Linux and PHP web application support and development (Bromsgrove, UK)
When writing unit tests, it’s often desirable to ‘mimick’ a backend call to web service or database (without using the real thing backend). Ideally you need this to be quick and easy to do. One way of doing this is to use mock or double objects. This article discusses their use with PHPUnit (a unit […]
Web applications often have a requirement to log information about a request to a database. In a contrived example this could just be a global counter which attempts to amaze visitors to your site about how many requests you’ve handled in the last hour/day/week/month. One approach to doing this is to update a database each […]
We think we’ve been fairly busy lately, so here’s a summary covering some of the things we’ve been up to – Released Android and iPhone apps (Food Hygiene – for ScoresOnTheDoors.org.uk). The Android release is now all native (so quite responsive and fast); both have new graphics and an improved method of searching. (See the iTunes […]
At the moment we’re redeveloping an existing JSON based API, which is used by a mobile application. We knew the performance of the previous release of the API was good – it’s been in use for the last two years without any problems, and easily outperforms a competitor’s API. However, our dataset size is due […]
On Friday and Saturday, last week, the annual London PHP conference took place. We were there on Friday – and I saw the talks on : “The Journey towards Continuous Integration” (which has prompted me to upgrade our internal Jenkins based CI infrastructure and introduce Sonar for long term statistics capture) “Security Audits as an Integral part […]
This post is based upon some content within our PHP OO training course (which covers design patterns). The circuit breaker design pattern is a fairly simple, and handy approach to dealing with remote services which may be offline. To explain the pattern, here’s a semi-true story – So, imagine the front page of a website […]
Recently on the PHP NorthWest mailing list, there has been some discussion over the causes of security vulnerabilities within PHP applications. The original poster provided a questionnaire – however, this didn’t really allow for much in the way of a detailed answer, so here’s our 2 pence. As a caveat: there are obviously other causes…. […]
Xerte Online Toolkits is an open source Flash+Ajax+PHP web application which allows tutors to create rich multimedia presentations through a web browser. We’ve been hosting a couple of Xerte based sites (for Techdis and Warwick University) for a couple of years now. Being an open source project – we initially added support to the Techdis […]