It has been quiet on this website since we posted the last contributed chapter abstract in June and it is time to give you an update. But first, allow me to refresh your memory on the list of contributed chapters:

• Best Practices
  • TYPO3: The Agile Future of a Ponderous Project
  • Unit Testing Bad Practices by Example
  • Quality Assurance at Digg
• Servers and Services
  • Testing Service Oriented APIs
  • Testing a WebDAV Server
  • Testing Database Interaction
• Architecture
  • Testing Symfony and Symfony Applications
  • Testing the ezcGraph Component
• QA in the Large
  • Large-Scale Selenium-Based Testing at studiVZ
  • Continuous Integration with phpUnderControl
  • swoodoo: A True Agile Story
• Non-Functional Aspects
  • Performance
  • Usability
  • Security

As we only have a deadline for the German edition so far and since we received the majority of contributed chapters in English, Stefan and I are currently busy translating the contributed chapters from English to German in an effort to meet our deadline. We are currently looking at a release date for the German edition in late spring / early summer of 2010.

Once we have finished the manuscript for the German edition, we will start working on the manuscript for the English edition. Hopefully, this process will be much faster as we only need to translate a couple of chapters from German to English. We are hopeful that the English edition will be available not much later than the German edition.

This is an abstract for a chapter from a book on Quality Assurance in PHP Projects.

The Graph component from the eZ Components project provides an easy to use and extensible library for creating graphical charts. In the eZ Components project we aim to develop test-driven, which resulted in two challenges developing this library.

The output generated by a Graph component is an image, which in most cases is binary-encoded data. Expectations are really hard to create by hand, it is only feasible to create functional tests replaying once created data. The actual image is generated by external libraries such as ext/gd. These external libraries may change their exact output at any time, or even between two runs with the same version of the library. Comparisons of the generated images need to respect that and implement special assertions for the given type of binary data.

Testing the created binary data has proven to be prone to errors. Since the actual image generation has been abstracted away, we are able to use of different image creation mechanisms. Thanks to the support for mock objects in PHPUnit, all calls to the driver layer can be checked for correctness without actually generating images.

Kore Nordmann is an active member of the PHP community and works for eZ Systems on the eZ Components.

Yesterday I released version 0.3.(0|1|2) of phpUnderControl. Except bugfixes and enhancements the major change in this new version of phpUnderControl is an ezcGraph replacement of the original cewolf metrics view. For the excellent appearance of the generated graphics I would like to thank kore, who supported me actively with his deep knowledge of the ezcGraph component. Beside the better appearance, the new graph implementation has another advantage, it performs much better than the original cewolf implementation, because cewolf generates graphics in real time, while the new ezcGraph solution generates static graphics during the build process.

To integrate the graph generator into your build process, you must alter the <publishers /> elements in the config.xml file. Simply add a CruiseControl execute-publisher that calls the phpUnderControl cli tool with the graph command, as shown in the following example.

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 3216 bytes)

We just released ezcGraph 1.1.1 - containing some small bugfixes for the prior release 1.1. The 1.1 release contained several interesting new features like radar charts, improved support for interactive charts, numeric datasets, logarithmical axis, rotated axis labels, improved date axis support and more...

Thanks for all the comments to my “Application Server in PHP? well… Yes!” posting. I was really amazed to see that many interested people. Your support gives me a great motivation. Thanks, guys!

I am currently thinking about proper object hierarchy and, actually, I changed it completely 3 times already in my thoughts. I finally “see the light”™ and will implement it on a weekend. I think about converting SCGI-part to a simple “driver” and move all http-related stuff to a separate driver-agnostic set of classes (Probably, that would be a class per kind of http-request and a class per kind of http-response). This way, I would be able to implement FastCGI as anther driver without altering applications. If you have any better ideas — let me know.

For now, I made another example application. This time, with some benchmarking in thoughts. Here it is.

This example supposes, that you have ezcomponents folder on the one level with the svn-checked-out “trunk” of my googlecode-project. And, you can start “runner.php” both as SCGI-server (using CLI) or as usual mod_php/(fast)cgi application. The idea was to see if there will be any noticeable speed difference between approaches. But… it showed the other thing

I used ezcGraph in my application and noticed a serious memory-leaking. Obviously, ezcGraph has the forementioned in comments problem with cycled references. The solution is, to add some kind of “public function clean()” method, which would remove references in the object, and objects which were auto-generated by it, so it would later be cleaned-up by a garbage-collector. I implemented a quick-fix locally and it did help to some degreee, but I definitely missed some references, so it still leaked. I think that someone who knows internals of eZComponents better should do it.

Derick? Anyone? Can this be done?

PHP Vikinger was again a blast and you can find full coverage by the Norwegian PHP User Group at http://www.php.no/phpvikinger.

You’ll find details about topics like MySQL Native Driver (mysqlnd), PHP 6 and unicode, Xdebug and Image Creation with PHP.

I especially recommend you to listen to Zak Greant’s “The Age of Literate Machines - A Visionary Look at Free Software & Open Source“.

   My article about an introduction to ezcGraph was just published on ez.no. From the article:
"Among the additions to the latest eZ Components 2006.2 release is the Graph component, which enables you to create bar, line and pie charts. The output driver mechanism allows you to create different image file types from each chart, and the available renderers make the chart output customizable from simple two-dimensional charts to beautiful three-dimensional data projections. "

ezcGraph introduction article published on ez.no.

ezcGraph introduction article published on ez.no.