A fruity Blog

Design patterns - Decorators

2006-10-20T18:54:00.000+01:00

Ahhhhh. Just back from Italliana and fully charged full of new freshly squeezed programming zest. While on my little trip around Napoli I was graced with much amazing pizza and pasta which helped me relax my mind into the higher zen ways of design patterns. A work mate lent me a book of high level design pattern abstractions and interpretations to mull over while journeying and a lot of things have finally started falling into place in the original design of the php classes. Although I'm only half way through the book the Strategy,observer,decorator and factory pattern have all been covered, all of which I have encountered in the past. In my code I've been using decorators to levy the functionality of existing components with added tids bits without tying them into tight coupling.

The thing I didn't realise was that this concept can be taken further to build up functionality in layers of inheritance, invisible to the high level code. For instance if I have a calendar month that needs to be displayed in a variety of different ways there should always be one base class that extends the original month decorator. So say a month is a text month of events as opposed to an HTML or XML month of events that had to be built to enable the functionality of text readers. The text month of events would not need the extra tags HTML and XML will need surrounding the text. The HTML will have all the ability of the text version's display but also will add in surrounding tags to the source. Before I knew this I was making a manager that would deal with different 'instances' of certain kinds of decorated calendar month. A bit backwards, but I know better now.

Also just had a small revelation that I was coupling my event too tightly to a calendar day.

Current status

2006-10-02T00:17:00.000+01:00

I've only recently saw any value in updating my log since I've just started making any progress. Going back to the start over my original code is both fun and torturous. I'm making some good progress and I'm pretty confident I'll have a working distributable version of fruity out for christmas. So far I've got a few new classes and a few redundant ones. I'm leaving all of the artist and venue management stuff just now and will include it as a plugin probably in the next version.

I've written a whole bunch of installation test classes that I will continue to maintain as I think i will be a great way to show if you have actually got everything installed correctly. It may be pretty obvious to some but I think if peeps start editing the files and stuff it will be one less load of things that could slip through the debugging net.

As for the actual code I've written these test classes:
TestConfig.php
TestDateMgr.php
TestEvent.php
TestEventMgr.php

I've only just found out how to make proper mock objects in simpletest so I'll take another day or two with the existing tests to make them into the correct mocks instead of just using canned data form a hardcoded Mock class. I'm really busy just now on other projects and commitments so I'll probably stumble at this point until next month. After I have the eventMgr classe working I'll ge tteh display and auth working and I'll be right back to having a viewable page :)

Events and the 'decorator' pattern

2006-10-02T00:04:00.000+01:00

The post pror to this one was done when I was round at a mates and very much confused and isolated from the internet so I posted it later. Heres the deal. The 'Events' have all unwittingly tried to implement the decorator pattern when I was just plugging away but I didn't know what they were so didn't understand how it was architected. Basically for all those not in the design pattern 'know', a decorator is the term given to a pattern that instantiates a class below it but adds a new level of functionality to it. This is to save continuous subclassing. So for example, if you have a picture you could use the BorderDecorator to put a border round it and a FrameDecorator to mount it on a frame. Its basically just layering in small steps without changing the initial class.

What the Hell is all this?

2006-10-01T23:53:00.000+01:00

I'm looking at this code and I'm wondering what the hell some of it does. Why the heck have I got these Calendar Decorators as parameters to the events? When I originally wrote the code I was none the wiser about design patterns so I just tied it in anyway I could to make it work. I've ended up with this which is now something of a muddled hodge podge. Dearie me.

Woooooo TestsARific

2006-09-28T01:09:00.000+01:00

I'm certainly cooking with gass now. It has taken a Long time but I have finally got right into the swing of things. i can now say that i can confidently pump out labout three methods a night with tests and all. I've Made an Test install class that will test all the configured classes against those that are installed and give out if they are all ok. Then I've Made a fully equipped date manager. I feel a bit like I'm reinventing the wheel anytime I go near dates but I think its important to revisit all my old code and refactor it as much as I can. Now I've got all of my old dateMgr class tested I've got to get this back into subversion.

A late post

2006-09-28T01:04:00.000+01:00

Ah dear I seem to have lost the rhythm, its been a few weeks since I last posted but its certainly no because I didn't want to work on fruity its just because life gets in the way.

Annoyingly I've been trying to make a class that keeps a persistent DB connection but its just not been for happening. I think its probably mostly down to my understanding of the syntax because the majority of my time has been spent weeding out errors. I've written an extended html reporter for simpletest and have started on the installation tests so I feel a bit better. The reason it took so long was just because I didn't understand that you had to connect to the database before every query. There must be much more efficient ways of doing this but I'll leave that to the future and just start making some progress. Wow this really was a padding post. But here I go, here I go, here I, here I go, Yo!

---I made this ages ago but it just sat on my desktop and didn't get posted to the blog.

De do up de

2006-08-24T01:37:00.000+01:00

I know man, I know. Pretty shoddy Kev pretty shoddy. But I'm getting round to giving it a make over and its getting late. I tried to do it on my macbook and just completely failed. But Css is familiar ground so I thought I'd just spend an hour or so giving the place a lick of paint.

An Agile approach

2006-08-21T01:20:00.000+01:00

Dash. I had a whole train journey but no laptop because I forgot my frigg'n AC adaptor. But it got me to thinking how I'm actually going to go about adapting fruity into a real project. I'm going to have to decise proper tests for everything and for what its worth I don't think The exisiting code is so amazing that I couldn't just rewrite the thing with the grace of hindsight and experience. I'll be able to save alot of the logic in the code which is the main thing. I'm going to try and adopt an agile approach as best I can and build based off of the user stories. So I'm right back to "User can view a Calendar". Yeah so I'm goign to do that...if none of this reads well ah well. I'm watching the Texas Texas Massacre documentary off of the special edition. Yeah pretty damn good.

Dev Setup - Mac finally up

2006-08-21T01:13:00.000+01:00

(Actually Friday 18th)
Woooooooo. It's up and running! All it was that my include paths were not set up correctly so I should have known that. At the mo I'm just tearing ahead and working with a different development environment setup so I can start testing. I'll have to change all of the config files back so they don't soley rely on the php.ini's include settiings as this isn't the most user friendly of solutions. The best idea is to have a load of constants in the class_Config.

Dev Setup: Mac /Mamp/ Pear Installation dir where are you?

2006-08-18T00:58:00.000+01:00

Okay I type:
$pear list
and I can see that DB and others are installed but God knows where they actually are installed to. I'm searching for DB.php but to no avail. Its a bit troublesome when trying to include them.

*Edit* 10:57pm
Right So I tried to track down the PEAR packages and failed. So I thought I'd just copy over the whoe folder into my eclipse workspace and reference the files directly. For some reason even when I'm doing this it wouldn't go further than one folder deep into the hierarchy so I dumped that aswell. I'me trying to get my index page working by gradually adding the includes that it uses but when I add the one for PEAR/Calendar/Month/Months.php it just gives me an empty screen... I've just had a thought. Maybe the pear that my machine is using is not the mamp one. That would explain the lack of packages in the directory.

*Edit* 23:09pm
Oh you Beauty that was it! On the down side that means I'm running a useless server everytime I boot From when I messed up my original attempts to install apache and stuff.

*Edit* 00:55pm
Hmm Well PEAR is definely installed but I don't know why my classes aren't generating the table. Its not like there is any output errors to go on either. It doesn't seem to like my Auth class very much. When I go Sess->start() it freezes up. What could that be then?

Righty I'm going to do this on the train down to my girlies tomorrow and I'll see if I can make any progress then. Nighty. x

Dev Setup: Mac Eclipse PHPUnit

2006-08-15T23:53:00.000+01:00

Woo dearie. Thats me just got all my required PEAR packages installed, take a deep breath:

Date
Calendar-beta
Auth
Mail
DB
PHPUnit
xml_parser
xml_util
soap-beta
HTTP_Request
Net_URL
Net_Socket
PHP_Unit
XML_RPC

...and exhale. "!But Kevin surely you are introducing far too many dependancies?!" I hear you cry. No no my good cherub don't you worr you're little head. You see I figure I need my application to do a lot of things fast and I'll be damned if I'm reinventing the wheel. So I'll be basing every step of my architecture on something else and the fastest most stable base from me to start from would be PEAR. I know not everyone is a big fan of the PEAR repositories but the fact is that they are there and loads of peeps have acces to them. If loads of PEAR packages end up being included in distributions then I'll just have to bundle them with copyright and kudos where due.

I also installed:
PHPEclipse (php eclipse plugin)
PHPUnit (The simpleTest eclipse plugin)
Had to make a php.ini for phpUnit since mamp and indeed the mac doesn't use it.

And got a green bar! ooooh oooooh oooh suit you sir. I know this is taking an age. But the fact is that I'm new to setting any development environment up in general. Next time I come to do this I'll have this whole blog entry as a reference and will be able to get it done snip snap.

Dev Setup: PHP / Mac / Apache Celebrations

2006-08-15T21:54:00.000+01:00

Thank you wonderful mamp people.

http://www.mamp.info/

Check, check, check, check, check it out. These wonderful peeps have gifted me the last piece of the puzzle. I now have the fecking set up done on my most wonderful macbook and I can develop while on the run. So Check it out man. I am currently chilling in my living room writing into my dev blog via a widget on my dashboard about how fecking excellent it is to be progging on this god sent machine. *Happy*

Dev Setup - Eclipse productivity hill

2006-08-08T23:46:00.000+01:00

Super multi platform, scalable plugin architecture, "will surely save the world" IDE strikes again. I don't know about other peeps but I have nothing but problems with Eclipse project setups they are just so fidgety. But the more I do them the faster they become and the more I find its easier to just start again than to fix a crazy plugin fault. The workspaces are cool IF they work consistently. I had a workspace in a completely different place in my local drive. I then installed simplePHP plugin from a folder on my desktop. Everything seemed to work fine and I was a happy chappy. Until one dredful day later I opened my other workspace deeper within the hierarchy of my machine. When I tried to run test it complained that the tests from the other workspace were missing. So I got rid of the other work space. Then ran it again but it still complained, so I got rid of the folder from my desktop thinking there may be something connecting it to the initial installation folder. Nope still not working. I think whats happened are .project files have got mixed up. You've got to admit Eclipse is such a buggy buggy bastard. Nusiance. I'll just start again.

Oh and the way I've got subversion working (svn+ssh) doesn't seem to be working in Subclipse. Dash.

Dev Setup: Tackling the repository or not so.

2006-08-07T22:13:00.000+01:00

Ok so here I am trying to get a subversion repository working on my VPS via SSH and 'Tortoise svn' and I am failing. They kick me so hard in the teeth again and again. I crawl around their feet as they laugh mockingly at my pathetic repeated attmpts to setup user accounts and then somehow lose them within the depths of this alien hierarchy of files. Damn you unatainable goal, damn you.

For some reason I can't track down where my blinking users accounts are being created. I'm just such a unix newb. Where do they go oh mysterious vps? When I create the accounts via the control panel its all fine and dandy you'd think they's just go in home/'name' but no, god knows where they are. No, scrub that they go to '/var/www/vhosts/...' which is all a bit new and confusing. Well they didn't work when I tried to get the repository from there so I've resorted to creating a repository at root which is silly yes but theres certainly more getting done by being silly than sitting around whining that I can't get it to work in the right place. At least I've got the bloody thing backed up for as much of a nusiance as it is.

--edit* I finally got them working in a user account logging in via root. I guess until I can figure out the permissions that will have to do. Ah, finally I am uploading all my docs into a safe house. Heres the format:

trunk/
|-data/
|-db/
|-doc/
|-src/
|-vendor/

Oh how sweet to finally have it there. Phew. Not perfect but its a green bar.

Action: Got the repository sorted and working.

Heres some resources on the topc:
http://www.tortoisesvn.net/
http://forums.asmallorange.com/index.php?showtopic=2803
http://www.logemann.org/day/archives/000099.html
http://www.developingprogrammers.com/index.php/2005/11/24/cvs-and-subversion-combined-tutorial
http://cheminfo.informatics.indiana.edu/~rguha/misc/svnapache.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/05/12/FreeBSD_Basics.html

I'd love to do more but I've gotta read for work :( yah booooooo.

PHP refactoring sucks

2006-08-06T23:14:00.000+01:00

Well I've started cleaning up to try and make the code at least readable before I have anyone else looking at it. But man its a slog. Refactoring in php is basically a very long copy, search, paste loop. I've been coding in Java pretty much solid for the past three months and to be deprived of refactoring tools is rubbish. It just takes forever to trawl through the source for conflicts. Slow slow slow. Someone take note and get some refactoring efforts on the go. I'l big you up or something.

Anyway I've basically been renaming everything to bring it into line with some common code conventions like capitals for class names, pre-initialising variables and declaring them private/public/inherited as opposed to the defunct and essentially meaningless 'var'. Maybe there is a more effective way to refactor in PHPEclipse, please suggest something because the switching to the java view doesn't seem to work.

Cleaning up behind me

2006-08-06T04:06:00.000+01:00

Before I make my first commit to the repository I'm going to clean it up. Because right now its such a mess its unreal. I don't mean I'll write tests for all of the existing code but I'll at least bring it up to scratch with PHP5 conventions. So basically today I started breaking bits into includes and constants. Putting them in rather than a squillion repeated lines would probably be appreciated. I just really did this to get it done before but now that I want to do it well I have no excuse for leaving such a mess brhind me.

Dev Setup - First tests

2006-08-05T15:00:00.000+01:00

Installed PHPUnit into Eclipse as a plugin. It turns out that PHPUnit is already in the 'Simpletest' plugin but just hasn't been renamed. Also for some reason it looks like I have three versions of Apache all fighting to make my localhost. Which was a reason why earlier I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get to any pages outside of the default www/ directory.

Now I'm going to start converting my original 'tests' I made at college into tests that are based upon the PHPUnit framework.

Dev Setup Online Docs

2006-08-05T14:47:00.000+01:00

Its obviously pretty important to document what you are doing and the easiest way I can think to do that is keep a blog and a list of things to do. I think Basecamp is the natural choice. I've wanted to properly use it for a while anyway.

Actions: Setup Online Docs
http://ihaveasoul.updatelog.com/

Dev Setup - Windows Box, PHPUnit, Eclipse.... and ma boabie.

2006-08-02T22:40:00.000+01:00

Right I have got a little side tracked with my Macbook because it's the best Laptop a boy could wish for. Thats right, you ultra thin premaddonas got nothing on my Macbook. I love it. I'm going to call it 'Boabie'. And its a pleasure to whip it out and play with every chance I get. I see peeps looking over their shoulders and staring in wonder at the pure beauty of ma 'boabie'. It's not huge its just a great looking; great sized, high performance, testament of engineering excellence.

Anyway, again side tracked. Although I'm all for the Mac as my main development platform but I have to face the fact I'm a relative Unix newb and I keep fucking everything up. So getting with what I know I've set up Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL4 on my windows machine so I have a fall back plan until I get my mac up to speed. Just installing Eclipse and PHPUnit the now and I think I'll make a start on unit tests for fruity tonight.

Edit:01:02am Yeah Boyeee. There was a bit of a struggle to get stuff installed as per because I had to set "stuff" up. PEAR does not come pre installed in wamp and so I had to install PEAR which was a pretty easy process.
Heres a post on the subject:
http://codewalkers.com/forum/index.php?action=displaythread&forum=pear&id=65&realm=default

Basically you just navigate to the wamp folder and execute go-pear.bat in the console. Then you have to set up the environment variables, but thats done mostly automatically in the set up script. I went and accidently uninstalled a previous working version of a testing suite for php but now I'd like to use PHPUnit. There doesn't seem to be a plugin for eclipse but I've gotta bed so gotta go, gotta go.

ACTIONS:
Installed Eclipse 2, PHPEclipse
Installed PEAR and PHPUnit within the PEAR packages.

TO DO: Get the PHPUnit test suite where ever it may be.

Dev setup - localhost macbook

2006-07-31T00:08:00.000+01:00

Darn It seems I may have spoke too soon. The server is all set up and ready to go and now my localhost is well and truly duffered. After getting apache 2 on my mac running smoothly I attempted to install php. That messed eveything up and now I'm left with a messy directory and no localhost. Darn. I'll have to consider my next move.

So to surmise I now have a Server running PHP5, mysql4 and subversion; meanwhile I have a localhost that is absolutely duffered. So I need to reinstall apache again and then get php, mySql and phpunit on it. *sigh*

Dev setup - More levelling up

2006-07-30T00:49:00.000+01:00

My god there was a lot of advancment today. I actuallly managed to get apache2 set up on my macbook as opposed to the default apache1. Doesn't sound like much but after the past pollavah I'm really thankfull it went so well and I have this guy to thank for the easy ride:
Step by step installation of the development environment on a macbook

I'm trying my best to standardise my development tool across all the platforms and hence using apache2 as opposed to 1. Next its mySql and then PHP5

Dev Setup - Server upgrade

2006-07-29T19:16:00.000+01:00

Ok Definelty a day not wasted. Upgraded the Operating system to centOS4/fedora 4 with plesk. Also got PHP5 installed and mysql4. They even offered to install subversion! Big hats off to Solar VPS for thier very timely assistance it was much appreciated and I'll recommend them in future.

Dev Setup - Bloody Bloody Server

2006-07-29T14:34:00.000+01:00

Can't get the bloody code repository to work bloody bloody thing.
So heres the plan. Man, its a plan. I'm sitting round here with Rob and we're going to make it work. Thats the plan.

So here some more details on "The plan". I'm installing Apache2 onto the VPS along with the default Apache1. I know this is a drain on system resources and doesn't make much sens from a secuity point of view but man, I just want it working.

We're going to sit here and try to get an HTML page out from port port 8080 where I'll put apache2. Then that will be it working and then I'll worry about subversion.

--Edit 5:19pm
Right Well thats an awful lot of legwork I did there just to understand where all the problems lay. But after a little investigation I've got to grips with what may be the problem. I installed Apache2 via a the tarball using the ./congure, make, make install, make clean. I then did all the appropriate config in the httpd.conf but alas there was no joy.

It seemed that the installed version of apache2 was calling upon the apachectl in the usr/sbin that the apache1 was using. I hit the IRC channels with some questions and so I have to give big props to 'megaspaz' for putting me on the right path. He concluded to the best of his knowledge that it may be a problem when I am originally instlalling apache since they will be using something called apxs. Something to do with a conflicting state of apxs during the install with the make command and then a continued confliction. Sooooooo. guess what I just gave up. I've asked my vps host to just rip out the existing apache and put in an apache2 installation. and from there maybe I'll have more luck.

Meeting 25/07/06

2006-07-27T00:06:00.000+01:00

Ok well me and Ross met to go over some of the stuff about what we plan to do which I can't be arsed writing all about here just now. Instead I'll just put up a load of points we touched on:

Planning: No huge Docs; Xplanner or some sort of rapid documentation; Schedules and milestones; Blogs, podcasts; Headsets; Meetings - Skype; make ourselves always available

Domain Names

Directory Layout

Code Layout

SSh / FTP / control access

Test Driven: Advantages; How to test; Keeps it new; How to arrange tests

IDEs: Refactor tools; Shortcuts; Integration; Plugins; Languages; Bugs; ANT

Repository: Subversion; Subclipse; Process; Concepts; Setup

API: fruity/codetalk; between sites; importance of reuse; screen scraping; xml/xslt; RSS; open APIs

PHP5

Certification

MySQL

packages

Frameworks

SPRING

Phew.

Kevin - Here we go.

2006-06-26T00:02:00.000+01:00

Hey there, I've just started this blog so that I have a place to store my thoughts openly while I get to grips with the whole development thing.

I need a good diary of activities and until I figure it out this will do fine. Tonight I'm just looking into PHPunit testing because I'm using unit testing elsewhere and I realize its definetly the best way to go.

This seems like a good start:
http://phpunit.de/wiki/Main_Page

and heres a wiki on the subject:
http://wiki.cc/php/Unit_testing

I'm going to spend the next hour going over it and see whats what.

0:32 - Ok had a read and I've decided to go With Eclipse since I've been using it for Java development with Junit. Turns out that the same peeps who make Junit make a PHPUnit as well so that sounds pretty handy. I'm just going to stick to what I know a little about as much as I can to give me a firm footing into this new territory.

Actions
--------
Researched PHPUnit
Downloaded/installed Eclipse

To continue
-------------
*Install PHPUnit
*Install The Runtime environment to work with Eclipse (since it doesn't recognise its there.)
*Install PHP Eclipse