Jeroens blog

About a year back I decided I had to change my development environment from working on a remote server with a simple text editor to something more solid, if I wanted to do serious PHP development.

I went for Eclipse as IDE, which is without a doubt the most awesome IDE out there, as it’s completely open source, robust, and has a lot of extensions that make it usable for an awful lot of languages. For PHP there is the open source PHP Development Tools Project, and the commercial Eclipse based IDE build on top of this, Zend Studio. At that point having my development environment as mobile as possible was rather important, as I often occupied machines other then my laptop or my own desktop. Therefore I put both Eclipse and my server on an usb.

Now, a year later, a lot has changed, and I finally updated my tools accordingly. First of all, I’m now also using Linux, and plan to leave Windows into the dust bin soon, so prefer tools that work on both operating systems. Secondly, I now only develop on my laptop and own desktop machine, so portability is not as important any more. Also, I’m now doing a lot more serious PHP development as I was doing a year ago, and would benefit a lot from more decent debugging, testing and profiling tools.

What I did was throwing out my mobile web server and install Zend Studio, together with Zend Server Community Edition (which is free). They integrate in such a way that you can do code tracing, work with breakpoints, profile code, ect, all out of the box. If you are developing PHP applications like me and in search for a good tool, I can definitely recommend this. Zend Studio isn’t free, but it’s worth the price. Not going into a complete list of awesome stuff PDT and Zend Studio include, but this blog post, although a little dates, does a good job at it.

It’ll take me a while to integrate these features into my work-flow, as I’m not used to having them available, but I expect this to start paying off rather soon then late Also waiting on a new release of Zend Studio build on Eclipse 3.6 (Helios).

(O yeah, can’t write a post about Eclipse without saying: NetBeans fails )

I’ve been “switching” to linux for about 2 months now, and am making this post because I feel that at this point I can just drop Windows while continuing to develop and do other stuff at a normal rate.

I’ve finally made the dicision to switch to Linux after being semi-lynched for using Windows at the local hackerspaces for a while and then finally my windows install failing fatally, requiring me to re-install. I got so tired of the ridiculous Windows bootloader and all other Windows crap I decided to give Ubuntu a go, as Lucid Lynx, the 10.04 LTS release, was just out. Soon after having messed with most basics, I decided to try out KDE, as Gnome was lacking some Windows 7 window manager like features. I then sicked with KDE as I find the window manager a lot better, as you can drag windows to a side of a screen to pack them there, or to the top to maximise, and can lock windows and applications to a certain virtual desktop, or make them appear there initially, which saves you moving around all your startup applications every time you login.

It took me quite a while to set up my whole dev environment, as I was not familiar with quite some of the needed apps, and more significantly, had next to no command line experience. I used to think command lines where evil, as clicking buttons works out of the box, while for the command line you have to learn the commands. Although this is true to some extend, I now love command line, as it allows you to chain scripts together, and even write your own, which you obviously can’t do with a GUI app. The self-written script I’m enjoying the most at the moment is one that svn updates my MediaWiki trunk and several MediaWiki tags, and then loops through my MW extension directory to update all extensions there. Similarly, I have a script that svn commits all that stuff. A lot faster (and more awesome) then doing it via TortoiseSVN on Windows!

The most notable application switch I needed to make was getting rid of U3 and RoboForm2Go, which I’m rather happy I finally did. U3 is a portable applications platform that runs only on Windows and was nice when it came out, but then all development of apps for it failed. RoboForm2Go is a portable, U3 version, of RoboForm, a rather nice cross-browser plugin (but not for Chrome ), that inserts a toolbar into your browser that stores bookmars and ‘passcards’. I have now switched to using Mozilla Sync (part of Mozilla Weave), or rather Firefox Sync, as it was recently renamed, which is a Firefox plugin that synchronizes user data such as bookmarks, history and passwords between different Firefox installs. It’s an awesome plugin, as the data is encrypted in such a way you are the only one that can decode it (Mozilla can’t, so no privacy issues) and is developed by one of the awesomest orgs out there, which is the Mozilla Foundation. As this does not run on other browsers (I hope it soon will, at least for Chrome), and does not work offline on a machine where you don’t have your data synchronized yet, I’m also using KeePass, a cool password manager, which has a port that works on Linux, called KeePassX, to store all my passwords and user names. To have security on my usb stick, instead of the U3 lock, I’m now using TrueCrypt, a cross-platform on-the-fly encryption application. I’m very happy with it, as it provides theoretical security by really encrypting the data, where U3 only locks access to your drive partition, and have also encrypted most of the partitions I have on my external hard drives (~1.5TiB encrypted now). It requires a virtual partition to mount each encrypted one on, which eats up drive letters on Windows, proving drive letters totally suck.

I’m having issues with getting (k)ubuntu to work nicely on my dual screen desktop machine though, which is making me stick to windows there for the moment. I’m going to put some more effort in fully switching to Kubuntu after my GSoC project has ended.

Now I can call people Windows-fags – yay!

Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6.4 are now available for download. This release contains several new features, amongst which basic KML support for Google Maps, a new OSM service implementation and re-added service links support to the Geographical Coordinates data-type in Semantic Maps. Everyone running 0.6.2 or older is advised to upgrade as soon as possible.

Lets have a closer look at some of the changes:

• The Google Maps (v2) service now has a KML parameter, which allows you to specify one or more KML files to use. Files are separated with comma’s. The base for this feature was submitted by Andy Chow, who created it for Transit Unlimited wiki. A neat example of a map there using KML is this one. Thanks for the patch Andy!
• There again is an OpenStreetMap service, although this one is different from the one that got removed in 0.6. The implementation is done by embedding (in an iframe) a page from the WMF toolserver, which renders a map with OSM tiles and Wikipedia overlay. Example. It’s basically the same what’s done on the German Wikipedia. Credits here go to Tim Alder and all other people who are making the awesome toolserver stuff work. The reason the creation of the map is not done on the server running the MediaWiki installation itself is that it’s rather difficult to fetch the Wikipedia layer from the toolsever. Hopefully a solution is found for this, as that would be a lot cooler for non WMF usage.
• I re-added service links support for the Geographical Coordinates data-type in Semantic Maps after someone requested this. It got removed in 0.6, as the old implementation was not working anymore, and I was unsure at that point how to create a new one. You can find the updated documentation on this here, although the examples are not working yet (semantic-mediawiki.org is using an alpha of 0.6). I will migrate the examples to the mapping documentation wiki at some later date.
• OpenLayers i18n (translation of the controls) should now be working. A style fix has also been made which caused OpenLayers to render badly in Chrome.
• Multiple small bugfixes have been made in both extensions, and a few in Validator. I guess this is now be the most stable release to date yet, so be sure to upgrade!

For a full list of changes since 0.6.3 see changes to Maps and changes to SM.

Downloads

• Maps 0.6.4: zip, 7z
• Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6.4: zip, 7z

See also

• The release notes on the documentation wiki

Andy Chow

Two days I go I got the beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010, which is scheduled to be released in the first half of next year. With it, came .Net Framework 4 beta 2. I’ve taken a good look at the changes in these new versions, and am really excited about the new features included in them.

The new WPF interface of VS is obviously cool, but it includes heaps of improvements, making life for the user easier. I’m still in the process of finding all goodies

The changes in the new .Net Framework are even more exciting. It includes a new parallel programming model, enabling you to create multi threaded applications without having to bother the low level work like locks and thread pools that was required until now. Also new are code contracts, a very handy feature allowing you to specify certain conditions for your code state (see this blog post). On top of that, there are various new features that where lacking in previous versions of the framework, like biginteger support, tuples and complex numbers, as well as multiple others.

I’ve been using windows 7 for 3 days now (on my primary machine), and these are my impressions:

The good:

• It’s eating less resources then Vista – although I can’t imagine you didn’t already know that.
• It looks and feels like Vista, but is just smoother to work with. A lot of attention has been paid to usability, so a lot of the small pains of Vista are gone (the list is really huge). This is probably the biggest reason to switch from Vista, and when still using it XP.
• The new task-bar design feels a little awkward at first, but works really logical, so you’re off with it in an instant.
• No lame sidebar to remove every time you install the OS.
• I didn’t have to install any driver or have problems with internet connection, which I did sometimes with Vista or XP.
• It’s compatible with Vista – all my apps still run on it. This is cause at it’s core Win 7 is really similar to Vista.

The bad:

• Quick-launch is disabled by default. Most people probably won’t miss it, since you can pin items in the task-bar. When you are used to having 12 or 14 items in your quick-launch, which is quite doable in Vista if you have a double height task-bar, you’ll be pretty annoyed though. Luckily, you can enable quick launch, but still it’s not as good as the Vista version. Only one line of quick-launch items is displayed on a task-bar with default height, and only one is added when you double the height. This is really lame, since doubling the height of the task-bar isn’t logical, since it’s already almost as heigh as the double Vista one, and isn’t needed, unless you regularly have a few dozen apps open in your task-bar. What makes it even lamer is that the task bar could display 2 lines of quick-launch items, but simply doesn’t. So apparently I’ll have to be satisfied with only 6 (directly click-able) items in my quick-launch.
• The snap-window feature, or whatever it’s called, that enables you to maximize a window by dragging it to the top of your screen, or putting it half screen by dragging it to one of the edges is nice, but sadly you can’t do this on an edge that has another monitor area next to it.
• Still no way to minimize/maximize (win key + d) all windows on one monitor.

I’m going to wait a little with installing it on my other machines. It’s very likely to make both my Win XP and Vista disks obsolete though. No reason to install Vista any more, and same for XP, which I only used cause Vista used up to much resources. I hope most people will upgrade from XP to Win 7, cause that OS is really getting old, and no matter what most people say – Vista is better, assuming your machine is powerful enough.