22 May 2019

feedSymfony Blog

Last days to submit a talk proposal for SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2019

Logo of the SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2019

The SymfonyCon Amsterdam will take place in only 6 months! Our Call for Papers is still open for a few more days!

We would like to invite the worldwide Symfony Community to participate in the Call for Papers for this event. For this conference, we are looking for:

If you never spoke at a conference before, we do have a mentoring program for speakers including a slack speaker-mentoring channel where several experienced speakers are happy to help shape your talk proposals, slides or help you during your rehearsals or do test runs via video conferences. If you want to share your Symfony or PHP experience with the community but you've never been on stage before, submit a talk proposal and add in the notes that you're intrested in our mentoring program for speakers! We'd love to hear what you want to share with the great Symfony community. Being an unexperienced speaker should not stop you from being a speaker, submit now your talk ideas!

Each selected speaker of the conference is eligible for travel cost reimbursement; 2 hotel nights accommodations, a free conference ticket, the invitation to the speaker event and a special gift!

If you didn't send yet your talk proposals, send them until May 24th (Midnight Paris time)!

We can't wait to meet you at SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2019 from November 21-23!

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2019-05-27 Clichy - 2019-06-3 Clichy - 2019-06-3 Clichy

22 May 2019 1:29pm GMT

Symfony 4.3.0-BETA2 released

Symfony 4.3.0-BETA2 has just been released. Here is a list of the most important changes:

Want to upgrade to this new release? Fortunately, because Symfony protects backwards-compatibility very closely, this should be quite easy. Read our upgrade documentation to learn more.

Want to be notified whenever a new Symfony release is published? Or when a version is not maintained anymore? Or only when a security issue is fixed? Consider subscribing to the Symfony Roadmap Notifications.

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2019-05-27 Clichy - 2019-06-3 Clichy - 2019-06-3 Clichy

22 May 2019 9:42am GMT

21 May 2019

feedDjango community aggregator: Community blog posts

The Best Animation and Prototyping Tools for Designers in 2019

Prototyping is a great way to showcase your product before embarking on a long development process. It gives you the opportunity to make changes prior to development. It also saves you significant time and money. The post The Best Animation and Prototyping Tools for Designers in 2019 appeared first on Distillery.

21 May 2019 9:42pm GMT

feedSymfony Blog

New in Symfony 4.3: Timezone improvements

Roland Franssen

Contributed by
Roland Franssen
in #28831, #31295, #31262, #31195, #31318, #31292, #31294.

Symfony 4.3 will add a new Timezone validator to check that the given value is a valid timezone ID as defined by PHP. In addition to that validator, we've worked hard on many other features to improve the support of timezones.

Added timezones to the Intl component

The Intl component added a new Timezone class to get information about timezones, such as their names (in all languages):

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use Symfony\Component\Intl\Timezones;

\Locale::setDefault('en');

$timezones = Timezones::getNames();
// ('timezoneID' => 'timezoneValue')
// => ['America/Eirunepe' => 'Acre Time (Eirunepe)', 'America/Rio_Branco' => 'Acre Time (Rio Branco)', ...]

$timezones = Timezones::getNames('de');
// => ['America/Eirunepe' => 'Acre-Zeit (Eirunepe)', 'America/Rio_Branco' => 'Acre-Zeit (Rio Branco)', ...]

$timezone = Timezones::getName('Africa/Nairobi');
// => 'East Africa Time (Nairobi)'

$timezone = Timezones::getName('Africa/Nairobi', 'de');
// => 'Ostafrikanische Zeit (Nairobi)'

You can also check if a given timezone ID is valid:

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$isValidTimezone = Timezones::exists($timezoneId);

Finally, you can get the timezone offset for any given timezone:

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$offset = Timezones::getRawOffset('Etc/UTC');              // $offset = 0
$offset = Timezones::getRawOffset('America/Buenos_Aires'); // $offset = -10800
$offset = Timezones::getRawOffset('Asia/Katmandu');        // $offset = 20700

$offset = Timezones::getGmtOffset('Etc/UTC');              // $offset = 'GMT+00:00'
$offset = Timezones::getGmtOffset('America/Buenos_Aires'); // $offset = 'GMT-03:00'
$offset = Timezones::getGmtOffset('Asia/Katmandu');        // $offset = 'GMT+05:45'

Intl timezones in TimezoneType

The TimezoneType form element supports both strings and PHP timezones in its input option (which defines the format the timezone is stored on your underlying object). In Symfony 4.3 this option supports a new value called intltimezone to use \IntlTimeZone objects to store timezones.

Allow Intl timezones in validator

The Timezone validator added in Symfony 4.3 has been improved to also consider valid the ICU timezones, not only the PHP timezones. Besides, the list of ICU timezones has been updated to its 64.2 version. The only difference is that expired timezones cannot be used with IntlTimeZone.

In practice, this considers valid both UTC (the PHP format) and Etc/UTC (the ICU format), whereas Etc/UTC was considered wrong before (which is not).

Timezone names translation

This long-requested feature will finally make it in Symfony 4.3: the list of timezone names displayed by TimezoneType can be translated. Thanks to the new choice_translation_locale option, you can set the locale used to translate the timezone names before displaying them to the user:

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use Symfony\Component\Form\Extension\Core\Type\TimezoneType;
// ...

$builder->add('timezone', TimezoneType::class, [
    // ...
    'choice_translation_locale' => 'uk',
    'intl' => true,
]);

In the example above, the timezones will be displayed in Ukrainian (locale = uk) instead of the default English, so the user will see things like за центральноєвропейським часом (Амстердам) instead of Central European Time (Amsterdam).

Be trained by Symfony experts - 2019-05-27 Clichy - 2019-06-3 Clichy - 2019-06-3 Clichy

21 May 2019 7:21am GMT

18 May 2019

feedDjango community aggregator: Community blog posts

Creating Evscaperoom, part 1

Over the last month (April-May 2019) I have taken part in the Mud Coder's Guild Game Jam "Enter the (Multi-User) Dungeon". This year the theme for the jam was One Room.

The result was Evscaperoom, an text-based multi-player "escape-room" written in Python using the Evennia MU* creation system. You can play it from that link in your browser or MU*-client of choice. If you are so inclined, you can also vote for it here in the jam (don't forget to check out the other entries while you're at it).

This little series of (likely two) dev-blog entries will try to recount the planning and technical aspects of the Evscaperoom. This is also for myself - I'd better write stuff down now while it's still fresh in my mind!

Inception

When I first heard about the upcoming game-jam's theme of One Room, an 'escape room' was the first thing that came to mind, not the least because I just recently got to solve my my own first real-world escape-room as a gift on my birthday.

If you are not familiar with escape-rooms, the premise is simple - you are locked into a room and have to figure out a way to get out of it by solving practical puzzles and finding hidden clues in the room.

While you could create such a thing in your own bedroom (and there are also some one-use board game variants), most escape-rooms are managed by companies selling this as an experience for small groups. You usually have one hour to escape and if you get stuck you can press a button (or similar) to get a hint.

I thought making a computer escape-room. Not only can you do things in the computer that you cannot do in the real world, restricting the game to a single room limits so that it's conceivable to actually finish the damned thing in a month.

A concern I had was that everyone else in the jam surely must have went for the same obvious idea. In the end that was not an issue at all though.


Basic premises

I was pretty confident that I would technically be able to create the game in time (not only is Python and Evennia perfect for this kind of fast experimentation and prototyping, I know the engine very well). But that's not enough; I had to first decide on how the thing should actually play. Here are the questions I had to consider:

Room State

An escape room can be seen as going through multiple states as puzzles are solved. For example, you may open a cabinet and that may open up new puzzles to solve. This is fine in a single-player game, but how to handle it in a multi-player environment?

My first thought was that each object may have multiple states and that players could co-exist in the same room, seeing different states at the same time. I really started planning for this. It would certainly be possible to implement.

But in the end I considered how a real-world escape-room works - people in the same room solves it together. For there to be any meaning with multi-player, they must share the room state.

So what I went with was a solution where players can create their own room or join an existing one. Each such room is generated on the fly (and filled with objects etc) and will change as players solve it. Once complete and/or everyone leaves, the room is deleted along with all objects in it. Clean and tidy.

So how to describe these states? I pictured that these would be described as normal Python modules with a start- and end function that initialized each state and cleaned it up when a new state was started. In the beginning I pictured these states as being pretty small (like one state to change one thing in the room). In the end though, the entire Evscaperoom fits in 12 state modules. I'll describe them in more detail in the second part of this post.

Accessibility and "pixel-hunting" in text

When I first started writing descriptions I didn't always note which objects where interactive. It's a very simple and tempting puzzle to add - mention an object as part of a larger description and let the player figure out that it's something they can interact with. This practice is sort-of equivalent to pixel-hunting in graphical games - sweeping with the mouse across the screen until you find that little spot on the screen that you can do something with.

Problem is, pixel-hunting's not really fun. You easily get stuck and when you eventually find out what was blocking you, you don't really feel clever but only frustrated. So I decided that I should clearly mark every object that people could interact with and focus puzzles on better things.


In fact, in the end I made it an option:

Option menu ('quit' to return) 1: ( ) No item markings (hard mode) 2: ( ) Items marked as item (with color) 3: (*) Items are marked as [item] (screenreader friendly) 4: ( ) Screenreader mode


As part of this I had to remind myself never to use colors only when marking important information: Visually impaired people with screen readers will simply miss that. Not to mention that some just disable colors in their clients.

So while I personally think option 2 above is the most visually pleasing, Evscaperoom defaults to the third option. It should should start everyone off on equal footing. Evennia has a screen-reader mode out of the box, but I moved it into the menu here for easy access.

Inventory and collaboration

In a puzzle-game, you often find objects and combine them with other things. Again, this is simple to do in a single-player game: Players just pick things up and use them later.

But in a multi-player game this offers a huge risk: players that pick up something important and then log off. The remaining players in that room would then be stuck in an unsolvable room - and it would be very hard for them to know this.

In principle you could try to 'clean' player inventories when they leave, but not only does it add complexity, there is another issue with players picking things up: It means that the person first to find/pick up the item is the only one that can use it and look at it. Others won't have access until the first player gives it up. Trusting that to anonymous players online is not a good idea.

So in the end I arrived at the following conclusions:

As a side-effect of this I also set a limit to the kind of puzzles I would allow:


Focusing on objects

So without inventory system, how do you interact with objects? A trademark of any puzzle is using one object with another and also to explore things closer to find clues. I turned to graphical adventure games for inspiration:

Hovering with mouse over lens object offers action "look at lens"
Secret of Monkey Island ©1990 LucasArts. Image from old-games.com


A common way to operate on an object in traditional adventure games is to hover the mouse over it and then select the action you want to apply to it. In later (3D) games you might even zoom in of the object and rotate it around with your mouse to see if there are some clues to be had.

While Evennia and modern UI clients may allow you to use the mouse to select objects, I wanted this to work the traditional MUD-way, by inserting commands. So I decided that you as a player would be in one of two states:

A small stone fireplace sits in the middle of the wall opposite the [door]. On the chimney hangs a small oil [painting] of a man. Hanging over the hearth is a black [cauldron]. The piles of [ashes] below are cold. (It looks like fireplace may be suitable to [climb].)


In the example above, the fireplace points out other objects you could also focus on, whereas the last parenthesis includes one or more "actions" that you can perform on the fireplace only when you have it focused.

This ends up pretty different from most traditional MUD-style inputs. When I first released this to the public, I found people logged off after their first examine. It turned out that they couldn't figure out how to leave the focus mode. So they just assumed the thing was buggy and quit instead. Of course it's mentioned if you care to write help, but this is clearly one step too many for such an important UI concept.

So I ended up adding the header above that always reminds you. And since then I've not seen any confusion over how the focus mode works.

For making it easy to focus on things, I also decided that each room would only ever have one object named a particular thing. So there is for example only one single object in the game named "key" that you can focus on.

Communication

I wanted players to co-exist in the same room so that they could collaborate on solving it. This meant communication must be possible. I pictured people would want to point things out and talk to each other.

In my first round of revisions I had a truckload of individual emotes; you could

point at target

for example. In the end I just limited it to

say/shout/whisper <message>

and

emote <whatever>

And seeing what people actually use, this is more than enough (say alone is probably 99% of what people need, really). I had a notion that the shout/whisper could be used in a puzzle later but in the end I decided that communication commands should be strictly between players and not have anything to do with the puzzles.

I removed all other interaction: There is no fighting and without an inventory or requirement to collaborate on puzzles, there is no need for other interactions than to communicate.

First version you didn't even see what the others did, but eventually I added so that you at least saw what other players were focusing on at the moment (and of course if some major thing was solved/found).

In the end I don't even list characters as objects in the room (you have to use the who command to see who's in there with you).

Listing of commands available in the Evscaperoom (output of the help-command in game)
The main help command output.

Story

It's very common for this type of game to have a dangerous or scary theme. Things like "get out before the bomb explodes", "save the space ship before the engines overheat", "flee the axe murderer before he comes back" etc). I'm no stranger to dark themes, but for this I wanted something friendlier and brighter, maybe with a some dark undercurrents here and there.

My Jester character is someone I've not only depicted in art, but she's also an old RP character and literary protagonist of mine. Who else would find it funny to lock someone into a room only to provide crazy puzzles and hints for them to get out again? So my flimsy 'premise' was this:

The village Jester wants to win the pie eating contest. You are one of her most dangerous opponents. She tricked you to her cabin and now you are locked in! If you don't get out in time, she'll get to eat all those pies on her own and surely win!


That's it - this became the premise from which the entire game flowed. I quickly decided that it to be a very "small-scale" story: no life-or-death situation, no saving of the world. The drama takes place in a small village with an "adversary" that doesn't really want to hurt you, but only to eat more pies than you.

From this, the way to offer hints came naturally - just eat a slice of "hintberry pie" the jester made (she even encourage you to eat it). It gives you a hint but is also very filling. So if you eat too much, how will you beat her in the contest later, even if you do get out?

To further the rustic and friendly tone I made sure the story took place on a warm summer day. Many descriptions describe sunshine, chirping birds and the smell of pie. I aimed at letting the text point out quirky and slightly comedic tone of the puzzles the Jester left behind. The player also sometimes gets teased by the game when doing things that does not make sense.

I won't go into the story further here - it's best if you experience it yourself. Let's just say that the village has some old secrets. And and the Jester has her own ways of doing things and of telling a story. The game has multiple endings and so far people have drawn very different conclusions in the end.

Scoring

Most often in escape rooms, final score is determined by the time and the number of hints used. I do keep the latter - for every pie you eat, you get a penalty on your final score.

As for time - this background story would fit very well with a time limit (get out in X time, after which the pie-eating contest will start!). But from experience with other online text-based games I decided against this. Not only should a player be able to take a break, they may also want to wait for a friend to leave and come back etc.

But more importantly, I want players to explore and read all my carefully crafted descriptions! So I'd much rather prefer they take their time and reward them for being thorough.

So in the end I give specific scores for actions throughout the game instead. Most points are for doing things that drive the story forward, such as using something or solving a puzzle. But a significant portion of the score comes from turning every stone and trying everything out. The nice side-effect of this is that even if you know exactly how to solve everything and rush through the game you will still not end up with a perfect score.

The final score, adjusted by hints is then used to determine if you make it in time to the contest and how you fare. This means that if you explore carefully you have a "buffer" of points so eating a few pies may still land you a good result in the end.


First sketch

I really entered the game 'building' aspect with no real notion of how the Jester's cabin should look nor which puzzles should be in it. I tried to write things down beforehand but it didn't really work for me.

So in the end I decided "let's just put a lot of interesting stuff in the room and then I'll figure out how they interact with each other". I'm sure this is different from game-maker to game-maker. But for me, this process worked perfectly.

Scribbles on my notebook, sketching up the room's main items
My first, very rough, sketch of the Jester's cabin


The above, first sketch ended up being what I used, although many of the objects mentioned never ended up in the final game and some things switched places. I did some other sketches too, but they'd be spoilers so I won't show them here ...


The actual game logic

The Evscaperoom principles outlined above deviate quite a bit from the traditional MU* style of game play.

While Evennia provides everything for database management, in-game objects, commands, networking and other resources, the specifics of your game is something you need to make yourself - and you have the full power of Python to do it!

So for the first three days of the jam I used Evennia to build the custom game logic needed to provide the evscaperoom style of game play. I also made the tools I needed to quickly create the game content (which then took me the rest of the jam to make).

In part 2 of this blog post I will cover the technical details of the Evscaperoom I built. I'll also go through some issues I ran into and conclusions I drew. I'll link to that from here when it's available!

18 May 2019 11:50pm GMT

17 May 2019

feedDjango community aggregator: Community blog posts

New features planned for Python 4.0

With the release of Python 3.8 coming soon, the core development team has asked me to summarize our latest discussions on the new features planned for Python 4.0, codename "ouroboros: the snake will eat itself". This will be an exciting release and a significant milestone, many thanks to the hard work of over 100 contributors.

Notably absent from 4.0, with much sadness, the following features did not make the cut:

We look forward to this release, and will do everything in our power to ensure it takes us several minor versions before it is even remotely usable.

photos/deadsnakes.png

17 May 2019 3:41pm GMT

29 Jun 2017

feedZend Developer Zone

PHP 7.2: Add Extension By Name

I don't know if you've been keeping up, but there's not a lot of new coming down the pipe in PHP 7.2. Yeah, there is a good list of things that are being deprecated, and a change to allow for type widening, but compared to PHP 7.0 and PHP 7.2, PHP 7.2 is positively a yawner. This makes writing articles about the new hotness coming down the pipe a bit difficult.

The post PHP 7.2: Add Extension By Name appeared first on Zend Developer Zone.

29 Jun 2017 6:36pm GMT

27 Jun 2017

feedZend Developer Zone

Deprecations in PHP 7.2

The only constant is change.
- Heraclitus of Ephesus

PHP is a living language and as such, as some things are added, others are removed. Click on inside to find out what is being flagged to go away in PHP 7.2

The post Deprecations in PHP 7.2 appeared first on Zend Developer Zone.

27 Jun 2017 3:41pm GMT

16 Jun 2017

feedZend Developer Zone

June 2017 PHP Community (coffee) Cup of Service winner

It is time for the June 2017 PHP Community (coffee) Cup of Service award. This month it goes to someone who has been giving to PHP for more than 15 years, Ms. Sara Golemon. Sara: Is a regular speaker at PHP conferences worldwide An active core contributor One of the release managers of PHP 7.2 Please join us here at... Read more »

The post June 2017 PHP Community (coffee) Cup of Service winner appeared first on Zend Developer Zone.

16 Jun 2017 12:00pm GMT

11 Nov 2011

feedCI News

Reportula

What can you tell us about the team that built reportula.org?

The Team that made reportula.org is just one person. Pedro Oliveira, started Reportula when he needed a clean and fast web application that reported the Bacula Backups software of the company he works for. He has decided to open the project, and let it grow to full web application that is able to manage the Bacula Backups.

Reportula Website Screen Shot

What can you tell us about the site in general? What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

Reportula is a php based web program that provides you a summarized output of jobs that have already run. It obtains its information from the Bacula's database. Aside from a nice graphical display, it provides summaries of your jobs, as well as graphs of job usage. This is a fairly high level bacula management tool.

The main goals were to create a web reporting tool for the bacula backups system, as I got further into the project it developed into something more than that. Right know it calculates average of bacula backups, it has time line history of backups. Imagine this scenario for example, if you use the crontab feature of reportula, you can see in time by how much data your backups infrastructure is growing.

Example. in 2011.05.01 if backups infrastructure stores 500 Tera bytes, in 2011.12.30 it stores 510 terabytes. This is very handy for us because with this feature you can predict the storage needs of your backups for the future.

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

I chose codeigniter because I needed an easy, fast, and supported PHP development framework. I found that with Codeigniter I could achieve that. This project was made in less than month.

Another nice thing about Codeigniter is that you don't have to "re-invent the wheel". Codeigniter has most of the thing that you need for an application already developed. All you have to do is connect the blocks which is very easy.

What is next on the plate for reportula.org? Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

On the plate for Reportula is user registrations, acls, and managing Bacula Backups like "bconsole".

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community? Tips from this project you'd like to share? Lessons you've learned?

First of all i think that Codeigniter is one of the best frameworks on the internet. I've tried them all (Cake, Yii, Symfony, Zend) they are all too complicated, too big, with lots of features and slow. They all had one problem BIG, STEEP LEARNING CURVE.

Codeigniter has less features than the others but you start making an application in less than 30 minutes. And what it does it does well! Even if you think you need a big framework after starting with codeigniter it cames to you that you don't need another framework to develop some applications. The lessons I learned are don't re-invent the wheel, Codeigniter does it and does it well, the community are nice, and always had support on the forum.

11 Nov 2011 10:19pm GMT

10 Nov 2011

feedshare.ez.no > All forums (topics and replies)

Re: ezoe : Not found error in customTags popup

Hello Franck,

I'm sorry I have not yet encountered this problem before.

What version of eZ Pubish are you using?

What version of ezoe are you using?

If you have a set of reproducible instructions to recreate the issue using the latest community build available you may wish to consider filing an issue on http://issues.ez.no/ezoe

I hope this helps ...

Cheers,

Heath

10 Nov 2011 2:44am GMT

Re: Single login through different SiteAccess (using sub-domains)

Edit your site.ini like that :

[Session]
SessionNameHandler=custom
SessionNamePerSiteAccess=disabled

Set a common cookie_domain for all your sub domains! To do that you can edit your apache virtual_host and add that line into it :

php_value session.cookie_domain ".mysite.com"

Thanks Yannick, it was really useful, but I needed to isolate groups of siteaccess under the same domain, it's possible using site.ini / [Session] / SessionNamePrefix. You just have to set the same value for each siteaccess you want to share the session.

Example :

I have siteaccesses siteA, siteB, siteC, siteD and siteE. I want siteA, site B and siteC to share a session, and siteD and siteE to share another session.

In

[Session]
SessionNameHandler=custom
SessionNamePerSiteAccess=disabled
SessionNamePrefix=fooPrefix

In

[Session]
SessionNameHandler=custom
SessionNamePerSiteAccess=disabled
SessionNamePrefix=barPrefix

10 Nov 2011 2:14am GMT

Re: user ans rules

Hello Amine,

I took a few minutes and wrote a custom owsimpleoperator template operator function on your behalf.
When you use this you should be able to do so without touching the code.

This solution provides you a new custom template operator named 'member_of_role' which you would use like this ... (note this is a simple static example you will want to use dynamic values instead of course.

{def $userID=10
        $roleID=1
        $isMemberOfRole=$userID|member_of_role( $roleID )}
 
{if $isMemberOfRole}
 
Success! This userID {$userID} is a member of this roleID {$roleID} ...
 
{else}
 
Failure! This userID {$userID} is *not* a member of this roleID {$roleID} ...
 
{/if}

The custom 'member_of_role' operator accepts UserID and RoleID (Both required) and fetches the user, user roles, iterates over user roles and compares RoleID param till it finds a match and returns true, false if no match is found / etc.

This operator uses builtin / core eZ Publish PHP class methods for the very best in terms of reliability and stability.

share.ez.no is terrible to use when trying to paste pre formated (whitespace, no tabs, plain text) source code within the ezoe custom plugin input which has been written outside of ezoe and pasted in.

This off and on is a real problem with this site. It's no wonder so few folks post source code within the forums these days ... So I have posted my example solution source code in a pastebin instead, http://ezpublish.pastebin.ca/2093464

Please let me know how this solution works for you.

One final note: This code can also be called statically within custom PHP code without making any changes.

Here is an example PHP call of the function which powers the operator: ''

Please remember to clear cache and regenerate autoloads be for using this solution within eZ Publish!

I hope this helps ...

Cheers,

Heath

Edit: I found some extra time later in the evening and tested the operator in templates and it worked perfectly (as well as via PHP directly). Best wishes!

10 Nov 2011 1:34am GMT

09 Nov 2011

feedPlanet Zope.org

Updated MiniPlanet, now with meta-feed

My MiniPlanet Zope product has been working steady and stable for some years, when suddenly a user request came along. Would it be possible to get a feed of all the items in a miniplanet? With this update it became possible. MiniPlanet is an old-styl...

09 Nov 2011 9:41am GMT

07 Nov 2011

feedPlanet Zope.org

Welcome to Betabug Sirius

It has been quite some time that I announced_ that I'd be working as a freelancer. Lots of stuff had to be done in that time, but finally things are ready. I've founded my own little company and set up a small website: Welcome to Betabug Sirius!

07 Nov 2011 9:26am GMT

03 Nov 2011

feedPlanet Zope.org

Assertion helper for zope.testbrowser and unittest

zope.testbrowser is a valuable tool for integration tests. Historically, the Zope community used to write quite a lot of doctests, but we at gocept have found them to be rather clumsy and too often yielding neither good tests nor good documentation. That's why we don't use doctest much anymore, and prefer plain unittest.TestCases instead. However, doctest has one very nice feature, ellipsis matching, that is really helpful for checking HTML output, since you can only make assertions about the parts that interest you. For example, given this kind of page:

>>> print browser.contents
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Simple Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Simple Page</h1>
  </body>
</html>

If all you're interested in is that the <h1> is rendered properly, you can simply say:

>>> print browser.contents
<...<h1>Simple Page</h1>...

We've now ported this functionality to unittest, as assertEllipsis, in gocept.testing. Some examples:

self.assertEllipsis('...bar...', 'foo bar qux')
# -> nothing happens

self.assertEllipsis('foo', 'bar')
# -> AssertionError: Differences (ndiff with -expected +actual):
     - foo
     + bar

self.assertNotEllipsis('foo', 'foo')
# -> AssertionError: "Value unexpectedly matches expression 'foo'."

To use it, inherit from gocept.testing.assertion.Ellipsis in addition to unittest.TestCase.


03 Nov 2011 7:19am GMT

02 Nov 2011

feedCI News

GoCart

Every week we hear of really awesome places that CodeIgniter is being used. I want to start sharing those with the community-at-large. I will start by posting them here under a new Showcase Category with the hopes that any future revisions of CI.com will have a section for stuff like this. You guys and gals make some really cool stuff and deserve a platform to show it off.

So without further ado…

This showcase is an interview with Kyle Roseborrough about GoCart

What can you tell us about the GoCart team?

We have a pair of PHP developers who knew there was a better way to build a shipping cart. Noah (lead developer) has 6 years experience in PHP development and 4 years in CodeIgniter. Gabe has about 10 years experience in web application development. Kyle has been working in UI and management for 10 years.
GoCart Website Screen Shot

What can we tell about the site in general?

GoCartdv.com was built to showcase GoCart and offer some basic information on the system.

What are the goals of the site and the main audience?

The main audience is CodeIgniter developers who are wanting a simple, scalable, CodeIgniter shopping cart. The goal is to get people involved in development to improve the cart and allow it to fully embody the goal of the project. To be easy to customize for developers and easy to use for end users/customers

What was your major consideration in using CodeIgniter for this?

CodeIgniter has great documentation and is easy to learn. We build lot of custom projects on CodeIgniter and it only made sense for us to build our cart on it. When looking for commerce solutions, we never found a suitable solution built on CodeIgniter so we decided to set out to do it on our own.

What is next on the plate for GoCart?

We really want GoCart to foster a great community of people contributing back to the roadmap and path the project will take. We want the focus to remain the same though "Easy to Customize, Easy to Use". It would be great if we could get enough people using.

Any additional functionality you can tell us about?

Well, not really. GoCart is intended to be a shopping cart, plain and simple. It does have some basic page and banner management and a whole slew of cart related features, but ultimately it's an ecommerce platform.

Do you have any other information you'd like to share with the community?

We built GoCart to be simple and scalable. As time goes on, we want the software to become easier and easier to use. We want GoCart to be scalable and to be able to work with new platforms as they come out. We feel that CodeIgniter and the CodeIgniter community is a huge benefit here. It enables developers to tie into a whole plethora of libraries, helpers and applications easily and support each other in the endeavor to make CodeIgniter better. Essentially, what's good for CodeIgniter is good for GoCart.

Tips from this project you'd like to share?

If you really want something, do it yourself. If it doesn't happen then you probably don't want it as bad as you think.

Lessons you've learned?

- Not every idea is a good one. Generally you need someone else around to discuss ideas and methods with. Collaboration is the best way to build a good application.
- No one knows what the next trend will be. Having a scalable platform that will adjust to a new set of tools and user demands is very important.


If you have a project that you would like to see in our showcase email me

02 Nov 2011 7:31pm GMT

01 Nov 2011

feedNews

eZ Systems takes over High-Tech Gruenderfonds

Successful exit for German IT technology and now one of the services offered by eZ Systems.

With the acquisition of the German high-technology start-up, YOOCHOOSE, the Norwegian company eZ Systems AS is expanding its content management system, eZ Publish Enterprise, with one of the world's leading recommendation engines. YOOCHOOSE was founded in 2009 by Dr. Uwe Alkemper and Michael Friedmann, and convinced High-Tech Gruenderfonds to provide seed financing at an early stage. Behind YOOCHOOSE - a spin-off company from Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin - lies a high-performance, patented recommendation system, which enables companies to significantly increase their revenues on the Internet using personalized recommendations.

01 Nov 2011 1:07pm GMT

26 Oct 2011

feedNews

eZ Delivers Analytics Optimizing Customer Experience

Through the acquisition of odoscope, eZ extends the powerful eZ Publish content management platform with behavior analysis optimizing the end-customer engagement.

26 Oct 2011 6:53am GMT

23 Oct 2011

feedPlanet TurboGears

Cliff Wells: FreeSWITCH on Scientific Linux 6.1

SL 6.1 (and I assume RHEL and CentOS 6.1 as well) has introduced an issue for building and running FreeSWITCH. Apparently a lot of stuff now relies on dynamically linking to libnss3. libnss3, in turn, depends on libnspr4.so, which depends on libplds4.so. Seemingly, this should not be an issue (stuff depends on chained shared objects all over the place), but somehow it is.

What happens is first you can't compile FreeSWITCH. You get complaints about unresolved symbols in /usr/lib64/libnss3.so. The solution is to run the following commands:

yum install nspr-devel
env LIBS="-lnss3 -lnspr4 -lplds4" ./configure
make && make install

This will get you a compiled version of FreeSWITCH. However, when you actually run it, you'll find that several modules won't load at runtime (including the ODBC driver, should you happen to be using it). The solution for this is similar. Assuming you are using an init script to launch FreeSWITCH, you can add the following line to the top of /etc/init.d/freeswitch:

export LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib64/libnss3.so /usr/lib64/libnspr4.so /usr/lib64/libplds4.so"

Voila. Everything works. Hopefully the FreeSWITCH devs get on RHEL6 support soon, but meanwhile this should get you by.

23 Oct 2011 3:27pm GMT

20 Oct 2011

feedNews

New Cockpit Available for Better Productivity

eZ Content Cockpit is the latest extension from the eZ Market that offers a cohesive website overview to facilitate better editing and maintenance of dynamic content.

20 Oct 2011 7:43am GMT

18 Oct 2011

feedPlanet TurboGears

Michael Pedersen: Request For Ideas for Hiring Pond

So, a favor to ask of people: I'm working on a web application to help people manage their resumes. As I've gotten further in, I've realized I don't have an actual todo list for it. So, since I'm making this to be used by others, I'll ask everybody here:

What would you want to see? Currently, I've added enough code to allow the program to output something very close to my online resume ( http://www.icelus.org/ ). Next up, I have the following features on my todo list already:




What else would you all want to see in order to make you want to use this?

18 Oct 2011 8:44pm GMT

13 Oct 2011

feedshare.ez.no > Articles and Tutorials

Building native mobile applications with the eZ Publish REST API

eZ Publish is a Web Content Management System that provides a platform to publish content via any channel. Its powerful presentation engine enables you to create websites and pages that display your content in a variety of renderings. Its powerful API directly and simply integrates your content with any web-enabled application on any device, such as the iPad, iPhone, or an Android device, without ever interfering with, or impacting the platform itself.

At the end of this tutorial, you will have learnt the basics of mobile application development for both iOS and Android platforms, consuming content from eZ Publish. CMS-side adjustments for the mobile channel will be acquired too. This cheatsheet will help you leverage the multichannel capabilities of eZ Publish, and its REST API in future projects, in a more systematic fashion.

13 Oct 2011 2:21pm GMT

05 Oct 2011

feedCI News

New User Guide in Development

We are happy to announce today that the user guide has had some significant improvements, and the first commit of these changes were just pushed today.

As many of you likely heard at CICON 2011, the Reactor team has had an internal project going on for some time to move the user guide to Sphinx. In addition to handling the tedium of generating page and document tables of contents, or maintaining internal links and references, the documentation is now easier to write, as you can simply focus on the content instead of markup and presentation. Don't forget syntax highlighting of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in code samples. Based on ReStructured Text, it's also more human readable in a text editor than HTML is, which is likely where you spend most of your time. As an added benefit, Sphinx can output HTML, PDF, and even EPUB formats all from the same source files. We will likely be taking advantage of that at a later date.

But we didn't stop there, we also enlisted the thunderous powers of EllisLab's Chief Creative Officer, James Mathias for a style redesign. They are clean, easy to read, and beautiful.

Setting up your dev environment to work with Sphinx (if you want to render and output locally) is very easy, and takes about five minutes. For those that want to geek out, we have added a readme file to the user guide source folder so the step by step instructions are available right from GitHub.

Today marks the first commit with the new user guide to the unreleased develop branch, so you may encounter some bumps. Most notably are the code blocks, which pandoc lost our line breaks on, and some navigation issues as we experiment with different table of contents presentation and depth. We'll be cleaning these up prior to the next release (much is as simple as some line breaks and tabs), but feel free to pitch in and submit some pull requests if you see anything out of whack.

And lastly, for the first time ever, we have live nightly builds of documentation for the develop branch available at the CodeIgniter web site. Enjoy!

05 Oct 2011 7:23pm GMT

04 Oct 2011

feedPlanet TurboGears

Alessandro Molina: TurboGears2 Performance Improvements

As recently some effort has been involved in improving the performances of TurboGears2, I was curious to see how much things improved. As usually, the test isn't really reliable in any way and was just for fun.

All the graphs report the request/sec the application has been able to perform on my computer with only 1 concurrent client. So higher is better.

Here is the comparison between TG2.0 and TG2dev (will be 2.1.4)

I also compared various setups with different template engines on TG2dev

The comparison happened on an application similar to the quickstarted one.
Actually as there is no database involved in this application the template engine impacts a lot and so was a good benchmark for the template engines themselves.

04 Oct 2011 3:35pm GMT

16 Aug 2011

feedshare.ez.no > Articles and Tutorials

Image Maps in ezwebin Banners

Beginners guide for learning how to use image maps in the ezwebin extension.

16 Aug 2011 12:40pm GMT

07 Jul 2011

feedshare.ez.no > Articles and Tutorials

Building mobile browser and hybrid applications with eZ Publish

eZ Publish is a Web Content Management System that provides a platform to publish content via any channel. Its powerful presentation engine enables you to create websites and pages that display your content in a variety of renderings. Its powerful API directly and simply integrates your content with any web-enabled application on any device, such as the iPad, iPhone, or an Android device, without ever interfering with, or impacting the platform itself.

At the end of this tutorial, you will have learnt the basics of mobile application development for both iOS and Android platforms, consuming content from eZ Publish. CMS-side adjustments for the mobile channel will be acquired too. This cheatsheet will help you leverage the multichannel capabilities of eZ Publish, and its REST API in future projects, in a more systematic fashion.

07 Jul 2011 1:29pm GMT

06 Apr 2011

feedcakebaker

Bash autocompletion for Git

One thing I often wished to have when using Git was the ability to autocomplete Git commands and branch names. As I had to learn this week from Markus Prinz' article A few of my Git tricks, tips and workflows, Git comes with an autocompletion script for the Bash shell. But to use the autocompletion, […]

06 Apr 2011 8:36am GMT

01 Apr 2011

feedcakebaker

Array iteration with JavaScript

Till recently I always used a for-loop when I had to iterate over an array in JavaScript. For example: var myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4]; for (var i = 0; i < myArray.length; i++) { console.log(myArray[i]); } However, with ECMAScript 5 the Array object itself got some methods for iteration purposes. With those methods […]

01 Apr 2011 2:51pm GMT

10 Jan 2011

feedcakebaker

2-legged vs. 3-legged OAuth

From emails I receive it seems like there is a bit of confusion about what the terms 2-legged OAuth and 3-legged OAuth mean. I hope I can clear up this confusion with this article (and don't contribute more to the confusion…). In short, they describe two different usage scenarios of OAuth involving two respectively three […]

10 Jan 2011 5:30pm GMT

04 Mar 2010

feedWithCake.com Companies Hiring

qpLogic Europe

We can use immediately an experienced Cake developer for assisting us with developing a multi-lingual application that needs some Jake/Joomla (css) integration. We have continuously Cake projects and prefer to work with a team of individual developers in multiple time zones. Please show me that you are experienced, affordable and have at least 24 hours available per week (40 is better ;-).

04 Mar 2010 11:54am GMT