development

Yesterday, Jeff Barr announced Amazon’s own PHP SDK for their web services — own, because AWS hired CloudFusion’s lead developer earlier this year (in March) and I guess after a while they decided it was time to incorporate his open source efforts into the company. The full story is on getcloudfusion.com. So what? What’s more than just pretty interesting about all of this, is that not only is the AWS PHP SDK hosted on Github (bonus points for sure), but since it implements almost the entire API of all infrastructural services and is backed by the API provider, this library currently presents the most feasible way for PHP developers to work with AWS....

While Chrome likes to emphasize how speedy it is, it is also sometimes a pretty bare-metal browser. But all the speed comes at an expensive — Chrome is doing less out of the box, which some people will say means, “Chrome is focusing on the essentials”. So because I’m thankful for said speedyness and overall painlessness, I also realize how I little extra bells and whistles I really need for a great browsing experience....

Sometimes, I have to debug unit tests and usually this is a situation I’m trying to avoid. If I have to spend too much time debugging a test it’s usually a bad test. Which usually means that it’s too complex. However, with Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase, it’s often not the actual test, but the framework. This is not just tedious for myself, it’s also not the most supportive fact when I ask my developers to write tests....

I haven’t really had the chance or time to play with PHP 5.3 until recently when Ubuntu 10.04 upgraded my local installations and kind of forced me to dive into it a little. And I’m also probably the last person on the planet to notice, but namespaces in PHP 5.3 allow you to monkey-patch core PHP code. What’s monkey patching? So monkey patching is a technique to replace functions at runtime....

(This post is entirely in German, I’ll see if I can translate this rant later.) Also, Prost und frohes Neujahr — ich starte das neue Jahr damit etwas emotionalen Ballast aus dem alten Jahr loszuwerden! Ab und an treffe ich wieder auf Kunden und Kollegen mit denen ich vor relativ langer Zeit — fünf oder sechs Jahren oder länger — zusammengearbeitet habe. Die Zeitspanne ist deshalb wichtig weil ich generell daran Interesse habe immer wieder oder zumindest des öfteren mit jemandem zusammenzuarbeiten, wenn die Zusammenarbeit erfolgreich war....