Current status

Learning AngularJS. Brushing up on HTML5 and CSS3. For me the greatest thing about angular is not its clean separation of concerns or its declarative natural, it's that it recognises that coding is only part of the solution; testing, maintenance, and debugging are just as important if not more important than the code itself.

Also, why is it that most organisations using PHP/ web applications think that monitoring is about whether the site is up? It is so depressing that these organisations do not understand or appreciate that it is the platform that is important right from the developers machine, the support desk, the production servers, the infrastructure, all the way through to the end users device; cutting code is not what contemporary software/ application development is all about.

Having a Geekie Whale of a Time...

...building local VM development boxes using vagrant, virtualbox and puppet.

Maven for PHP Plugin alternatives?

The maven for php plugin is proving a bit unpredictable. That leaves me with three options:

1. Start some local dev on the plugin itself and get access to the project that way,


2. Fork the project and start developing the bug in.


3. Use maven assemblies and ant tasks to create a pom template to build a php project.

Whilst option 1) is the best long term, I'm thinking option 3) more immediately. One of the benefits of option 3) is that it should be easy to tweak for other dynamic languages (e.g. ruby, python, perl) etc without having to stamp out a new plugin for each.

Th reasons I'm going to all is effort for my php development is:

• I want a tool chain that allows me high degree of confidence that any code tweaks/ additions are not going to break the app.


• I want to be able to consistly employ all the best practise techniques for deploying a high performance web app (e.g. Steve Souders)

PHP and Maven

I've recently been exploring how I might use Maven with PHP. Whilst the maven-php needs a little TLC, the main thing that struck me was that by moving to a none-php based build tool (I know, I know, Maven is more than a build tool), I am able to take advantage of so many other plugins such as Cucumber for BDD running on jRuby, YUICompressor on Java, and others. And by using Maven I can throw the POM at Jenkins.

I also noticed that by using a build tool that can do lots of pre-processing for me before deployment, I can create more responsive web apps (e.g. reduce apache re-write rules, version resources such as js, imgs, css as well as minimise them). A consequence of employing such techniques is the production of greener web apps as they use less resources (therefore energy) on a per request basis due to the tools doing the work before deployment.

Just Upgraded Server

Just upgraded server with hosting provider. Hoping blank pages will be a thing of the past. Hoping anyway.

PHP versions

Just noticed my host provider supports php/5.2.6 on Apache/1.3.41. ZendFramework supports 5.2.4 and above so I should be ok. I'd better be careful with the php features I choose to use for other php coding adventures or my code won't be working when served from my host provider :(

Blank Site Pages

When surfing around this site lots of blank pages just keep being displayed. Fasthosts have been unable to sort it out... they visit a few pages and when none show blank declare it a non-issue.

I thought disabling the php compression might help and it seemed to a little, but the wordpress powered blog pages (particularly the admin ones) are still affected. So I think I'll have to record a screen session and open a new problem ticket, and then may be find new php hosting facilities.