This is almost like the time they made a Facebook game out of a popular TV show. Except it isn't. Family Guy Online isn't your standard social grind. It's not even a Facebook game. It's a graphically convincing free-to-play browser-based RPG with plenty of character, TV-showness and gameplay challenges...

Many are still busy plowing through the insane amount of content included in Skyrim. Maybe you're not one of them. Maybe you've unlocked and spent every perk point, cleared every dungeon and punched every NPC in the nose. Maybe you've tried out every mod and are looking for more. Bethesda will relea...

Bethesda's Creation Kit for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will be made available on February 7, according to a Twitter update by VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines...

Good news, we just received an invite to play in an upcoming round of beta testing in ArenaNet's highly anticipated Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately we can't share, but you can expect plenty of coverage to hit on Monday, February 20 at 6 AM Pacific...

An update posted to the Team Fortress 2 blog teases "something brand new" for Vavle's free-to-play online shooter. No word yet on what it is, but Valve did say it wasn't a hat, and it wasn't a new map. Could it be a new class? A new layer to its microtransaction system? Gordon Freeman? Err, sorry about that last guess, I just really miss Half-Life...

When I first started playing Mass Effect, I set out to behave like a stony-hearted space-bitch. I was going to take the universe for everything it had: credits, loot, fame, blue ladies, the lot. It didn't last long. By the beginning of Mass Effect 2, my red-headed Shepard whom I'd designed to loo...

Valve's ever-popular competitive shooter Counter-Strike has been around for over a decade. The latest iteration of the franchise, Global Offensive, is currently in closed beta testing on PC. Though not all features are currently built into the beta, the classic de_dust and de_dust2 maps are...

Publisher Atlus announced that Game of Thrones, a new role-playing game from Cyanide Studios based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy fiction, will launch on May 15 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC...

"Walker, at the beginning of the game, is specifically meant to invoke other military shooters," says Walt Williams, the lead writer on 2K Games' Spec Ops: The Line. "We want the player to feel that they're walking into a situation that they know what it's going to be. Like, 'I know this guy, I know...

It is now common practice for Electronic Arts (EA) to include an online pass in new copies of its games that must be activated in order to access online features. However, Syndicate, which EA will publish later this month, will arrive free of any online pass. A producer at EA tells Eurogamer that the online co-op in Syndicate is equal in substance to the single-player campaign and everyone should have access to the entire game...

It used to be that once a year I would take a good, hard look at the tools I used and endeavor to learn something new or change my workflow with those tools. However, I've been living the #startuplife for the past two years, so it's been about three years since I last addressed my development toolchain. I decided to come up for air and take some time this weekend to rectify that by addressing five main areas: my terminal emulator, my shell, my terminal multiplexer, my IRC client, and my color scheme—yes, even my color scheme! In addition, I decided to push out my updated Octopress-powered blog, even though things are still a little rough around the edges.

I've been a long-time user of Terminal.app, but I had been hearing good things about iTerm2. I actually used iTerm (version 1) years ago, but I switched back to Terminal.app for reasons I cannot recall. Nevertheless, iTerm2 has come a long way, and I wanted to take advantage of some of its functionality like split panes, better full-screen support, etc. So, that was the first major change I made to my tools.

Bash has been my favored shell since I began using Linux about fourteen years ago. I'd never given much thought to using a different shell, and to be honest, switching shells always seemed a daunting task. I thought I'd have to relearn my way around the shell, and everything I took for granted with Bash would be non-existent in a different shell. Fortunately, this is not true. As it turns out, zsh “can be thought of as an extended Bourne shell with a large number of improvements, including some features of bash, ksh, and tcsh” (Wikipedia).

I was able to switch to zsh without ditching my knowledge of bash. As a result, I've gained all the advantages of zsh, which include advanced customization and scripting capabilities, while continuing to provide most (if not all) the same functionality and commands I'm used to in bash. I have much more to learn, though, so if you have tips and tricks, please share.

If you're interested in switching to zsh, I recommend checking out oh-my-zsh. It's a framework for managing your zsh configuration, and it contains lots of goodies. In addition, there are great posts by Mark Nichols and Jon Kinney that will get you quickly up-to-speed with oh-my-zsh. The latter post has the awesome title “It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds…with ZSH”.

Generally, I've really only used screen when I started noticing that my connection to a remote development machine was getting sluggish or I wanted to keep a constant connection to IRC, but tmux has opened my eyes to so many more possibilities that a multiplexer can offer. I've just only started using it, so I can't say much about it, but I encourage you to read Hawk Host's two-part post on tmux.

I used irssi in a screen session for years. Then, I decided I needed Growl notifications from my IRC client. I quit using irssi in favor of Linkinus. I've used Linkinus for about two years—together with the IRC bouncer znc for some of that time—but I've continued to miss the flexibility and functionality of irssi. On a whim, I decided to switch back to irssi, but it wasn't without so

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Sublime Text 2 is a new cross-platform text editor that I've recently switched to. It's still in public beta, but already offers better performance (and battery life!) and a better look (fonts that render properly!) than Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans.

One thing it didn't have was support for PHPUnit, so I've made a plugin. It's available to install via Package Control.

To use this plugin, your project needs to contain either a phpunit.xml or a phpunit.xml.dist file. This file contains all the configuration that needs to be passed to PHPUnit. The plugin searches upwards from your code, and will favour a phpunit.xml file over a phpunit.xml.dist file if it finds both.

If you don't have one, you need to go and create one now.

If you have your code open in a Sublime Text 2 window, right-click inside the window to see what your options are:

• Test This Class – click this option to run just the unit tests for this class.

  This option appears if the PHPUnit plugin can find your unit tests. It takes the name of your class, and uses the standard PSR-0 transformation to figure out what the name of your test file should be.

  For example, if your class is called ‘Phix_ProjectCommandLineLibCommandParser.php', the PHPUnit plugin will search for a file ‘CommandLineParserTest.php' that's in a folder called ‘Phix_Project/CommandLineLib'.

• Open Test Class – click this option to open up your tests in Sublime Text 2. If you already have the tests open, this will switch tabs to your tests.

  Again, this option only appears if the PHPUnit plugin can find your unit tests.

• Run All Unit Tests – click this option to run all the unit tests for your code.

  This option just points PHPUnit at your phpunit.xml or phpunit.xml.dist file.

If you have your tests open in a Sublime Text 2 window, right-click inside the window to see what your options are:

• Run These Tests – run these unit tests, using the phpunit.xml or phpunit.xml.dist file that the PHPUnit plugin has found.
• Open Class Being Tested – open the class that these tests are for in Sublime Text 2. If you already have the class open, this will switch tags to your code.
• Run All Unit Tests – click this option to run all the unit tests for your code.

If you're someone who prefers keyboard over mouse, then you'll probably want to run the PHPUnit plugin commands from Sublime Text 2′s Command Palette:

You get the same commands that appear on the right-click menu … the right commands will appear for the file that you're currently editing, just as you'd expect.

Finally, you can also right-click on your phpunit.xml (or phpunit.xml.dist) file in the Project Sidebar, and run your unit tests using that specific config file.

Like TextMate before it, Sublime Text 2 also has a handy snippets feature, where it can insert a pre-crafted block of text (or, in our case, PHP code) to speed up your coding. I'm collecting most PHP-related snippets in my Additional PHP Snippets plugin (hat-tip to Rob Allen for the inspiration for this), but the PHPUnit plugin includes a few PHPUnit-related snippets to help.

• phpunit-testcase – will create a new test class for you to fill out.

  I find this handy mostly so that I don't have to remember which class my test class has to extend :)

• phpunit-test – will

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With the release of Zend Framework 1.8 came the long awaited component for bootstrapping a Zend Framework application. Many different bootstrapping-solutions became obsolete with Zend_Application.

In the beginning of the framework most developers didn?t give much thought on bootstrapping. Most of the initialisation work was done directly in index.php, the central starting point of the application. Teams often moved that bootstrapping code to a separate configuration script. The solution worked, but many people wanted a more standardised process for application initialisation.

This blog posting is in German as the event it relates to is German-only.Sorry for the inconvenience.

Bei allen PHP-Themen zählt nichts mehr als die Praxis. Deshalb bieten wir unsere Power-Workshops interaktiv und mit intensivem Praxisbezug an. Über die behandelten Themen entscheiden die Teilnehmer mit ihren konkreten Fragen. Anstelle von Frontalunterricht erleben sie die Entwicklung von neuem Code unmittelbar. Mit Augenzwinkern und Spaß erläutern Sebastian Bergmann, Arne Blankerts und Stefan Priebsch Entwicklungsmethoden und Tools und stellen Trends und Konzepte vor.

Der nächste PHP Summit findet im März in München statt. Und das sind die Workshops:

PHP 5.3 und PHP 5.4 überzeugen im Programmieralltag durch eine Fülle relevanter Vereinfachungen. Lernen Sie die innovativen Features und geschickte Einsatzmöglichkeiten der neuen Versionen kennen. Entdecken Sie das Lösungspotenzial aktueller Technologien aus dem PHP-Umfeld (memcached, ZeroMQ ?) für Ihre Fragestellungen.

Früher oder später wird unsauber geschriebener Code zum Ärgernis. Nicht nur für den, der ihn warten muss. Änderungen und Erweiterungen können im Extremfall den Code unwirtschaftlich machen. Lernen Sie schlechten Code durch statische Codeanalyse aufzufinden und in test- und wartbaren Code umzuschreiben. Lernen Sie mithilfe der SOLID-Prinzipien, nachhaltig wartbaren Code zu schreiben.

Natürlich könnte man das Rad jeden Tag neu erfinden. Meist fehlt dafür die Zeit, Spaß macht es auch nicht und Fehler können sich so immer wieder an denselben Stellen einschleichen. Für die vielen alltäglichen Probleme, die nur geringfügig von schon vorhandenen Lösungen abweichen, gibt es clevere Ansätze, die das Leben leichter machen. In einer komplett vom Auditorium gesteuerten Live Session zeigt der Workshop dafür programmatische Konzepte und lädt zur Diskussion über Tools und klassische Fragestellungen ein.

Programme und Webseiten enthalten Fehler. Immer. Sie werden sichtbar, wenn Benutzer falsche, ungültige oder unerwartete Eingaben machen, der Zugriff auf die Datenbank plötzlich unmöglich ist oder die Festplatte überläuft. Um solche und andere Probleme sicher abzufangen, gibt es verschiedene Ansätze, die hier vorgestellt und diskutiert werden. Wie man Exceptions richtig anwendet, warum ein eigener Error Handler hilfreich ist und dass Debugging viel mit Sicherheit zu tun hat, vermittelt der Workshop lebendig und anschaulich.

Der Workshop klärt die Frage, was es mit der objektorientierten Programmierung eigentlich auf sich hat. Jenseits der bekannten Standardbeispiele führt er praktisch in die OOP mit PHP ein. Dabei werden neben den Grundlagen und zentralen Prinzipien der OOP interessante Features beispielsweise aus der Standard PHP Library (SPL) vorgestellt und ihr sinnvoller Praxiseinsatz vorgeführt. Neben Faktenwissen wird eine Denkweise vermittelt, die es erlaubt, unnötig komplizierte Ansätze von vornherein zu umgehen.

Der Workshop zeigt Teilnehmern, die mit den Grundlagen der OOP vertraut sind, fortgeschrittene Techniken wie Dependency Injection, abstrakte Klassen, Interfaces und Best Practices für erfolgreiche OOP. Eine Live-Coding-Session macht den Einsatz der vorgestellten Techniken in der Praxis erfahrbar. Außer Faktenwissen zeigt der Workshop, dass gute Lösungen einfache Lösungen sind: Einfache Objekte sind leichter wieder zu verwenden und vermeiden Fehler.

Der Workshop vermittelt grundlegende Kenntnisse und Fähigkeiten im Einsatz von PHPUnit bei Unit Tests, Datenbank-Interaktionstests, Edge-to-Edge- Tests und End-to-End-Tests. Sie lernen alles, was Sie über das Schreiben, Ausführen und Organisieren von Unit Tests mit PHPUnit beherrschen müssen.

PHPUnit clever einsetzen: Die Teilnehmer lernen die besten Praktiken beim Einsatz von PHPUnit und erprobte Strategien bei der Einführung von Testmaßnahmen an vorhandener So

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The past weeks I finally had some time to invest in the DMS library again, so i got busy with a few things. I also had to fix a big problem which had gone unnoticed to me, so i have to thank Mr. Guilherme Blanco for pointing it out.

Sadly this means a BC break, so please follow and make adjustments.

The reasoning here is simple, PHP still supports legacy from PHP4 meaning a function with the same name as the class is understood as a constructor. This generates a few nasty notices, and it made enough sense to rename the function, making it clear like the other ones.

Along with this i had time to work on building a Bundle so you can plug filtering into Symfony 2 just as you would with validation.

This bundle is also available on Packagist, making it easy to install, i'll also add the DMS and Filter library as standalones to this soon.

I finally tagged the releases as 1.0, or rather 1.0.1 as i quickly found a few fixes to put in.

The rest remains, here are the links:

DMS Library: github

DMS Filter Library (sub-tree split): github

DMS Filter Bundle (sub-tree split): github packagist/composer

© Rafael Dohms for Rafael Dohms, 2012. | Permalink | No comments
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