Sonntag, 28. Oktober 2012

I will outsource (almost) everything!

Yesterday evening, playing around with the bitbucket issue tracker that comes with each repository, I realized what a fool I was for setting up a git server for our startup, PicturePlix. I realized that hosting your own mantis setup is just plain wrong. The same is true for the wiki and many apps more. Let me tell you why.

Samstag, 20. Oktober 2012

Living on the edge

Everyday development for a company usually involves using stable libraries which are in use for some time. Companies have (valid) requests to only use software which is reliable, without major bugs and well documented. So even when you can introduce a new library/tool, you'll most likely be able to work with it pretty flawless.

When you are on your own, coding away for fun or some weekend project, you can dive into bleeding edge technology, using alpha/beta software like crazy and get away with it. Why you ask? Because it's fun and you'll get a better developer.

Montag, 15. Oktober 2012

Build systems > Own scripts

For a long time I though build systems are overhead. You can always write a (insert language of your choice here) script and run it to test or build your software.

Setting up phing to build and test a symfony 2 project of mine really showed me the value: These systems (for example ant, a java build tool very well known) are designed to do exactly this one task, and they are designed to do it very good.

Sonntag, 7. Oktober 2012

symfony2: Testing secure pages

If you develop a web application, more often than not you have some kind of user section or admin panel where some kind of login identifies the user and protects your actions against usage from unauthorized people. It can be difficult to do functional tests with this kind of pages as you need to simulate some session or cookie context.

In this tutorial, I want to show you how to test your functional pages with symfony2 and phpunit. If you are experienced, this cookbook explanation might be sufficient: How to simulate HTTP Authentication in a Functional Test. For me it wasn't, first because I didn't found it and second because it is very short.