One of the more frequent questions I see on the mailing lists and IRC is, “How do I take over a package?”. Very often people start to use a PEAR package and then at some point encounter either a bug or they miss a certain feature. The package’s state however is inactive or flat unmaintained. Offer help The first step is to offer your help. And the easiest way to help is to report bugs or open feature requests....
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....
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....
The scope of this blog entry is to give you a quick and dirty demo for start-stop-daemon together with a short use case on Gearman (all on Ubuntu). In this example, I’m using the start-stop-daemon to handle my Gearman workers through an init.d script. Gearman Gearman is a queue! But unlike for example most of the backends to Zend_Queue, Gearman provides a little more than just a message queue to send — well — messages from sender to receiver....
Update, 2010-03-04: I just rolled a 0.0.2 release. In case you had 0.0.1 installed, just use pear upgrade-all to get it automatically. This release is trying to fix a random hang while reading documents from the source server. I also opened a repository on Github. --- As some may have guessed from a previous blog post we are currently running a test setup with CouchDB lounge. My current objective is to migrate our 200 million documents to it, and this is where I am essentially stuck this week....