While working with legacy applications and inherently dirty code you have to find creative ways to make things better. Rewriting / major re-factoring are usually not an option as team does not get enough time to do even basic housekeeping, what do you do then?

I have seen sphagetti code way too many times in my life not to call it an anti pattern. One of the main reasons for sphagetti code is allowing any object in the codebase to talk to any other object. In addition it comes hand in hand with usage of global/static scope and leaking information between application layers.

I recently realised that i have been applying the same pattern for a while now. The pattern i propose is an effort to cluster ugliness and relief rest of the code-base from exploding dependencies.

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I have looked at the state of different messaging backends recently and i ran a little benchmark to see what is the rough comparison of message publishing throughput. Results that i got are quite surprising.

UPDATE 2012.04

What i wanted to achieve was some sort of reassurance before choosing a messaging bus for my PHP project. PHP is usually a bit special as it's runtime environment is different than java / .net. I wanted to use rabbitmq because of it's routing flexibility and implementation of AMQP. After the simple benchmark i am not convinced any more if that is the best way to go for me right now.

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Pecl extension does not compile with the version on rabbitmq-c library shipped with ubuntu so you will have to manually install the library. Here is step by step guide how to do it.

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That is just a very quick tip how to get git branch name into the prompt. Friend of mine pointed me to this neat little trick just last week and i thought its pretty neat so i am sharing it.

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I don't know if everyone will agree and notice the significance of this event but for me this is a MAJOR milestone in PHP community evolution. Drupal 8 will integrate with Symfony2. THIS IS GREAT NEWS!

I always liked Drupal. It is amazing! Community is huge and provides thousands of modules to solve almost any web-related needs you may have. To make it really embarrassing for the enterprise-level CMS solutions, Drupal often beats them in terms of features and quality. I have seen enterprise-level CMSes and they were just a legacy JUNK! There is no question about it, Drupal is awesome! Symfony2 is the sweetest PHP framework there is. Great architecture, patterns, cleanness, consistency, interfaces, testability, dependency container - basically all you need.

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Just a very quick tip on how to test for warnings that may happen in functions like fopen. PHP does not treat errors in unified way some of them rise warnings, some of them throws exceptions others return 0,false or -1 or some other value to indicate an error. How do you deal with them in PHP Unit?

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From time to time I see bugs in the code and I start thinking "really? is it possible that no one noticed that bug before? am i the first person to see this code?". I thought it might be worth writing a little post on what helps me to deal with bugs and software quality in general and what are the common pitfalls in developer's thought process. Although it is not a very extensive post i hope it may inspire some developers to try new approaches :-)

In general it is extremely rare for me to commit bugs that would make it into production (maybe less than one a year? hard to say as it is really rare). To be honest I can't remember a serious issue with my code for last 5 years.

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Unfortunately i have to support PHP 5.2 and i also need to run my Mac in 32 bit mode as my VPN client does not support 64 bit :(

This causes quite a lot of hassle as PHP 5.2 is less and less supported by frameworks, extensions etc. It is also waste of time as i have to manually build stuff instead of using regular packages, ports etc.

Here is a quick step by step guide on how to get mongodb and PHP5.2 mongo pecl extension going on your MacOSX in 32bit mode!

NOTE: 32 bit mongodb binaries have 2GB address space limit so you wont be able to process too much on your laptop. You will still be able to code and connect to remote instances just fine.

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I think it is quite an interesting book and i would recommend it to people who want to better understand themselves. I would not see it as a guide how to live your life nor how to plan your career but it does share an interesting concept.

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It was very interesting as my cacti installation began failing today. For no apparent reason. I noticed CPU usage and CPU temperature going through the roof as PHP script ran by cacti was stuck in some infinite loop or active wait state. It seemed to query database non stop without sleeping or anything and it was not doing anything either.

I looked in error log and there was nothing, looked in access log of monitored server ... nothing again. Finally i looked into cacti log and found tons of messages like this:

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This book was not exactly what i hoped it would be so my review may not be the best but i think there are people who will enjoy it and benefit from it.

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There are many ways to implement mobile version of your website but easiest and probably cleanest one is to use mobile subdomain.

Once you have your mobile website you want to implement an automated test suite to be able to regression test the functionality after every release. You also want the test suite to be easy to configure and run it against test environment. In perfect world you want the test suite to run as part of the continous integration setup. Jmeter allows for all of that and is free. As a huge fan of jmeter i recommend you download it and play around with it as soon as possible.

In this article I describe how to create a test suite for mobile website redirects, you can also download my jmeter test plan and customise it to test your own websites.

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This is just a very short and simple example of how to build a jmeter plugin. Jmeter is awesome and allows you to extend it by adding all sorts of components. What i wanted to do was to have separate test plans and reuse the configuration variable sets. My use case is that i want to have set of global settings with ability to override some of them with additional config files.

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Jakarta jmeter is an awesome tool. I deeply encourage to experiment with it. If you want to see more details on how it is implemented or write your extension it may be worth compiling it from sources on your machine.

Here is a quick guide how to setup a eclipse project and what to do to build jmeter from sources and run it locally.

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Lets make something clear from the very start: JUST BECAUSE THERE IS https:// IN THE URL OF THE REMOTE SERVICE IT DOES NOT MEAN THE CONNECTION IS SECURE!

I am sorry for the tone of this post but i am enraged by how popular this issue is online. If you ask why i suggest a little experiment.

Steps to follow

• Change your host file settings to point something like www.somedomain.com to your development server
• Create a self signed certificate for this domain and setup a https virtual host to serve it on local IP or alias
• Put a test file on that URL
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