schlitt.info - php, photography and private stuff
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:Author: 		Tobias Schlitt
:Date:			Thu, 19 Sep 2013 08:35:38 +0200
:Copyright:		CC by-nc-sa

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Blog - Open Source - schlitt.info
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- Slides from Ludwigsburg

  A couple of weeks after the International PHP Conference Spring Editition,
  which was held in Ludwigsburg (near Stuttgart) - Germany -, I managed to
  upload the slides. Here you go:

- "Virtual properties"

  Jeff Moore  posted an article on procata.com about getters, setters and real
  properties. I fully agree with him. Especially the usage of interceptors
  (__get()/__set()/__isset()/__call()) makes your API a lot more readable and
  comfortable, while maintaining the purpose behind getters and setters:
  Checking the correctness of values assigned to a property and wrapping
  around retrieval mechanisms for a property. I personally call the way of
  maintaining value-correctness for properties through interceptors virtual
  properties, which fits quite nice I think.

- Radar charts, MS SQL support, dialog system and greetings from spiderman!

  After the usual development cycle of eZ Components we just released version
  2007.1 beta 1. This release (which will go stable in a few weeks) includes
  lots of new features and many bug fixes.

- phpDay in Italy

  Although I sadly cannot take part in the Italian PHP Conference, the phpDay,
  this year, I'd like to advertise this nice event here.

- Get Chorizo for less?

  If you live in the north half of Germany or in a country that also has "Aldi
  Nord" discounters, you can now get a professional Chorizo cheaper than from
  Mayflower. ;)

- Comfortable PHP editing with VIM -6-

  I recently added 2 new functions to my PHP FTPlugin for VIM, which I wanted
  to implement for a longer time and recently needed quite often:

- The time of the conferences...

  While I have not been to any conference since last november, the time of the
  conferences seems to come again. So, here I go:

- 10 golden rules for starting with open source

  Are you new to open source? Or if not, do you still remember, what it was
  like, as you first started with open source? I recently tried to remember
  these days... back in 2001, when I started playing around with PEAR and
  shortly after that started to work on my own packages for PEAR...

- Why documentation matters

  If you kept an eye on Planet-PHP during the past days, you will have seen a
  discussion emerging about the sense of doc blocks and documentation in
  general. Travis Swicegood states a quite interessting point of view. His
  main point is, that program languages themselves are declarative and that it
  is somewhat stupid to describe the purpose of a method in plain english, if
  it has been already described by the programming language itself. Although I
  never thought in this direction so far, I can see a valid point here.
  Partly.

- Why code coverage matters

  I'm a fan of PHPUnit code coverage reports. And with this sentence I can see
  a lot of the developers out there shiver, because they are of the opinion,
  that code coverage reports for unit tests are nonsense and cannot give you
  any hint on the quality of a test suite. I see it a bit differently. Surely,
  a high code coverage rate of a test suite does never indicate, that code is
  well tested (if you have not written the code and tests yourself). But the
  other way around works: A small code coverage rate definitly means, that the
  test suite is not sufficient. But let me dig a bit deeper into code coverage
  and what it gives you.