PHP

I have started to use virtual machines to develop sites rather than installing a local web server. This allows me to replicate the exact setup of the server I will be deploying to with ease. For each virtual machine I set up a shared folder which allows me to store the files locally whilst being able to run the code on the virtual machine. One thing I missed was the ability to use xdebug to debug the sites through Netbeans, so I set about trying to set up the virtual hosts to allow me to use xdebug remotely.

All that is needed was to add a xdebug.remote_connect_back clause to the xdebug.ini file found in the PHP configuration. Set this value to 1 to automatically connect back to any xdebug session that is created on the server.

I have talked before about running Selenium tests in PHPUnit but I have only recently come to properly automate things. Getting a Selenium server to start and stop in a script is relatively easy and can be done in a simple script. My original script for running a directory of PHPUnit tests was as follows. I will explain more about how this all works later on in this post.

I was at a meeting of the Manchester Web Performance Group the other day where Tom Taylor gave a talk about some of the performance testing tool he uses at Laterooms.com. He used a ruby script to set up some preferences in Firefox which then ran Selenium to open some web pages and test them with YSlow. The results of the YSlow inspection are then sent to a Show Slow server where the results can be graphed over time. I realise that I've just mentioned a whole stack of technologies there, so let me pick out the important ones:

Selenium is a remote control agent for web browsers, although it is most stable in Firefox. I have written about this tool before but it allows us to automate interaction with a website via a series of selenium scripts. These scripts can be exported into different code formats, including PHP.

Selenium is an application that allows automated testing of websites through a browser and consists of a number of different components. It allows the creation of browser tests that perform certain actions, which can then be run again at a later date. Three components are required to allow Selenium to run tests through PHP. These are as follows:

Although Drupal SimpleTest is an extremely useful module it doesn't currently support data providers, which is a shame as I use that feature quite a bit in other testing frameworks. A data provider is a mechanism that allows you to call a single test case multiple times with different arguments so that you can ensure the correct output each time. This is useful because testing a single function once is fine, but testing it with a variety of different values can otherwise mean having multiple test cases.

To mimic this functionality in Drupal SimpleTest you can create a data provider method that returns an array, which is then used to test a particular function.

For example, let's say I have the following (trivial) function in a Drupal module.

I quite often find myself with the need to pull the data from a CSV file into a system. This might be to fill out essential data like postcodes or to update a site with new content. What system I happen to be using dictates how I pull in the CSV file, but writing a quick parser is quite easy in PHP via the use of the fgetcsv() function.

Unfortunately, when using this function it is quite easy to miss something quite important and creates a quite useless piece of code. Take the following example. It appears to be fine at first glance, but the output of the code is always to run once and stop.

DocBlox is the new defacto PHP class documentation generator. It was developed as an alternative to PHPDocumentor, but it looks as though it will replace it and become the new PHPDocumentor2. As a result I thought I would put together a quick tutorial on getting started.

This post assumes that you know what PHPDoc comments are and that you have a project that you want to generate API documentation for. To get started on PHPDoc take a look at the Wikipedia page on PHPDoc.

Whereas PHPDocumentor would scan and generate all of the code in one go, DocBlox will scan the source code and generate a series of XML files based on the code it finds. It will then use these files to generate the API documentation in a number of different formats, although HTML is probably the most common.

I'm always writing bits of script to test things out and I thought that I would start making a record of them in case I need them in the future. This is a little script that will loop through the contents of a text file and validate that a bunch of 301 redirects point to the place they are meant to point to. This script assumes that the redirects are already in place on the server, but this is what I was testing. Here the format of the redirects text file.

http://www.exmaple.com/old_page http://www.exmaple.com/new_page 
http://www.exmaple.com/nother_old_page http://www.exmaple.com/another_new_page 

The script below loads in this file and loops through it using the PHP function get_headers() to test that the first URL redirects to the second. If any problems are found then the line number and the problem is reported on.

The other day I was approached by a friend (Julie Cheung) and asked if I could create some code that would display a list of last played tracks from last.fm. Julie isn't a PHP developer and so the code I gave her had to be easily understandable so that she could edit it herself if needed. The following code is what I came up with.

In any list of documents in a system it is a good idea to add some thumbnails of the document so that your users can get a quick overview of what a document looks like before downloading it. This is a good alternative to just displaying an icon of the document type.

Creating Word document icons is very simple thanks to a service called LiveDocx. LiveDocx was created as a web service to allow the easy creation of most document formats from a simple template. However, it is possible to send a normal Word document as the template file and get an image of the file in return.

The best way to use LiveDocx with PHP is to use the LiveDocx class contained within Zend Framework. You can use this outside of a Zend Framework application by including the file Zend/Service/LiveDocx/MailMerge.php at the top of your script.