Blog

Refactoring your code to Fluent Interface

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:45:14 +0000

With the introduction of chaining methods together in PHP 5 we now have the opportunity to implement Fluent Interfaces in PHP which opens up an interesting way of writing more readable and smaller code.

Fluent Interfaces are not a new programming construct, they provide us with the ability to directly de-reference an object, PHP developers can build objects using fluent interfaces.

On the first look this might look like abracadabra if you are totally new to the new buzzword "Fluent Interfaces". Fluent interfaces are best described as way of chaining methods of an object together. By having a method return a reference to the object itself, return $this; you chain methods together like this:

$this->methodOne()->methodTwo()->methodThree();

The point of using fluent interfaces is simple; to make your code easier to read (and in the end also easier to maintain). My interest has been triggered by the articles Júlio Pontes has been posting on the All Together As A Whole website. A community initiative to gather community developers together. A full list of the articles written by Júlio can be found at the end of this article.

eZ Publish News

robin.muilwijk@telfort.nl (Robin Muilwijk) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:00:00 +0000

Book Review
Just the other day I received my review copy of a new book titled "eZ Publish 4: Enterprise Web Sites Step-by-Step". Packt Publishing contacted me a few weeks ago about this upcoming release and asked me to review this book. I'll hope to read through it in one or two weeks and I will post my review on our blog here.

eZ Publish Community Portal
I just read on twitter that the new Community Portal of eZ Publish is online. It looks promising, giving the Community a more prominant place in there site structure. Congrats to eZ Publish with the launch.

The Internet turns 40

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:31:57 +0000

It was exactly forty years ago on this Friday that the first link on Arpanet was created. On 29 october 1969 at half past ten in the evening a connection was made between the university of Los Angeles and Stanford. The first connection in the Netherlands was there at October 30. ARPANET, a project of the U.S. defense research organization Arpa, was the mainstay of the Internet as we know it today.

Arpanet was obviously not the only important link in the development of the Internet: tcp / ip, Cyclades and the breakdown of Arpanet in a military research arm and also contributed to much. The www was of great importance, this application of the Internet - by many as a synonym for 'Internet' is used - made sure that the Internet could be rapidly popular among 'ordinary' users.

Check out the slideshow on the Guardian website if you are interested in a quick overview of the development of the Internet. No doubt that the ideas of Tim Berner Lee made the web available for the general public, read his original proposal and be amazed how this led to the Internet as we know it.

Happy birthday Internet!

How to download the latest version of Joomla 1.6

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:00:00 +0000

At the current download page of Joomla you will not find a nightly build download option as it was available earlier on (1.0 and early 1.5 development). There are a lot of people who are eager to see the current state of 1.6 and would like to download a development version. In this article I will explain how you can get a copy of the latest development version.

Before we show the tools that can make it happen, I would like to explain a bit more on how the Joomla codebase is maintained. The Joomla development team is storing changes to the code into a software versioning system called Subversion. The code is stored in a so called commit, saying no more that the changes that de developer has made locally are uploaded to a central repository. That repository can be access by a web browser or tools that have been build for easy maintenance of the software. It is possible to go back to every state of the development by reverting versions since every change is stored in this central repository.

When an official release is build a copy is extracted from this software repository and from that extract the compressed files are generated that you then can download. For official releases this process is automated, but if you are interested in the last version of the code you can manually export the data from the repository. What I normally do in such a situation is export the data into the webfolder of my development system, in my case that is '/var/www'.

It is actually pretty straight forward, let me give an example of a command line export on Ubuntu (subversion client is installed of course).

cd /var/www
svn export http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/ --username anonymous
Authentication realm:  Document repository
Password for 'anonymous':

As you can see we do a checkout from the 1.6 trunk location (http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/) and use anonymous access to retrieve the repository. There are several different clients available that can read the subversion repository on a variety of platforms (Windows, Linux, MAC). Under windows you can use for example Turtoise SVN, all you then need to do is to right-click on a folder in the explorer en you can select the export option. Obviously it would be the easiest way if the daily build option was re-introduced on joomla.org...

Hierarchical data, nodes and nested sets in 1.6

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:44:22 +0000

In this article I will focus on the recently committed library 'libaries/jocularr/database/tablenested.php'. This class initially implemented the unlimited nested categories and is also used for the 'asset' and 'usergroup' tables. The class 'JtableNested' is introduced in Joomla 1.6 and implements the nested data-set logic.

One of the most requested features for Joomla, beside ACL, was the desire to get rid of the section and category limitation. In Joomla 1.6 this problem is solved by providing the categories to be stored and presented as an hierarchical dataset. Hierarchical data-sets are also available in Drupal for example, the most common known implementation within Drupal is de node structure that is the corner stone of the Drupal data-model.

Well that is interesting, is it not? Joomla 1.6 is going to provide you with the libraries where you actually can manage data in a hierarchical way, or if you prefer as a node based way. In this article I will go into the underlying theory of managing hierarchical data and the specific implementation that has been chosen by the development team called nested sets. It looks like the nested category work was inspired on an article by Mike Hillyer describing the theory behind adjacency list models and the nested set data model and the initials work done by Enno Klassing during the Summer of Code 2007. This Jfoobar article is also based on Mike Hillyer writing.

FOSDEM is calling you

robin.muilwijk@telfort.nl (Robin Muilwijk) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

FOSDEM, a developer-oriented Free and Opensource conference in Europe, will be taking place in Brussels, Belgium on Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 February 2010. Over the weekend FOSDEM has placed several calls for participation.

See you at the Joomladay New York!

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:00:00 +0000

On my way back home from the Wisconsin User Group meeting I decided to stay a bit longer to also visit the New York Joomladay. For the first time in years I am not listed as a speaker and attend the Joomladay as a community member which gives me some additional time to talk to people.

The program has some really interesting topics, if you are close you should consider going there because Joomladays are events you should not misse. Not sure you still can get a ticket, I suggest you check out the Joomladay New York site if this is possible. As with the JUG I expect to meet a lot of old Joomla friends and am looking forward to the talks.

Hope to meet you there!

Learn what a web browser is by watching a 1 minute video

arno.alvaana@gmail.com (Arno Zijlstra) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:02:49 +0000

There you go, finally you have a site to show your mom and dad when they call you again with something like "my search engine want's to update, what should I do?".

Google has put together a site to simply explain what a browser actually is. And looking at the video below it's certainly needed.

Check the site out at whatbrowser.org and watch the video.

Oh man, it's needed

Source: Techcrunch

Ning Community for Joomla Developers - All Together, As a Whole

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:57:44 +0000

Past week Amy Stephen opened a new social network where "those of us who develop using Joomla can come and share ideas, code snippets, ask questions, and collaborate on projects".

If you develop Joomla Extensions or Templates, or if you create innovative Joomla web sites, you are welcome and encouraged to participate. You can share your blog post, start or respond to a discussion or find people who are willing to collaborate on a new innovative idea.

You can join at joomladevelopers.ning.com. Feel free to invite others to join in.

Continuous integation presentation

jansen.wilco@gmail.com (Wilco Jansen) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:48:41 +0000

Yesterday I have gave a presentation at the Dutch T-Dose event at the University of Applied Science in Eindhoven about continuous integration. I have uploaded my presentation to slideshare for those who are interested.

Continuous Integration In Php

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