Query7 » Web Development

This Week in Web – PHP Needs X, Python IDEs, Firefox5, jQuery Mobile, Python Games

logan — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 21:29:51 +0000

Firefox 5 Released

Mozilla have released Firefox 5.0 final. Some of the biggest changes are support for CSS animations, the addition of the do not track header and better HTML5 support. A list of features and changes that developers may find relevant can be found here. If you were a user of the Firefox 4 beta versions, Firefox should update to version 5 in the background. Otherwise you can download Firefox 5 from the downloads page.

jQuery Mobile Beta 1

The jQuery Mobile team is happy to announce the release of Beta 1. We’re proud of the refinements we’ve made to make jQuery Mobile faster, extensible and more compatible over the last 12 weeks and look forward to having more frequent releases as we work up to 1.0 in late summer. We’re planning on releasing a second Beta in about a month that will begin decoupling our code so you can include only the components you need, add greater extensibility to support dynamic JS-driven sites, and bring even broader device support.

Note that jQuery Mobile 1.0 will require jQuery core 1.6 as a baseline. Going forward, we’ll be supporting the two latest major versions of core but we’re starting with a cleaner baseline for launch.

Read a full list of features and changes here

Bejeweled Blitz Clone in Python

Al Sweigart, author of Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python has written a Bewjewled clone named Gemgem. It is powered by PyGame and is around 540 lines of commented code. It is available to download here [zip]. The Invent With Python blog is a great resource for those wanting to learn Python and PyGame. Sweigart has posted many games on it and continues to keep it updated.

PHP Needs X

The recent PHP Fork has lead to alot of discussion regarding the direction the PHP language is taking toward the future. Other dynamic languages such as Python, Lua and Ruby have been quick to add new features after consulting and discussing them with the community. PHP on the other hand has almost been the exact opposite, with PHP core developers making the majority of decisions themselves with little to no communication with the PHP user base. The folks over at Orchestra.io have created a web application that allows people to submit and vote on suggestions for the PHP language. Hopefully this will make clear to the PHP core developers exactly what the community would like to see in future versions of PHP.

PyCon 2011 IDE Panel

This Week in Web – SMF2, ZF2, Python Lamdas, Future of JS, Titanium 1.7

logan — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 20:01:16 +0000

Simple Machines Forum 2.0 Final

After being at Release Candidate stage for over two years, SMF 2.0 has now gone gold. Along with some minor bug fixes and security enhancements the biggest change is that SMF 2 is now licensed under the BSD License. SMF 1 and all previous SMF 2 RCs were licensed under a propriety ‘SMF License’ that prevented people from modifying the original SMF source and redistributing it themselves. With the change to the BSD license, SMF is on it’s way to becoming a mainstream open source project. Unfortunately development is still done in a private version control system.

Video: Future of Javascript

Jeremy Ashkenas and Brendan Eich talk about the future of Javascript at JSConf 2011.

Titanium Studio, Mobile SDK 1.7 Release

Appcelerator has released the final version of their Titanium Studio product and Mobile SDK version 1.7. A full list of changes to the Mobile SDK since the previous release can be found here.

Fastdev for Android speeds prototyping and testing by enabling local changes to become instantly available to your application while the simulator is running. This eliminates the time-consuming steps of packaging, building and deploying apps for each change.

New cross platform APIs for TCP/IP networking: Sockets and Streams, and supporting APIs for managing Buffers and Codecs.

Universal Binaries: develop a single app for deployment on iPhone and iPad

Major improvements related to memory management and memory leaks for iOS (both iPhone and iPad) which substantially improves stability and performance.

How Not To Use Lambdas in Python

e000 has posted a humorous guide on how you shouldn’t be using lambda functions in Python. It starts off with the fairly harmless:

pow = lambda x, power: x**power

And gets to:

(lambda flask:
    (lambda app:
        (app,
         app.route('/')(
            lambda: 'Hello World!'
         )
        )[0]
    )(flask.Flask('__name__')).run()
)(__import__('flask'))

Zend Framework 2.0.0dev3 Released

The Zend Framework team is pleased to announce the third development release of Zend Framework 2.0, 2.0.0dev3. It is immediately downloadable from the Zend Framework servers:

zip package

tar.gz package

NOTE! This release is not considered of production quality, and is released solely to provide a development snapshot for purposes of testing and research. Use at your own risk.

This release includes several features:

Refactoring of the Markup component

Refactoring of Zend\Tool and CodeGenerator to better accommodate namespaces

Merging of ZF 1.11.0 features into ZF2 (JSON and YAML Zend\Config adapters, etc.)

Migration and refactoring of the LiveDocx service

The new EventManager component

The proposed Dependency Injection component

Documentation is still in progress for several features, including the EventManager. A tutorial on the EventManager is available via this ZF2 tutorial slidedeck.

This release is primarily intended to solicit feedback and comments on the proposed Dependency Injection component. Documentation is provided on the wiki, which also contains a variety of use cases for which it was designed. Our goal is to develop a component that both promotes rapid application development as well as optimizes for performance in production. We’d love to get feedback from you on it.

source

This Week in Web -Django Hosting, Podcasts, Git Tutorials, Python Apps with Titanium

logan — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 08:19:20 +0000

Django Hosting Roundup

Over the last month and a half Ken Cochrane has been evaluating the different cloud webhosts for Django apps. In this summary post, Cochrane provides a useful table that compares features and prices of all cloud hosts as well as App Engine and Web Faction. Below are links to the individual host reviews.

Podcasts for Programmers, Developers and Web Designers

James Fuller has assembled a list of 8 podcasts that are aimed at web developers. The podcasts range from news discussions to entrepreneur interviews. In addition to the podcasts on the page I recommend TechZing. It’s a weekly podcast hosted by two freelance programmers who are both working part time on their own start ups. The show alternates between an interview with a web entrepreneur or programmer and a discussion about their startups and news.

Writing Titanium Desktop applications with Python

php-color

Harold Asbridge has written a class for PHP that allows easy manipulation and conversion of colors. The source is hosted on github.

$color1 = new Color(0xFFFFFF);

$color2 = new Color(0x888888);
$distance = $color1->getDistanceRgbFrom($color2);

This Week in Web – jQuery API, Python Video Archive, Symfony2 Beta, Heatmap.js

logan — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:49:58 +0000

I Don’t Like [Django] Class Based Generic View

John DeRosa has written a blog post detailing why he does not like class based generic views (which were introduced in Django 1.3). He is of the opinion that generic views should be very simple and require a minimal amount of code to use. Class based generic views require you to subclass the generic view and override particular methods and properties (such the name of the template). This is in contrast to the old “function style” generic views where all you needed to do was call method and pass in the appropriate parameters.

jQAPI.com

The jQuery documentation is great, very complete, nicely written and with a lot of examples and demos. The only thing that bugs me is the way we have to find the right documentation for what we search for. Try to search for the .is() function for example. Over 100 matches before the actual function I am looking for?! And it is a fixed layout which means even on my big screen I have to scroll all the way down and have to scan for it. There have to be a better way, obviously.

Just to make it clear, I only coded the navigation and re-styled the documentation. The content is the same as in the official documentation and all credits belong to the jQuery team. Keep up the great work!

Symfony2 Beta 2&3 Released

Over the last week the Symfony project has released beta versions 2 and 3 of the Symfony2 PHP Framework. These releases have focused on fixing bugs and improving the documentation. The following tutorials have also been published:

Symfony2 can be downloaded from here.

Python Miro Community

python.mirocommunity.org is a video archive and aggregator for Python related videos. Currently they have videos from the last 3 years of Pycon, 2 years of Djangocon as well as other smaller Python conferences. You can subscribe to the RSS feed of latest videos added to the site here.

Heatmap.js

Heatmap.js is an open source Javascript library written by Patrick Wied that can be used to generate web heatmaps. “Heatmap instances contain a store in order to colorize the heatmap based on relative data, which means if you’re adding only a single datapoint to the store it will be displayed as the hottest(red) spot, then adding another point with a higher count, it will dynamically recalculate”. Heatmap.js is a standalone library (it doesn’t rely on any frameworks).

This Week In Web – Python, NodeJS CMS, Google APIs, XDebug

logan — Fri, 27 May 2011 11:56:52 +0000

Writing Clean, Testable, High Quality Code in Python

Noah Gift, Python book author and Associate Director of Engineering at AT&T has written an article titled Writing Clean, Testable, High Quality Code in Python on IBM Developer Works. Gift primarily talks about good coding practices such as multiple small functions, test coverage and static analysis (with PyLint). Although all code in the article is Python, the lessons he teaches and topics he discusses can be applied to any dynamic language such as Javascript, PHP and Ruby. If you are relatively new to programming I recommend your read this article.

NodeJS Cheatsheet

The folks over at GoSquared have published a great NodeJS cheatsheet [pdf] [jpg].

Removal and Deprecation of some Google APIs

Following the standard deprecation period – often, as long as three years – some of the deprecated APIs will be shut down. The rest have no scheduled date for shutdown, but won’t get any new features. The policy for each deprecated API is specified in its documentation.

These APIs are now deprecated but have no scheduled shutdown date: Code Search API, Diacritize API, Feedburner APIs, Finance API, Power Meter API, Sidewiki API, Wave API
These APIs will be shut down as per their deprecation policies: Blog Search API, Books Data API and Books JavaScript API (not the new API), Image Search API, News Search API, Patent Search API, Safe Browsing API (v1 only), Translate API, Transliterate API, Video Search API, Virtual Keyboard API

Wherever possible, the documentation includes suggested alternatives designed to help you achieve similar functionality — whether it’s a new version or related offering. We hope these alternatives, along with lengthy deprecation periods, will help minimize the impact and allow us to focus on building great products together.

More info and links to APIs in the announcement.

XDebug PHP Talk

Talk given by Derick Rethans, developer of XDebug. It covers:

Getting up and running with XDebug
Interpreting XDebug output
Remote debugging, breakpoints
Finding bottlenecks

Calipso – NodeJS CMS

Calipso is an open source CMS project started by Clifton Cunningham. It runs on NodeJS and MongoDB and aims to be a high performance, extendible content publishing platform. Although usable, it is still in early stages of development and Cunningham is looking for more developers. The installation guide will help you get up and running with Calipso quickly and the module guide will give you an idea about the architecture of Calipso.

Resources for Learning Vim

logan — Mon, 23 May 2011 09:48:38 +0000

Over the last few months I’ve found myself using the Vim text editor an increasing amount. Below are some resources that I found particularly useful.

Venturing Into Vim

Jeffery Way, editor and author of Nettuts, has released a 4 part video tutorial series called Learning Vim From The Ground Up. The 4 videos total over 2 hours playtime and cost just $5. They are recorded on Mac OS X at a screen resolution of 1280×720. Way’s experience in screencasting really shows in these videos. He clearly communicates all of his points, step by step, at a good speed. These videos start with the assumption you know absolutely nothing about Vim so they are a great resource for a Vim user of any level.

Vim Cheatsheet

The folks at ViEmu.com (who produce Vim keybindings for MS Office and Visual Studio) have produced a printable Vim cheatsheet. The cheatsheet clearly lays out the lower and upper case functionality for each key as well as some general Vim commands. The text size and colour contrast makes it easy to read from a distance, I recommend you print it out.

VimCasts.org

Drew Neil produces short, focused Vim screencasts and posts them at VimCasts.org. They are typically 5-10 minutes in length and each focus on how to achieve or learn a particular feature of Vim. My favourite VimCast is about Synchronizing plugins with git submodules and pathogen. In it Neil walks you through setting up a directory which holds the .vimrc file and all vim plugins. He then shows how you can install Vim plugins as git submodules using the pathogen plugin for Vim.

vimtutor

vimtutor is an interactive learning application that comes bundled with Vim. It can be started by entering the command vimtutor into the shell. It should take a beginner around 30 minutes to complete. I recommend doing vimtutor daily until you can comfortably complete it without needing to actively think about the keys you are pressing.

Additional Reading

This Week in Web – jQuery Chrono, jMongoBrowser, PHP DI, Titanium

logan — Fri, 20 May 2011 10:49:14 +0000

jQuery Chrono

The jQuery Chrono plugin provides an easy, human-readable wrapper around the Javascript functions setTimeout() and setInterval().

Rather than writing:

setTimeout(function() { ... }, 5 * 60 * 1000);

You can write:

$.after(5, "minutes", function() { ... });

Likewise

setInterval(function(){ ... }, 60 * 60 * 1000);

becomes

$.every(1, "hour", function() { ... });

PyGame Examples

The Simpson College Computer Science Department has posted a collection of 15 GUI PyGame scripts. They range from drawing simple graphics onto the screen to full blown games with keyboard control. This is a great resource for those wanting to learn PyGame but don’t know where to start.

jMongoBrowser

jMongoBrowser is a cross platform GUI administration tool for MongoDB written in Java. It provides GUI tools that allow you to easily manage your databases, collections and documents. jMongoBrowser also allows you to execute queries and explore the returned data through the rich user interface.

Titanium Mobile SDK 1.7 RC1

Titanium Mobile SDK 1.7 Release Candidate 1 is now available, providing new functionality, enhancements and bug fixes across iOS and Android. Download and install the release candidate SDK to test drive the following new capabilities:

New cross-platform APIs for TCP/IP networking: Sockets and Streams, and supporting APIs for managing Buffers and Codecs.

Fastdev for Android speeds prototyping and testing by enabling local changes to be instantly available to your application. Fastdev eliminates the time-consuming steps of packaging, building and deploying apps with each change.

Universal Binaries: develop a single app for deployment on iPhone and iPad (requires use of Titanium Studio 1.0 Preview).

Improved memory management and stability, especially on iOS.

Read the Release Notes for additional details on all new features and improvements available in the release candidate.

Practical PHP Testing Patterns – Dependency Injection

As part of his Practical PHP Testing Patterns series Giorgio Sironi has written an article discussing Dependency Injection in PHP. I have read alot of articles about Dependency Injection in PHP and I found this article to be one of the better ones. Rather than focusing on a specific Dependency Injection implementation, Sironi talks about the different injection options available in PHP and shows an example of Dependency Injection being useful in a testing environment.

Kohana 3.1 Wiki Tutorial Routes

logan — Mon, 16 May 2011 07:39:43 +0000

In the original Kohana wiki application the URLs in the views were hardcoded. If we wanted to change the domain name or restructure a route we would need to go through the application and change every single URL.

Thankfully the Kohana Route class comes with a method url() which allows us to generate URLs to routes we have specified in the application. In the first tutorial we defined the following routes in application/bootstrap.php:

Route::set('wiki-edit', 'wiki//edit')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller'=> 'wiki',
		'action'	=> 'edit_page',
	));

Route::set('wiki-save', 'wiki//save')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller'=> 'wiki',
		'action'	=> 'save_page',
	));

Route::set('wiki-page', 'wiki/')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller'=> 'wiki',
		'action'	=> 'view_page',
	));

Route::set('default', 'wiki')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller' => 'wiki',
		'action'     => 'view_page',
		'id'		 => 'index',
	));

Before we can generate routes we need to set some configuration options in application/bootstrap.php (line ~82). We need to specify the base_url and index_file attributes in the array passed to Kohana::init(). The application on my local install is located at 127.0.0.1/query7kwiki/index.php, so my Kohana::init() statement would read:

Kohana::init(array(
	'base_url'   => '/query7kwiki/',
	'index_file' => 'index.php'
));

In application/views/edit.php the form action attribute was hardcoded to the value /query7kwiki/index.php/wiki/. That can be replaced by:

 $page)); ?>

In application/views/single.php there is a link to the edit that specific page. We can replace the href of the anchor tag with:

 $page)); ?>

In the view application/views/create.php change the href of the create page link to:

 $page)); ?>

The wiki application is now portable and can safely be moved to a different server without functionality breaking.

This week in web – Vim Python IDE, Silex, Dojo JS Classes, New Appengine Datastore API

logan — Fri, 13 May 2011 12:00:56 +0000

Python Appengine Datastore alternate API

Guido van Rossum has published a document detailing Datastore plus, a new Python API for the Google AppEngine Datastore. It beings by explaining the conventions and terminology used (Kind, Ancestor, Property) and then covers all classes and methods. The document is packed with examples of the API in use which makes it a really good learning tool. A printable API cheatsheet is provided at the bottom.

Also check out the new Appengine 1.5.0 API

Turning Vim into a modern Python IDE

John Anderson has written a detailed tutorial on setting up Vim for Python development. It covers the basics such as syntax highlighting and indentation through to the more complicated such as integrating pytest, git and virtualenv into Vim workflow. The finished vimrc file can be installed through the following:

git clone https://github.com/sontek/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles
./install.sh vim

Titanium Mobile Fastdev for Android

The idea behind Fastdev is simple: Instead of packaging, building, and deploying your app’s files every time you want to see a change, the application requests those files directly from a server running on your machine. This means that any changes that are made locally are instantly available to your application, and the need for a “stop the world” re-deploy is only necessary in very specific instances. On top of this, Fastdev is bi-directional — meaning you can control the app itself directly with the new titanium fastdev command. Right now, app control is limited to restarting and killing the app, but in the future this could be expanded to work in conjunction with our new debugger support to provide dynamic expression evaluation, and other awesome rapid development features.

JS Classes with Dojo

David Walsh has written a tutorial titled Classy Javascript with dojo.declare. It is part of the new Dojo 1.6 documentation. He begins by discussing how classes work and how they are loaded in Dojo and then goes into detail and explains how a developer can write and provide their own classes. He covers:

Inheritance (multiple)
Methods and properties
Constructors

Silex

Silex is a PHP microframework written by Igor Wiedler and Fabien Potencier. It makes use of several components from the Symfony2 framework and aims to be easy to both extend and test. Silex requires PHP 5.3+ and is distributed in the .phar format so it is easy to get up and running with quickly. A comprehensive usage guide is available here. Below is a hello world example:

require_once __DIR__.'/silex.phar'; 

$app = new Silex\Application(); 

$app->get('/hello/{name}', function($name) {
    return "Hello $name";
}); 

$app->run();

Kohana 3.1 Wiki Tutorial

logan — Mon, 09 May 2011 06:09:52 +0000

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a simple wiki using the PHP framework Kohana version 3.1. Several years ago Siddharta Govindaraj created a screencast demonstrating how to create a wiki using Django, this is essentially the Kohana version of that. It covers using Kohana’s Routing, ORM and MVC systems. Full source code of the application is available on github.

The wiki application has 3 different pages:

/wiki/somepage/save – handles the saving of the page
/wiki/somepage/edit – displays a form that allows the user to edit the page
/wiki/somepage – displays the page

Configuration

We will be using the ORM module to query the database for our wiki pages so we must load it in the application/bootstrap.php file (Line ~99).

Kohana::modules(array(

	'database'   => MODPATH.'database',   // Database access
	'orm'        => MODPATH.'orm',        // Object Relationship Mapping

	));

We also need to specify our database configuration settings. This is done in application/config/database.php.

 array
  	(
  		'type'       => 'mysql',
  		'connection' => array(
  			'hostname'   => '127.0.0.1',
  			'username'   => 'root',
  			'password'   => 'root',
  			'persistent' => FALSE,
  			'database'   => 'query7kwiki',
  		),
  		'table_prefix' => '',
  		'charset'      => 'utf8',
  		'caching'      => FALSE,
  		'profiling'    => TRUE,
  	),
  );

  ?>

Model

Compared to most ORMs (Django, Doctrine, Propel), Kohana’s ORM is relatively light. You don’t need to specify the fields of your table as the Kohana ORM doesn’t attempt to generate the tables for you. It simply maps attribute names of the model object to field names in the database table. Be sure to check the Kohana Documentation for a detailed explanation of the ORM.

application/classes/model/page.php

class Model_Page extends ORM
{

	protected $_table_name = 'page';

	public function rules()
	{
		return array(

			'title' => array(
						array('not_empty')
							)

		);
	}

}

Execute the following SQL:

CREATE TABLE `page` (
`id` INT( 11 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`title` VARCHAR( 255 ) NOT NULL ,
`content` TEXT NOT NULL
) ENGINE = MYISAM ;

Routing

I define all routes at the bottom of application/bootstrap.php, however if you are working on a large application it may beneficial in the long run to define them in a separate file and then include them into the bootstrap file.

Route::set() accepts 2 parameters. The first is the name of the route and the second is the URI pattern it should match. Because Route::set() returns an instance of Kohana_Route, we can chain the defaults method onto it. There we specify the controller and action that should be executed if the route is matched.

The section of the URI pattern is captured from the URI and automatically passed to the controller method as an argument.

Route::set('wiki-edit', 'wiki//edit')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller'=> 'wiki',
		'action'	=> 'edit_page',
	));

Route::set('wiki-save', 'wiki//save')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller'=> 'wiki',
		'action'	=> 'save_page',
	));

Route::set('wiki-page', 'wiki/')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller'=> 'wiki',
		'action'	=> 'view_page',
	));

Route::set('default', 'wiki')
	->defaults(array(
		'controller' => 'wiki',
		'action'     => 'view_page',
		'id'		 => 'index',
	));

Views

Read this tutorial on generating domain-independent, non hardcoded URLs

application/views/single.php


	
		<?php echo $page; ?>
	

	

		
		
			
		
		
		
			Edit

application/views/create.php


	
		<?php echo $page; ?> - Create
	

	

		
		This page does not exist. Create?

application/views/edit.php


	
		<?php echo $page; ?> - Edit
	

	

		 - Edit
		
			


				<?php echo $content; ?>

Controller

The wiki only has one controller, Controller_Wiki, located in application/classes/controller/wiki.php. All of the methods accept one parameter, the name of the page which is automatically passed by the URL Router.

The action_view_page() method will display the wiki page if it exists or a ‘create’ page if it does not exist. $single->loaded() will return true if the ORM returned a result, so if the page exists we load the ‘single’ view and attach the appropriate variables to the view, if it does not exist then we load the ‘create’ view.

public function action_view_page($page)
{

	$single = ORM::factory('page')
			->where('title', '=', $page)
			->find();

	if($single->loaded())
	{
		$v = View::factory('single');
		$v->page = $page;
		$v->content = $single->content;
				}
	else
	{
		$v = View::factory('create');
		$v->page = $page;
	}

	$this->response->body($v);

}

action_edit_page() returns the ‘edit’ page with the correct content field.

public function action_edit_page($page)
{
	$single = ORM::factory('page')
			->where('title', '=', $page)
			->find();

	if($single->loaded())
	{
		$content = $single->content;
	}
	else
	{
		$content = '';
	}

	$v = View::factory('edit');
	$v->page = $page;
	$v->content = $content;

	$this->response->body($v);
}

action_save_page() handles saving the page after the user submits the edit form. It first checks to see if the page exists. If it does exist then we update the content attribute of the model with whatever was posted in the form. If it doesn’t exist then we make a new page by instantiating a new model, assigning the title and content attributes and saving it.

public function action_save_page($page)
{
	$single = ORM::factory('page')
			->where('title', '=', $page)
			->find();

	$content = $this->request->post('content');

	if($single->loaded())
	{
		$single->content = $content;
		$single->save();
	}
	else
	{
		$new_single = new Model_Page();
		$new_single->title = $page;
		$new_single->content = $content;
		$new_single->save();
	}

	$this->request->redirect('http://127.0.0.1/query7kwiki/index.php/wiki/' . $page);

}

Full source code of the application is available on Github.