PHP

Back when installing ZendStudio 5.5.0 on Ubuntu I sometimes had the following error:

An internal LaunchAnywhere application error has occured and this application cannot proceed. (LAX)

Stack Trace:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Malformed \uxxxx encoding.
at java.util.Properties.loadConvert(Unknown Source)
at java.util.Properties.load(Unknown Source)
at com.zerog.common.java.util.PropertiesUtil.loadProperties(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.lax.LAX.(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.lax.LAX.main(DashoA8113)

This is because the \u variable of bash (username in the prompt) is mistaken for an (illegal) \uXXXX unicode character.

After searching back then I found out (and back then it wasn't #1 hit on a google search) that you just have to temporarily alter your .bashrc:


(fa@don):(~) $ echo 'export PS1="# "' >> .bashrc
(fa@don):(~) $ source ~/.bashrc

then start the installer and after you're finished, removed the last line and source it again.

For another problem, see that posting.

Back from the PHP Unconference 2008 in Hamburg, so here's a little review. I arrived a little early so I didn't have to queue up for my checkin, but that problem was also solved soon for the rest. The voting for the suggested talks took a while, so we didn't start before lunch as planned, but at least that gave some time to meet and greet. After lunch I listened to one of Kris' excellent talk about MySQL Performance Tuning of which I'm sure he could've talked 3h more and it still wouldn't have been boring and then Secure PHP installations by Johann-Peter Hartmann which also had some stuff I hadn't thought of and from my impression some folks also had some a-ha experience.

In the evening we had some beers (or what they call beer in Hamburg) and excellent Chili Con Carne in the Recycel Bar. This went along with more chatting about the talks, own projects and PHP in general.

The second day started with Judith Andresen's talk about Intranets where we tried to get to a common understanding what we developers and customers especially think when they want to 'improve the intranet'. This led to some discussion which is summed up on the conference page (in German). After that I listened to Manuel Pichler and Sebastian Bergmann who talked about Continuous Integretion with phpUnderControl which was a good introduction to phpUnderControl for me, but I was missing details on the topic in general because I've done my share of work in this field lately - so not much new.
After that I attended PHP is not Java, a panel discussion lead by Gaylord Aulke, Johann-Peter Hartmann, Lars Strojny and Stefan Priebsch, that involved more into a discussion with the whole audience, but I think that sparked some even more interesting thoughts. Finally I went to Kore Nordmann who talked about Regular Expressions with the help of Thomas Weinert (who seems to have been bugged about the stalled progress of Weaverslave all the time :P). The talk was more introductory level, but also had some hints towards not-so-well-known features and even recursions and some theory with the proof via Pumping Lemma. Not much new to me, but very interesting nevertheless.
And so it ended and after a little sightseeing tour of Hamburg by Markus Wolff, who originally just planned to take us along to the central station.

To sum it up it was a very nice weekend, not only for the talks but especially for the discussions started in the talks and to meet some people I've known from online talk for years in person finally. Big Thank You! to all the people involved, the orga team for a near perfect event, Reinhard for WLAN access, the sponsoring of the yummy food and all the people I've had some nice chat with.

Should you ever need to work with XPath extensively, there's XPather for Firefox, that looks quite nice, but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work today, so I had to improvise. Then I stumpled across the very cool feature of xmllint, that lets you browse XML documents like directories.



And to not be completely offtopic, I'll admit that once I got my XPath expressions, I fed them to SimpleXML

(fa@donau):(~/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.0/bin) $ diff -u ZDE.orig ZDE
--- ZDE.orig 2007-10-23 14:09:19.000000000 +0200
+++ ZDE 2007-10-23 14:03:08.000000000 +0200
@@ -1692,6 +1692,7 @@
fi

debugOut ""
+options="$options -Dawt.toolkit=sun.awt.motif.MToolkit"
unset POSIXLY_CORRECT
if [ $DO_NOT_FORK ]
then

If you get a blank Zend Studio 5.5.0 window...

I've felt the need to both test both the Zend IDE and phpeclipse and so I made a little thing for practice and to fiddle around a bit.

First the Zend IDE made a good first impression, but I gave up soon. I wasn't able to work with a file of just 500 lines because it felt more frozen than sloppy. Default colors for highlighting were quite good and readable, that's a big +1. But it also has problems with a lines with both ' and " in it:
[geshi lang="php]echo 'hello '.$test."\n";[/geshi] is underlined in red and so are the following lines.

I was really surprised by phpeclipse, which I had last tested over a year ago and something wouldn't work and as I was (and still am) quite content with Weaverslave, I didn't check it out lately until now.

For larger projects I'll definitely use phpeclipse from now on - I'm used to using eclipse for Java anyways.

Just a very quick and rudimentary roundup, but imho especially an IDE shouldn't get in the programmer's way and do just what it should be - aid development.

Because I didn't know what to do and I've long searched for something like this, I'll started a quick hack of a directory parsing class, because I don't really find dir()
Output looks like this:



This is a var_dump output of an xDir object:



The code is available under svn.anderiasch.de - any comments welcome.

I'd appreciate any comments if I missed anything with similar behaviour (mainly something like Apache's directory index with a few extras like: "ignore by pattern", level of detail, etc) - perhaps even a PEAR class I overlooked?