Posts by: Ivo Jansch

• Creating Pluggable Applications Using Data Sourcing July 12, 2010

  The first versions of most projects are self-contained applications. They work as-is, without any connection to other applications. It often isn't until a later release that there is focus on interoperability. They build import/export functionality into their applications or add webservices that allow other applications to interact with it.

  While this is an important steps toward application interoperability, there is often an important step missing. Most interoperable applications lack one final feature that allows full seamless integration: data sourcing, or the ability to get the data it needs from elsewhere.

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• The Test Driven Challenge – Winners and Results July 8, 2010

  In May and June we ran another one of our PHP coding contest. We love to play with PHP and offer people a chance to show off their coding skills in exchange for prizes!

  This time the contest revolved around creating a class that satisfies a given unit test case.

  The test case contained tests for 7 mathematical operations. The contestants did not only have to guess the actual operation, but also provide a class that implements the operation in as few lines as possible.

  Two contests for the prize of one

  Contest 1 - Smallest solution adhering to decent coding practices

  The main contest was just that; because there was some discussion on twitter regarding the 'fewest lines as possible' we updated the contest with a rule about 'good coding practice' and we ignored coding standard issues; so a brace on the same line or on the next line was considered equally good, and we accepted both regular if constructs and the ternary operator. Some contestants removed all methods from their code and replaced it by a single __call construct, but our jury decided that that is not considered a decent coding practice.

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• The Elephpant Challenge - Winners and Results May 17, 2010

  We recently wrapped up the Ibuildings Elephpant Challenge, a contest where a PHP Elephpant traveled around the world visiting a given set of landmarks. Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.

  In this post, the winners will be announced and we will make some observations based on the contest.

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• The Bug Hunt Challenge - Winners and Results March 18, 2010

  In February and March we ran a bug hunt contest. We asked people to download a small application and tell us any issue they found. We promoted the contest at PHPBenelux and PHP UK conferences and it was open to all residents of the EU. We got a large set of responses and, besides being able to determine a winner, we were able to get some interesting analytic data from the contest entries. I will share those later in this post. But first things first...

  The Winners

  We had 3 categories:

  • Juniors (0-3 years of PHP experience)
  • Experienced developers (3-5 years) and
  • Seniors (5+ years)

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• Zend Studio formatter for Zend Framework and ATK March 18, 2010

  Zend Studio is a great IDE and we use it a lot at Ibuildings (in addition to NetBeans, PDT and Vim). One of the nice features is the code formatter that helps develop code according to agreed standards, which is useful to keep projects consistent.

  One problem we have with the current versions of Zend Studio is that its default Zend Framework formatter is not consistent with the official Zend Framework coding standard. Luckily, that can be easily fixed. Sandy Pleyte, one of our developers, created a formatting file for Zend Studio that does adhere to the formal standard. There might be a few issues here and there but we've found it to work much better than the default one in Zend Studio. Because it might be helpful to others, we're sharing the formatter file with anyone that's interested. Download the file and read on for instructions.

  • Zend Framework formatter for Zend Studio

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• PHP on Windows: The WinCache 1.0 Benchmark November 19, 2009

  Today Microsoft released the stable 1.0 version of their WinCache accelerator. Although Linux is still the most frequently used platform at Ibuildings, we have a significant and growing number of PHP on Windows deployments, and since WinCache is designed to speed up PHP applications it is an interesting product to us. The best way to put an accelerator product to the test is to benchmark it. While it's important to realise that benchmarks have their drawbacks, they are very useful to make relative comparisons, and that is exactly what we will be doing in this article.

  The benchmarks were carried out by Mark van der Velden, one of our PHP on Windows platform specialists.
  I'm going to describe his setup in a minute, but for those unfamiliar with the concept of acceleration, I'd like to point to this Wikipedia article which is a good primer on how PHP accelerators work and why you should use one.

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