Posts about Development

Selenium is a great tool for automating browser based testing of web applications. This post is regarding the installation and configuration of Selenium with the excellent Jenkins Continuous Integration server.

There’s a lot of bad code about. We’ve all seen our fair share of it, and we frequently still do when we inherit projects from elsewhere.
We work with a lot of PHP, which has quite a reputation for bodgy hacked together, frankly horrible code - not entirely undeservedly, but that’s not the fault of the language - at least not anymore. The really low barrier to entry is both a blessing and a curse, but it’s surely our mission, as members of the PHP community to help raise that bar in terms of the standard of output. Some of the worst code happens when it’s author(s) haven’t stopped to think and analyse.

So far in my series of articles on design patterns in PHP we’ve looked at a creational pattern, a structural pattern and a behavioral pattern. Today I’ll be taking a closer look at another behavioral pattern - the observer. The observer pattern (also known as the Subscribe/Publish Pattern) is used to notify one object, the observer, about a change of state from another object, the subject.

I’ve got a fairly vanilla install of Snow Leopard (10.6) and use the default installations of PHP, MySQL, Apache, et al. Installing the Sphinx open source search engine and the PECL extension wasn’t too much of a pain, but would have been easier had i had the following notes to hand. :-p

Spam bots are annoying, there’s no question about that - they cost people money and, more importantly, time. So how do we stop form spam without using traditional captcha forms? Over the next few posts I'll be detailing the results of some research I've been conducting, as well as testing different methods of stopping form spam, or at the very least reducing it.

Continuing my series on PHP design patterns, today it’s the turn of the Decorator. In contrast to last week’s Strategy Pattern which is used to change the “guts” of a class, the Decorator Pattern is used to extend the behavior of a class with different functionality at run time. This is achieved by implementing a “decorator” class that implements the same interface as the object that you wish to “decorate” and wraps it’s content.

I couldn't find any recent surveys looking into the percentage of software development teams that make use of TDD, but i'd hazard a guess that it's probably not as high as it perhaps should be. I think there are a number of reasons for this, but it’s primarily all about the people. The technologies are here, you’ve just got to start using them - which begins by understanding why they should be used.

Last week's post about the Factory Method Pattern in PHP seemed to go down quite well so I thought I'd get onto another one fairly sharpish. So today i'll be talking about the Strategy Pattern, which to my mind, is one of the patterns that demonstrates beautiful encapsulation in OOP (Object Orientated Programming).

A design pattern is a template used by software engineers as a guideline of how to solve a particular problem. The term design pattern was first introduced to the software community in 1994 by the ‘Gang of Four’ or GOF (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides) in their book Design patterns, which is still relevant today.

We recently built a Javascript date time picker for a new site. This calendar was designed as a really integral part of the page so the traditional pop out style, as seen in a lot of existing solutions, or indeed in the new HTML5 specification for time selectors wasn't really appropriate.