After exploring various options for improving the search functionality in eZ publish, I finally settled for Lucene … (the Java version) which will server as a base platform to build upon. I won't give a detailed list of pro's and con's of alternatives (like Xapian, Egothor) or why not use complete search engines like mnogosearch, [...]

Guy Harpaz posted a reply to my Debugger Protocol Shoot-out on his newly created blog. In this post he tries to counter some of my arguments. I don't quite understand why he couldn't just have posted his comments here though. (And in case why you're wondering why I'm not adding a comment to his post: You need a blogger.com account to comment, and I refuse to create one just to be able to comment on a blog).

The first thing that strikes me as odd is the following quote:

We chose performance (binary based protocol) over easy server side implementation (textual based protocol).

Easy implementation was never the reason for going with a textual based protocol. The main reason was to allow extensions to the protocol be as easy as possible. Cramming as much data in as little bytes as possible is also not going to increase performance if your protocol has no ways to paginate through arrays with many elements or when you have no means of limiting the amount of data in one variable to be send over the wire. This is very useful incase you have a few MB files in variables for example.

The second argument why you should "choose Zend Studio's protocol" is:

DBGp supports several scripting languages and from this derives some of its disadvantages. We believe that a debug protocol should be as 'close' as possible to the PHP language.

This doesn't make much sense to me, as far as I know Eclipse is a multi language IDE. Secondly, which disadvantages there are is not mentioned.

Then Guy tries to compare some security points:

The Proxy mechanism has few bugs in it

If that is the case, would you mean telling us where?

He further mentions:

The PHP IDE debug protocol does not specify requirements for a security system but defines that the Debug server should receive the client IP before initializing the session. By using the IP, implementing a security mechanism is very simple.

Xdebug doesn't specify any requirements either. Xdebug could implement an extra security that checks whether the IP is allowed to be used as debugging IDE client. However, when you are on a NAT-ted local network, and your dev server is somewhere outside of this network you have a problem without a proxy. As there is no way for the debugging engine on the developer machine to connect to individual IDEs anymore (as the IPs are simply not accessible by the devel server because of NAT). The proxy-server based approach of DBGp allows your devel server to connect to the proxy on one IP and one port (which also means you have to poke only one hole in your firewall). The IDE then simply have to make itself known to the proxy server with its "idekey" to allow debugging through a NAT-ted network.

The last point that Guy raises is:

DBGp supports PHP execution stdout and stderr as a general solution for all supported languages. PHP IDE as a specific protocol for PHP can distingue between header output and standard output and between all types of PHP errors (warnings, errors and notices).

It really has nothing to do whether a protocol is specifically made for PHP or not to allow the sending of HTTP headers. DBGp currently has no options for sending headers, but that would not be hard to add. It definitely would not be the selling point on why somebody should "choose Zend Studio's protocol".

I am having a couple of talks at the eZ publish conference. This year I mostly have talks related to performance, much based on the work done lately to scale eZ publish. If you are interested in making eZ publish fast this should be of interest to you.

Have you signed up yet?

Guy Harpaz, the product manager for Zend Studio, has sterted a new blog up today, and has already posted his first item, a look at PHP IDE debug protocols and why to choose Zend's.

Lately there were many questions and comments on blogs and in PHP related forums regarding the debugger protocol, which will be used in the PHP IDE project at Eclipse.org.

When the Eclipse Foundation approved the PHP IDE project, Zend Studio's debug protocol was opened source and was chosen to be the debug protocol of the PHP IDE project. Zend Studio was known for its debugging capability and it is considered one of its big advantages, therefore, the decision to open source the protocol was obviously a big decision.

He follows this with two reasons to make the choice of Zend's offering, and includes two more topics looking at the differences between the two main protocols (DBGp and PHP IDE debug).

Sebastian Bergmann has posted several new screenshots of the new reporting feature of the upcoming PHPUnit 3 release, completed via a patch from Michael Lively Jr.

Michael Lively Jr. sent me a patch last night that implements most of the bits and pieces that were still missing from the new reporting functionality in PHPUnit 3.

When you compare the current version of the reporting to the original version you will notice that I changed the color scheme. It now uses colors from the Tango Palette.

The screenshots include views of the summary page, a detail view of the same (and more) information, example test results output, and the code coverage for an internal class.

Michael Lively Jr. sent me a patch last night that implements most of the bits and pieces that were still missing from the new reporting functionality in PHPUnit 3.



The screenshot above shows the summary page for PHPUnit's own test suite. The screenshot below shows a more detailed view.



The screenshot below shows the test results for the ExceptionTestCaseTest test case. Notice the graphical representation of the test case structure.



The screenshot below shows the code coverage for the PHPUnit2_Framework_Assert class.



When you compare the current version of the reporting to the original version you will notice that I changed the color scheme. It now uses colors from the Tango Palette.

Update: I released a third alpha-quality version of PHPUnit 3 that now contains the new reporting functionality.

The German subsidiary of eZ systems sponsors the webdevity.de Code Challenge 2006 where you can win prices all together worth over 20 000 EUR.

Tobias Schlitt has posted this information on his blog about a free eZ components online session he'll be hosting May 26th.

I'll be giving a free online session about our enterprise PHP library in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de on May 26th, 15:00-16:30. The session will give an overview about the eZ components architecture, as well as practical usage examples. I would love to meet you online then. :) Thanks to Wolfgang Drews from dynamic-webpages.de for providing this session!

The training session will be provided in German, but is open to all who would like to attend. You can get complete information about the session from the official site.

I'll be giving a free online session about our enterprise PHP library in cooperation with dynamic-webpages.de on May 26th, 15:00-16:30. The session will give an overview about the eZ components architecture, as well as practical usage examples. I would love to meet you online then. :) Thanks to Wolfgang Drews from dynamic-webpages.de for providing this session!

Find detailed information here.

We just released the second beta for eZ components 1.1. In this release you will find the new PersistentObjectDatabaseSchemaTiein and Template packages.

The PersistentObjectDatabaseSchemaTiein components provides a script that can generate definition files from a database schema (or database structure). Those definition files can then be used for ORM with the PersistentObject component.

The Template package provides a templating engine (more information in the announcement for beta1 of the Template component).

The release also comes with updated packages for Base, Cache, ConsoleTools, Database, DatabaseSchema, File, Mail, PersistentObject and SystemInformation. The first beta of the Template component will follow in a separate release next week.