, or Pageflakes or NewsFire. These applications, hosted or native to the operating system, regularly check the updates from blogs RSS or Atom feeds. In some cases, like with the...

Giorgio Sironi01/10/11
5803 views
0 replies

Practical PHP Testing Patterns: Prebuilt Fixture

The goal we want to tackle today is: how to prepare Shared Fixture before the first test runs? There are of course other approaches, like lazy creation, but simply having it always available simplifies the rest of the test suite. For instance, the tests can...

Mitch Pronschinske01/06/11
6180 views
0 replies

Drupal 7 At Your Service!

A large faction of web developers have waited eagerly for many months while the the final bugs were fixed for the shiny new features in Drupal 7. Well today, the wait is over. Drupal 7 is here, and we're going to show you what you're getting when you...

Steven Lott01/06/11
18229 views
5 replies

Java PHP Python -- Which is "Faster In General"?

Sigh. What a difficult question. There are numerous incarnations on StackOverflow. All nearly unanswerable. The worst part is questions where they add the "in general" qualifier. Which is "faster in general" is essentially...

Giorgio Sironi01/05/11
3915 views
0 replies

Practical PHP Testing Patterns: Implicit Setup

Sometimes a fixture is well-defined, and can be extracted from Test Methods without loss of clarity. Maybe it's only an irrelevant part of all the fixtures we'll need in a test. Or it is a System Under Test which is a leaf in the object graph, and its...

Giorgio Sironi01/04/11
7914 views
2 replies

These are not the buzzwords you're looking for

Sometimes you come across expressons which are commonly used in the Agile community, but which lack a formal or straightforward definition.I have to say that in the Agile and eXtreme Programming community the scenario is often much better: Test-Driven...

Mitch Pronschinske01/03/11
5408 views
0 replies

Video: CodeIgniter Tutorial

This is a very basic overview of the CodeIgniter framework for PHP. This might be a bit jumbled...I didn't plan it out. Let me know if you want me to upload any more. This screencast by Jack Tannager, along with a ton of other great tutorials,...

Ted Neward01/03/11
22436 views
0 replies

Tech Predictions, 2011 Edition

Long-time readers of this blog know what’s coming next: it’s time for Ted to prognosticate on what the coming year of tech will bring us. But I believe strongly in accountability, even in my offered-up-for-free predictions, so one of the traditions of...

Rob Allen01/03/11
3088 views
0 replies

Displaying an RSS feed in WordPress

My wife decided that she wanted to display a list of her latest AudioBoos in the sidebar of her blog. She looked at the AudioBoo JavaScript widget but decided it wasn't subtle enough and so she enlisted me to solve her problem. It turns out that AudioBoo...

Giorgio Sironi01/03/11
4758 views
0 replies

Practical PHP Testing Patterns: Creation Method

In our journey into fixture creation strategies, we are transitioning from a simple Inline Setup to a Delegated Setup: from a bunch of new operators to external Creation Methods. Fixture setup is the process of creating objects for test purposes, being them...

Mitch Pronschinske12/30/10
19481 views
0 replies

Installing Joomla on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Azure

Installing Joomla on on of Microsoft's SQL-based back-ends can be very simple with the setup utilities they provide. The process is shown in detail by the tutorials on hooduku's channel on YouTube. Here is a pair of videos that can get you set up quick...

Cal Evans12/29/10
3628 views
0 replies

Book Report: You Want to Do What with PHP?

I hate getting books for review that are written by friends of mine. I have a strict policy that I won’t review a book I don’t like. This leads to awkward conversations if, after skimming the book, I decide not to review it. Thankfully, that isn’t...

Giorgio Sironi12/29/10
4736 views
0 replies

Practical PHP Testing Patterns: Delegated Setup

Inline Setup is pretty simple to understand: you just create the fixture when you need them, in the Test Method that needs them. But sometimes the process gets too long, or unreadable, or full of duplicated code between tests. So you have to factor out that...

Giorgio Sironi12/28/10
6002 views
2 replies