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[You may have heard about the Magento fork Mage+.]

Lee, just tell us: who are you and what are you doing?

I'm a Magento technical architect, developer and contributor to Magento CE. I specialise in architecting and building large scale and complex installations of Magento - having built enterprise Magento platforms for Warner Music Group both in Europe & USA, and for Rebate Networks, who operate a collection of localised flash-sales websites throughout the world. I'm also the founder of the London Magento Users Group.

I created a fork of Magento CE called Mage+, after the frustrations I'd experienced whilst working with Magento.

I spent the better part of this afternoon trying to figure out why a Composer installation wasn’t working and finally figured out the problem…it wasn’t mine.

First, a little context – I’m currently working on a testing presentation for some folks at work and I wanted to show them how to work with the Behat testing tool to create some handy functional/integration tests for our framework-based apps. I threw together a little framework (yes yes, I know) and got the PHPUnit tests set up and running in no time. When it came to the Behat tests, though, no matter what I did, I was still having a problem:

PHP Fatal error: Class 'GoutteClient' not found in /www/htdocs/testing-examples/app/vendor/behat/mink/src/Behat/Mink/Driver/Goutte/Client.php on line 13

No matter how I tried to configure the composer install, it always gave me this message. I tried everything I could think of and, finally, at the suggestion of Rafael Dohms, checked out the github repository for the Goutte client (a href=”http://github.com/fabpot/goutte”>here). As it turns out, in the past ...read more...

When thinking about open-source relational databases, many people face dilemma how to choose between two the most popular systems: MySQL and PostgreSQL. Both of them are cross-platform, time proven solutions having a lot of users ranged from individuals and small business to huge corporations. In order to resolve this issue Intelligent Converters released solutions to migrate MySQL databases to PostgreSQL server and vice versa. Both products have high performance due to direct connection to data source and destination databases (they do not use ODBC or any other middleware software). Command line support allows to script, automate and schedule the conversion process. Intelligent Converters invites both end-users and media people to try PostgreSQL to MySQL and backward conversion using free demo version of the products:

[HTML_REMOVED]http://www.intelligent-converters.com/pgs2sql.htm[HTML_REMOVED][HTML_REMOVED] [HTML_REMOVED]http://www.intelligent-converters.com/sql2pgs.htm[HTML_REMOVED][HTML_REMOVED]

Demo version allows to convert only five records for each database table, all other features are in place.

[HTML_REMOVED]Features[HTML_REMOVED][HTML_REMOVED] [HTML_REMOVED] [HTML_REMOVED]All versions of PostgreSQL are supported[HTML_REMOVED] [HTML_REMOVED]All versions of Unix and Windows MySQL are supported[HTML_REMOVED] [HTML_REMOVED]Fast conversion engine (about 10,000 records per second of average P-IV system)[HTML_REMOVED] [HTML_REMOVED]Option to merge data into an ...read more...

Get a head start evaluating Window Server 2012. Based on the beta release, this guide introduces its new features and capabilities, with scenario-based insights demonstrating how the platform can meet the needs of your business.

Here is a quick update on conferences we will attend and speak at in the next couple months. If you are attending any, feel free to come and say hi!

Next week our entire team will be at jsDay and phpDay in Verona, Italy. If you haven’t got tickets yet, hurry up because it is about to be sold out.

Pierre will talk about Backbone.js, Igor has two talks about realtime apps with websockets and the Silex microframework and I myself will be talking about managing your dependencies with Composer.

In June there are two notable events. The first is SwissJeese. A local JavaScript-oriented conference co-organized by Pierre that will be in Bern. It is free and on a Saturday so there is really no excuse not to come if you have an interest in JavaScript. Register for free on eventbrite!

The second a week later is Symfony Live in Paris which we are always ...read more...

SQL Maestro Group announces the release of AnySQL Maestro 12.5, a powerful tool for managing any database engine accessible via ODBC driver or OLE DB provider (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Access, etc).

The new version is immediately available at
http://www.sqlmaestro.com/products/anysql/maestro/.

AnySQL Maestro comes in both Freeware and Professional editions.

Top 10 new features:

1. Report Designer.
2. Support for auto increment columns for MS SQL Server and MS Access.
3. SQL Editors: Unicode support, text change markers, and improved code folding appearance.
4. Enhanced performance of the SQL Script Editor tool.
5. Improved Script Runner.
6. Inline images in the data grid.
7. Displaying BLOB data as PDF.
8. Creation of views from Visual Query Builder.
9. Updated Data Input form.
10. Spanish translation.

There are also some other useful things. Full press release is available at the SQL Maestro Group website.

The 508 handbook is written for the developer or designer who wants to make accessible websites, but doesn't know where to begin. The reader will not only be introduced to the various audiences covered under 508 and their limitations and assistive technologies, but be given practical advice on how to make a website for them, while not compromising the overall design. Practical examples are provided, as well as heuristics to guide them during the development of completely new technologies.

Have a killer app idea for iPhone and iPad? Head First iPhone and iPad Development will help you get your first application up and running in no time. You'll not only learn how to design for Apple's devices, you'll also master the iPhone SDK tools -- including Xcode -- and Objective-C programming principles to create eye-catching, top-selling apps.

Tweaking is the motto - what an easy release PECL/mysqlnd_ms 1.4 will be! The first tweak for the next stable version of the mysqlnd replication and load balancing plugin solves pitfalls around charsets. String escaping now works on lazy connection handles (default) prior to establishing a connection to MySQL. A new server_charset setting has been introduced for this. The way it works also prevents you from the risk of using a different charset for escaping than used later on for your connection.

Lazy connections and server_charset

PECL/mysqlnd_ms is a load balancer. A users connection handle can point to different nodes of a replication cluster over time. For example, if using MySQL Replication, the connection handle may point to the master for running writes and, later on, to one of the slaves for reads. At the very moment a user opens a connection handle, the load balancer does not yet know which cluster node needs to be queried first.

 /* Load balanced following "myapp" section rules from the plugins config file */ $mysqli =  ...read more... 

Very often I find myself writing input filters for large XML files using PHP. Common enough task; and PHP offer a great variety of tools to do this effectively depending on the situation. Unfortunately, almost as common is the lack of documentation for the aforementioned XML files.

Manually trying to document the XML structure is not a fun job. And I have looked around for a simple tool but I didn’t really find a  tool that gave me the quick and dirty overview I wanted. A year or so ago I finally wrote a small PHP class to analyze large XML files.

It is simple, but quickly creates a good overview of the XML structure as well as the kind of data and attributes of the elements in the XML file. Even for a very large XML file it does a good job of showing just the relevant structure of the XML.

It is best described using an example.

Example XML

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>  <company xmlns:dvoidcomp="http://dotvoid.se/schema/company" name="MegaCorp" employeeOfTheMonth="E0003">
 
 <department name="Advanced Technologies" location="NY" number="123">
 
 <employee name="Al Smith" SN="E0004"  ...read more... 

PostGIS is an extension that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. The version 2.0.0 is now complete and available for download here :

Download PostGIS

The development process for 2.0 has been very long, but has resulted in a release with a number of exciting new features.

• Raster data and raster/vector analysis in the database
• Topological models to handle objects with shared boundaries
• PostgreSQL typmod integration, for an automagical geometry_columns table
• 3D and 4D indexing
• Index-based high performance nearest-neighbour searching
• Many more vector functions including
• ST_Split
• ST_Node
• ST_MakeValid
• ST_OffsetCurve
• ST_ConcaveHull
• ST_AsX3D
• ST_GeomFromGeoJSON
• ST_3DDistance
• Integration with the PostgreSQL 9.1 extension system
• Improved commandline shapefile loader/dumper
• Multi-file import support in the shapefile GUI
• Multi-table export support in the shapefile GUI
• A geo-coder optimized for free US Census TIGER (2010) data
  

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This is a train of thought article (i.e. it may make sense…or not). You’ve been warned in advance. The CL;DR will be posted to Twitter when Hell freezes over, pigs fly, and Hollywood makes an ensemble casted DC Universe movie. This is what happens when you have a laptop, an editor, a train ride home, and have just realised that the wifi connection is not working.

In PHP, we’re well insulated from what happens in other programming languages. This is not by accident – mentioning PHP while among a crowd of Java, Ruby, Python or Perl programmers is liable to result in a heated argument, several fistfights and one dead PHP programmer. Death by mobbing is not a pretty way to go. I’m sure a few of us have been there – at a web conference where people dismiss PHP ...read more...

Recently we implemented some quite sophisticated caching mechanisms using varnish. In addition to just caching, backend errors and invalidated pages had to be handled gracefully whenever possible so we implemented grace mode, saint mode and backend probes.

Everything was working great during development but then we did some real performance testing... The results really gave us some headache because at some point we noticed the following in varnishlog from time to time:

 11 FetchError   c no backend connection

This error appears when (obviously) no backend is available/healthy. The problem: The health checks at that time reported that the backends were alive. Googling didn't help here as this error didn't seem to be one of the standard issues. So i finally found myself digging in the C code and after some while i found out what was going on.

The reason we got this error was a combination of a not-yet completely finished backend and the (poorly documented) saint mode:

We still had quite an amount of 500s returning from the backends because of database inconsistencies and general ...read more...

Use of the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern is generally accepted as a best practice in modern web applications. Like all design patterns, MVC is a reusable solution to a common problem. The MVC pattern is intended to address the following concerns:

1. Support for multiple types of clients
2. Reduce duplicate code when supporting multiple types of clients
3. Isolating domain logic from the user interface

Note that items 2 and 3 are both dependent on item 1. Support for multiple types of clients is the single driving force behind the MVC design pattern. Following are some examples of client types:

• Web Browsers
• API Clients
• Admin Processes (e.g. CLI, cron, daemon)
• Unit Tests
• Native GUI

Realistically, how many of these different client types do you need to support? If you’re taking a RESTful approach, then Web Browsers and API Clients can be combined into one type of client, which we can just call User Agents. Likely you’re not building a Native GUI. This leaves you with the following three types of clients to support: