A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.
I’ve spent a large part of yesterday setting up the testing environment for a CakePHP project. As always, every time I do something that I have done before, I wanted to do it better, using all the experienced that was acquired previously. And this often leads to the discovery of new things – both good and bad. Here is a record of what I’ve learned yesterday.
Continue reading Unit tests with CakePHP
Chris has an interesting example of Blueprint CSS framework not working. The code looks like it should work, but it doesn’t. And since it was me who recommended Blueprint CSS to him, I felt like I had to understand what’s going on. Or at least find a working solution. First, I tried his code snippet, and indeed it wasn’t working.
<div class="container">
<div class="span-24 last">
<div class="span-4 first">4</div>
<div class="span-10">10</div>
<div class="span-10 last">10</div>
</div>
</div>
It was breaking the last DIV into a line of its own, which is not what you or I would expect. After a few minutes of going back and forward, I started with an empty HTML file and started copying Blueprint CSS examples one by one, trying to figure out how to make it work. And here is the code that did it for me.
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<title>Blueprint Test</title>
<!-- Framework CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="blueprint/screen.css" type="text/css" media="screen, projection">
</head>
<body>
<div class="container">
<div class="span-4">4</div>
<div class="span-10">10</div>
<div class="span-10 last">10</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
The biggest two differences between the version that works and the version which doesn’t seem to be an additional DIV with “span-24 last” classes, and the “first” class added to the first content DIV.
With this I have to agree with Chris, that it should have worked.
NOTE: THIS IS VERY MUCH OUTDATED! Read about the update or go directly to GitHub repository for the new version.
I have a task at hand. I have to re-introduce myself to a rather large codebase. It’s a project that migrated to CakePHP a couple of years ago and haven’t seen since. There was a whole team of people working on it sense then, and now I need to make sense of all those changes that were done and help reorganize and refactor them a bit. When I looked into CakePHP’s models/ folder, I was surprised to find 50+ models there. Each and every one of them links to other models. And documentation is practically non-existing. How do I go about it? I hack up a little script to help me out.
There is a really elegant and beautiful tool for graphing things – GraphViz. If you haven’t heard of it, you need to drop whatever is that you are doing and familiarize yourself with GraphViz. Right now. Right. This. Second. You are missing out a whole universe until you do so. I’ll wait.
Now that you are back, I just want to mention a very slick tool, which is a part of GraphViz package – dot. It is a simple language in which you can describe graphs. Sort of like “A goes to B, which goes to C”. You specify your graph in a very human readable format in a text file, and then dot will transform that text file into an image format of your choice (PNG, JPEG, GIF, etc). The primary beauty of this is that those text files can be generated automatically by using pretty much any programming language.
So here is what I did. I assumed the following:
I probably assumed a whole bunch of other things, but you can get an idea of how simple the setup is from the above ones.
Here is how I generate a graph of all models and their dependencies:
cd app/docs/ php -f graph.php > graph.dot dot -Tpng graph.dot > graph.png
Obviously, I can’t show you the full graph from that system (it’s not open source, it’s not mine, and it will drive you insane in a matter of seconds), but here is how a small part of that image looks like.
There is a different colour for each type of model relationship ($belongsTo, $hasMany, and $hasAndBelongsToMany). Each model folder is in a separate sub-graph cluster. There is a legend graph on the image. The current time stamp and version control revision are also imposed on the image for easier referencing.
And here is the source for the graph.php script. Feel free to modify any way you like. If you spot any major bugs or better ways of doing things, please let me know in the comments.
Continue reading CakePHP + GraphViz = making sense of a numerous models
Here is a funny, yet too realistic diagram of a programmer’s day. See a bigger version and some comments over at Digg.
Via this Slashdot post I came across an excellent blog rant – Whatever happened to programming (and the follow-up). Subject in focus – modern programming, and how boring it have become (mostly).
Today, I mostly paste libraries together. So do you, most likely, if you work in software. Doesn’t that seem anticlimactic? We did all those courses on LR grammars and concurrent software and referentially transparent functional languages. We messed about with Prolog, Lisp and APL. We studied invariants and formal preconditions and operating system theory. Now how much of that do we use?
Of course, when a subject like that is brought up, it’s pretty much guaranteed that the web will respond with numerous discussions on if and how much of it is true, how did we get here, and how we can get out, and anything else remotely or not at all related. And that’s just what happened. You can read Slashdot or Reddit comments or Google for more. But I think, if you do programming for living, you’d probably agree with the main point of the article. And even if you won’t, it’s still fun to read. Like this bit for example:
Especially, I have learned that anything that has “Enterprise” in its name is so incredibly boring that the people who use it had to shove the name of the Star Trek ship into its title just to keep themselves awake.
On the serious note though, working with mainly two programming languages – Perl and PHP, I see that there is indeed a difference to the “being boring” degree. PHP is way more boring than Perl. Surprisingly even with Perl being so well known for its CPAN – a huge archive of modules and libraries to use. I guess it has something to do with There Is More Than One Way To Do It – motto of Perl.