Category Archives: Tutorial

• Speedy Sites: Building the Stack May 8, 2013

  In the previous post about speedy sites, we discussed the static assets of a site, and how providing them to users can be optimised through selective use of aggregation and HTML. Let’s move away from considering what to give the user, and instead look at how we provide it to them: the stack.

  How do we define "the stack"? For the purposes of this article, the stack represents everything between the user and the PHP generating the content they see. As with all performance tuning work, you will need to have a sandbox to try out these techniques, and see what works for you. Often this will be a mixture of several technologies, which I affectionately refer to as the "Speed Sandwich", with each layer doing a specific role to improve the overall performance of the user experience, while aiming to limit complexity to a few distinct components. We want to give the end user the page they requested as fast as possible. So how can we achieve this? (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Functionally Testing Your Application Using Mink May 2, 2013

  Automated testing is big news these days. There's hardly a PHP conference happening without a talk on testing automation or derivative methodologies. TDD (Test-Driven Development) and BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) are all around us. So why should you care about all this? Well, there are many excellent reasons to do automated testing, including assuring application quality and inspiring developer confidence in a system. If you are a business person, you're most likely to care about the quality; if you're a developer then the confidence aspect is more important. The more complex an application becomes, the harder it is to be sure that each new feature or bug fix won't break the system, and that decreases your overall confidence in your work as developer. That's exactly the reason why you need automated testing - to be confident that you're not breaking important parts of an application.

  Now you're convinced that automated testing is important, but isn't unit testing enough? Unit tests are cheap, fast and small. Why might you want to expand into using a technique such as functional testing? Once again the answer is confidence. The more complicated an application becomes, the more complicated the interactions between separate parts of the application become. Just as you can't be confident your car is roadworthy by manually turning each of its wheels independently, you can't be sure that an entire application is working by testing each of its units independently. You need functional testing for complex applications - and today, that's every application. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Pair Programming, TDD and Other Impractical Things April 22, 2013

  "Why should we write our tests first? Isn't that going to slow my development?"
  "What? Assigning a single task to 2 developers? How is that efficient? What a waste of resources!"
  "Look, in the perfect world your advice is great, but I have a project to finish here."

  In this talk Marcello explores efficiency in contrast to effectiveness. He looks into how practices, traditionally accepted as efficient, sometimes turn out to be less effective than a few "impractical" things he has come across.

  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Speedy Sites and Why You Need Them March 27, 2013

  Anyone who went to the PHP Conference 2013 in London hopefully saw Ilia Alshanetsky’s talk on analysing bottlenecks in your application, which had some great techniques for how to test the performance of your site. This article assumes you've taken a look at his slides or are already familiar with Google Chrome’s Developer Tools, so you can refer to the Network tab to gain insight into what is happening to your users. Other tools such as YSlow and Pingdom will also help in gathering data, though they don’t tell the full story.

  What happens though if you complete your analysis and you do have a bottleneck, and it’s going to take a while to fix? Or you have some sluggish legacy code that is a huge lump of technical debt? Fixing sites is hard, and as engineers, we are frequently attracted to the most difficult technical challenges. We want to fix the problem, not mask it. That said, there are many ways we can deal with performance without actually fixing the problem, while keeping users even happier. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• New Relic for PHP: Web Application Performance Monitoring March 14, 2013

  The performance of a web application plays a critical role in how an application is perceived by its users. It is important to measure it, identify the causes if it changes and react swiftly to any unexpected changes. This article describes an industry leading tool, New Relic, and how it can be used to monitor and improve your site performance.

  Setting up a good web application monitoring system can be tiresome, but it's well worth it. Without the monitoring tools the only thing we could tell is if our site is performing as expected or not. In order to improve the performance we have to be able to identify the worse performing user actions and profile them independently to pinpoint the cause. New Relic achieves that and more in just a few screens, all without manually adding any profiling code to your application.

  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Manipulating HTTP with Charles Proxy March 5, 2013

  Charles Proxy is exactly what its name implies; a proxy. This proxy is special however, as it is specifically aimed at giving functionality that developers will need. It allows you to view, change and replay the traffic that passes through, and can handle SSL. Charles isn't free, but at $50 (at the time of writing) for a license, it reaps returns from day one. This article will show you how to start using Charles and covers techniques that will help you work with your web and mobile applications; basically anything that works over HTTP. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Custom Zend Framework Form Elements July 31, 2012

  Creating forms in Zend Framework (ZF) is easy, but creating and managing complex forms can get messy! Using config files is perfectly good if you use standard Zend Form elements; it is quick and easy to setup a form in a few minutes however you will have limited control over how the form is rendered. If you want to display your own custom form element correctly in Zend Framework then some configuration is needed in order to achieve this with a config file. An alternative approach is to create some custom objects that extend the base Zend Form object - you can still use the config but also add in your own custom Zend Form elements.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Do You Need A Multiregion Website Deployment? July 9, 2012

  In this age of cloud computing, it has become far easier to choose, or even move, the geographical location of your web server. It has also brought high-availability solutions such as hosting simultaneously in multiple locations into the reach of a even very modest applications. But where is the best place to host your site? And are the improvements worth the effort of distributing your servers across the world?

  Armed with a few simple tools, you can come a long way to answering these questions fairly quickly. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Agile Smells April 2, 2012

  We all know that switching to Agile will solve all our problems. We can almost guarantee that adopting agile will be rewarded by a million per cent increase in productivity and ensure that we never miss a deadline ever again. It's all so fresh and buzzwordy - how can there be a downside?

  Unfortunately, as with everything, this is not quite the case. Agile when utilised properly can have a positive effect on productivity, it can go some way to helping make deadlines easier to hit. But when used badly, it can have completely the opposite effect.

  There are a number of problems, or 'smells', we have identified in the Agile process that could be having a negative impact on all your good intentions. Here we outline some of the smells you may find in various elements of the agile process and give you some tips on how to spot and eradicate them. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• MySQL Alternatives to MySQL March 15, 2012

  Have you been using MySQL for your web applications since your first foray into website development? Perhaps you now run, or are thinking about running, your own server and you will set up MySQL because that is what you have always used.

  Did you know there are alternatives? A NoSQL database is one of them, and it has its use cases, but that will need some consideration, and almost certainly some rewriting of your application, to take advantage of. Instead, let me talk to you about some databases that speak your applications language, namely MySQL's client server protocol. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Are You Making the Most of MySQL? January 5, 2012

  Here at Ibuildings, we encourage our developers to continue to develop themselves professionally and to gain relevant certifications. Most have the Zend PHP Certification (ZCE) and some have the Zend Framework Certification (ZFCE) and/or the MySQL Certifications. I have recently been working to gain the MySQL Certified Developer qualification which is taken as two exams; each one is an hour and a half and covering a wide range of topics relevant to developing applications with MySQL (there is a separate qualification for administrators). I found some of the course material pretty easy as I have used it repeatedly over the years but there was plenty that was fairly new to me; some features that I haven’t been using and haven't noticed other PHP developers using or talking about very much. Having learned more about them, I thought they were worth highlighting. I’ve enjoyed finding out about these features and look forward to using some of these elements such as subqueries, views and stored procedures effectively in future projects. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Architecture Patterns: Domain Model and Friends October 31, 2011

  Imagine a workshop of a racing team. The very first thing you will notice is that everything has its own place; spanners hanging on walls sorted by size, other tools placed in drawers, divided by their purpose, bolts and nuts placed in separate dividers and once again sorted by size. Everything is labeled, clean and in order. Now imagine how would it be to work in such an environment, where every single item has its specific place. I reckon that after the first few days, you would be able to point to where everything is with your eyes closed! Such a degree of segregation and organisation makes our lives much easier and it's a pleasure to work with.

  

  Architectural and design patterns help software architects to break systems in to smaller, more maintainable sections organised by their functionality and usage. The biggest benefit of patterns is that someone has already solved problems we may face and by utilising patterns such as Transactional Script, Domain Model or Data Mapper in your application it gives us, as developers, some good guidelines on how it should be designed. (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Beyond TDD with PHPSpec August 3, 2011

  This is the second part of a series about Outside-in Behaviour Driven Development in PHP. The first part introduces outside-in development, and how to execute scenarios with Behat. Read this to catch up with the tools and the example we've used so far, then come back to find out how PHPSpec fits into this picture.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Behaviour Driven Development in PHP With Behat July 27, 2011

  Outside-in Development is an agile development methodology that places the intention and goals of the stakeholders at the centre of the process. This is achieved by having human-readable user stories and scenarios being invoked as scripts that feed back on the progress, continuously leading the development towards the stakeholders’ goal. Developers will start from this executable specification, and write the high level controllers that will provide the functionality. They then go into what they need to provide that functionality by specifying how their library class should work. By the time all classes’ specifications are met, all scenarios will also be fulfilled and the cycle is complete.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• How To Create User Stories July 19, 2011

  Gathering requirements for software development is a vital communication process. There are multiple parties involved and a project relies on customers, users, domain experts, and many others, each with their own view of how the system should function. We will look at how user stories can help us to gather the information we need for a successful project.

  For a project to succeed, there needs to be a process in place that gets information as early and often as possible, where decision making happens based on information available at any point in time. Agile methodologies favour face-to-face communication and use user stories to collect customer requirements and to respond faster to constantly changing requirements. Use of user stories eliminates a need of extensive upfront requirements gathering and writing comprehensive documentation, allowing to us spread the decision making across the duration of the project.

  What is a User Story?

  In short, a user story is a chunk of functionality that is valuable to a user or a customer of the software. In my opinion the most comprehensive definition of a user story was provided by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler in Planning Extreme Programming:

  "The story is the unit of functionality in an XP project. We demonstrate progress by delivering tested, integrated code that implements a story. A story should be understandable to customers and developers, testable, valuable to the customer, and small enough so that the programmers can build half a dozen in an iteration"

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Database Version Control January 11, 2011

  Version control for source code is used by most development teams today. It gives you a history of all the changes you made, you can use it to share your code with others and you can work on an experimental feature without polluting the stable product. These are just some of the reasons why version control software is considered indispensable today. But where does our database fit in all this? How can we share the changes we want to make to the database with our colleagues, and eventually with our production environment?

  Database version control is something that most developers have to deal with regularly, yet only a few have actually thought about what solution might be best for them. Most people have a solution that sort of works for them, but when you ask them about the subject they are pretty convinced that there must be some better way to manage database changes, they're just not entirely sure what that solution is – but the silver bullet must be out there somewhere, right?

  This article will give you a bit more insight into the theory behind database version control, and gives you several suggestions on how you could deal with the problem. We will look at simple solutions and also take a look at some of the tools available to help.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Unit Testing Databases with Zend Framework December 7, 2010

  Testing the database layer is a fundamental step during application development. It allows us to ensure that all data operations behave properly, without data loss or corruption. In this article, we are going to describe a simple way to test the database layer of our applications, using PHPUnit database classes, Zend Framework extensions and some custom reusable code to facilitate the process for all the domain models. This article will walk you through, step by step, for each of the tasks needed to achieve this.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Using MongoDb in PHP Applications November 30, 2010

  After recently attending the MongoUK conference in London, it is clear that MongoDB is fast finding application amongst cutting-edge web developers. As a relatively new concept for persistence, NoSQL (Not Only SQL) and more specifically document-oriented databases, such as MongoDB, are starting to enter the web applications landscape. Its strength lies in speed and ability to cope with dynamic data, making its goals align closely with requirements of many websites around today.

  This tutorial will show you how to incorporate MongoDB into new or existing object-oriented applications, by showing how to interact and integrate with applications and how to deploy applications using MongoDB. Credit for this approach must go to Matthew Weier O'Phinney who spoke on this topic at the DPC 2010 conference in June. I would suggest reading this tutorial if you are considering using MongoDB for an application and are looking for a starting point on which to build an idea of its features. Alternatively, you may also be interested in this tutorial if you've found yourself getting tied to the persistence layer in the past and are looking for ways to reduce that technology lock-in. If you've implemented MongoDB into many of your systems, then maybe this tutorial will, open your eyes on a new way of integrating it. Whatever your background, if you understand object-orientation and want to start using MongoDB, then this tutorial is for you.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Optimising HMVC Web Applications for Performance November 16, 2010

  In an earlier article written for techPortal, Scaling Web Applications With HMVC, the Hierarchical-Model-View-Controller architecture was explored. Using an example web application called Gazouillement and the Kohana Framework, the article investigated how structuring code using an HMVC methodology can help overcome some common scalability challenges in complex software architectures. The article concluded by demonstrating the relative simplicity of horizontally scaling the HMVC Gazouillement example application, after analysis of the execution bottlenecks.

  The previous article was intended to be a reintroduction to HMVC for the web application era. HMVC is not a new concept: it was originally referenced in a Java World article over ten years ago and based on an idea that dates back forty years. Todays rise in notoriety of HMVC might be due to the popularity it is enjoying in modern frameworks. Or it could be that the similarity in size and scope of modern web applications to their desktop cousins has given developers reason to revisit the HMVC architecture. Given the present interest in HMVC, this is a great time to explore the subject further and answer a few of the questions arising from the previous article.

  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Creative MVC: Meet the ViewModel Pattern November 2, 2010

  In this article we will introduce a powerful new tool in the arsenal of developers - the ViewModel. This provides MVC applications a natural location for presentation logic and lazy functionality while maintaining the segregation between the layers of responsibility within the code. It allows designers access to data and methods they need, while hiding aspects that aren't needed at view level.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• The EAV Data Model October 21, 2010

  One problem many developers encounter while defining and analysing data requirements is the situation where a number of different attributes can be used to describe an object, but only few attributes actually apply to each one. One option is to create a table with a column representing each attribute; this is suitable for objects with a fixed number of attributes, where all or most attributes have values for a most objects. However, in our case we would end up with records where majority of columns would be empty, because attributes may be unknown or inapplicable.

  To solve the above problem you can apply the EAV (Entity, Attribute, Value) model. This pattern is also known under several alternative names including "object-attribute-value" model and "open schema". In the EAV data model only non-empty values are stored in database, where each attribute-value (or key-value) pair describes one attribute of a given entity. EAV tables are often characterized as "long and skinny"; "long" refers to multiple rows describing entity, and "skinny" to the small number of columns used. In this article we will describe the EAV model, its implementation, and show applications of using it in the real world - including examining how Magento makes use of this pattern.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Understanding APC October 7, 2010

  APC is a performance-enhancing extension. It should not be confused with a magic pill, although having it around does provide a positive impact on performance! If configured incorrectly, APC can cause unexpected behaviour, however when implemented optimally APC can be a useful weapon in your arsenal. In this post we will examine APC's capabilities and it's application both as an opcode cache and in its less common usage as a data cache.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Building a Continuous Integration Server for PHP with Hudson September 20, 2010

  Continuous integration (CI) is fast becoming part of the standard development model for creating high quality software, and rightly so. Delivering reliably high quality software is in the best interest of yourself, your manager and your clients. This is not an article about Continuous Integration itself, but will introduce Hudson, a key tool, and may help you to implement your own CI strategy. Last year we also published a tutorial on phpUnderControl, which is another CI tool that you might like to consider.

  Hudson itself is written in Java, however the folks over at hudson-ci.org have made its installation as pain-free as possible. This article will focus on setting up Hudson on a debian-based platform however the general outline will be useful even for use on a different platform; there are packages available for other linux distributions over on the hudson-ci.org website.
  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• 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.

  (more...)

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Web Services for PHP Developers June 1, 2010

  In this world of sharing data, increasing numbers of sites and applications are making information available over web services. Whether we are building a service as a feature of our own development, or pulling in the information published by others, we will need to understand the different service types and how to work with them in PHP. This article aims to give you the tools to do just that.

  (more...)