Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

The new semester has right begun, which basically means that the semester vacation as it was named earlier (now the lesson free time) is over. While that meant a lot of exams and work on the book for Kore and me at first, we had time for some vacation and finally to take care about a brand new eZ Components project:

Starting by the end of August we spent almost whole September full-time on designing and implementing this component. The goal was to design a flexible WebDAV server component, which can be used to edit whatever data source on an HTTP server through the WebDAV extension of the protocol, with the full lot of concerns in mind.

Who ever read RFC 2518 or even had a slight glance at it, might have noticed its quality. To state it plainly: It's bullshit. Inconsistencies, spongy phrases and un-logical behaviour definition wherever you look. No wonder, that almost every client behaves slightly differnet, so the first major concern was, that we did not now how clients would expect us to react.

The result of the design phase included a custom summarization of the RFC including many other issues we stumbled over and is is a 3 level architecture for the component (as seen in the illustration). The 3 levels incorporate a lot of flexible configuration and adjustment possibilities, as well as a plugin API to realize the many extensions for WebDAV. We are currently working on the necessary client adjustments. While a lot of clients already work, Kore is on reverse engineering the M$ clients constantly, while I'm currently working on the first plugin: Locking.

If you would like to know more about this component and see it in action, come and visit my talk at the International PHP Conference 2007. The family meeting will as usual take place in Mörfelden (near Frankfurt am Main, Germany) from November 4th to 7th. We plan to have an alpha release of the component soon, so I believe you can right forward try it out at the conference and give us feedback.

Looking forward to see you all! :)

Because I had a talk about how to use VIM in respect to PHP source code editing, I took the time during the week, to write some extensive documentation for PDV, the PHP Documentor plugin for VIM. Additionally, I documented my VIM file type plugin, which is also available through the SVN of PDV. Take a look at the README.txt to learn more.

Update:

For those looking for my .vimrc: It is in SVN, too, but splitted up in a general .vimrc and a file type plugin, which is only sourced for PHP code. Installation instructions can be found in the README.txt, too.

Update 2:

I also added the repository to SVNServe now, so you can check it out using "svn co svn://phpugdo.de/PDV".

Thanks to Jakob I found a patch (look at the very end of the page) which enables Beagle to index Thunderbird emails. I created a Gentoo ebuild for me personally to support this. I just made a TAR ball of it, so you can use it, too. To make it running, do the following steps:

1. Create a portage overlay, if you don't have one, yet (mostly /usr/local/portage).
2. Add the overlay to your make.conf (PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage).
3. Download this TAR ball and extract it into your overlay.
4. emerge app-misc/beagle-0.2.6

Beagle now automatically indexes your TB mails, if you let it index your home dir. If you're using IMAP, you need to enable the download of messages for offline use. Have fun!

Seems like I currently have an affection for continuations. After the sequel to my entry "Comfortable PHP editing with VIM" now a sequel for a much older entry follows.

I recently stumbled across this website, where a guy called "skyline" collected some really cool firefox extensions. I did not checkout all of them, but some seem really useful, so I will definitly add them to my standard repartoir of firefox extensions. This also gives me the chance to update my recent standard extensions.

To keep it complete, here a short list of what I used until now (missing those I do not use any more). The new extensions follow after that in deeper detail:

• AllInOneGestures
• UserAgentToolbarWidget

What I had new since my last entry on this topic:

• WebDeveloper
  • A web developer toolbar, which lets you tweak a whole bunch of options for the currently displayed website. Disable or outline different classes of tags, change the CSS instantly, manipulate forms and their actions, search for common HTML errors and do much more with it!
• FireFTP
  • A rudimentary but cool FTP client integrated into your firefox!
• Foxylicious
  • Bookmark to del.icio.us directly from firefox (integrates into the right-click menu).
• LiveBookmarkThis
  • Usually you can only add a feed as a live bookmark, if the parent html-page (the page which referrs to the feed) contains the specific RDF information (the little live bookmark icon appears in the bottom right corner). This extension adds a "Add Live Boomark..."-link to the right-click menu of links so you can add any feed you like.

So, what's new since today?

• DownloadStatusBar
  • This extension adds a new toolbar to the bottom of your firefox window, which shows currently running downloads and their progress. No more switching to the download window necessary!
• TargetAlert
  • You always bark, when a site automatically opens a new window? You hate watching the statusbar to see, what type of document you can await when clicking a link? End this with TargetAlert. This extension will display a significant icon beside special links, so you always know, if a link will open a new window, leads to a PDF, Doc or whatever or calls your email agent.
• FlashBlock
  • Mostly pretty nice, colorful, moving, blinking and really nerving, that's what flash animations are. But sadly not all of them. Until every webmaster offers an alternative navigation you should use this extension. It deactivates Flash animations by default and shows a button to activate them.
• GooglePreview
  • Adds a nice little thumbnail of the websites to your google search results. Really cool!

I tested all of them and they worked with Firefox 1.0 on Debian Unstable.

I really love that firefox thing and it brings more and more fun from day to day. For me the best browser ever made...

^{Also dignified for taking a look: The firefox add in the German FAZ}

You are using Mozilla or Firefox?

Did anyone of you notice the cool featur the PEAR package search offers?

Just go here and hit

Add PEAR Package Search to Mozilla Search tab here!

and you will get a cool new searchengine within your Mozilla searchbar... :)

Never noticed that, guess that was the same with some of you!

Mozilla Firefox (formally known as Firebird) is the coolest browser the Mozilla project ever produced. My compliment! But to get a fully customized browser you have to download and install (ok, that's just 1 step together) several extensions. And since I have multiple computers, where I more or less often have to install the desired Firefox, I allways needed to browse through the extension directory and find all the extensions I wanted to have... To speed this up a bit and let maybe someone profit of the little collection of my favorite Firebird extensions, I note it down here: AllInOneGestures A simple but pretty usefull mouse gesture system. Beware, mouse gestures are addictive! :) GoogleBar The famouse Google toolbar ported to Mozilla (not complete but most of it's features, what I miss is the display of the site rating while browsing). ImageZoomer Zoom in and out of images in a website. Imagetag Copy a XHTML image tag from any website image. JSLib The common JavaScript library for Mozilla (needed by other plugins). LanguageMenu Select the "Language accept" header instantly from a menu. ReloadEvery Define timespans to reload a specific tab. UserAgentToolbarWidget Select or even define freely a user agent string provided to websites, JavaScript and Co.

Mouse gestures are a very cool and easy way to navigate websites. Problematic is, that the most used browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer) does not support them by nature. This problem has now ended. Christopher Todd has implemented mouse gestures in JavaScript to be usable in any webbrowser. Read more...