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Even Chancellor Merkel is using Joomla!

Written by Wolfgang Disch Wednesday, 30 September 2009 11:00

Chancellor Angela Merkel won in Germany’s national elections on Sunday. To help in the election campaign the conservative Christian Democrats formed a supporter team, who had their own community website: www.team2009.de.

This website uses Joomla! 1.5 with many extensions and 3rd party APIs, like Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube. More than 27.000 people registered at that site.

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Continiuous integration, a best practise report?

Written by Wilco Jansen Tuesday, 29 September 2009 14:10

Recently I have been interviewed by a Dutch journalist who pointed me to the "Coverity Scan Open Source Report". His question was why Joomla was not amongst the open source projects in that report. I will not bother you with the interview, but the report itself holds some very interesting information regarding quality of the products and with that the quality of the development of those open source projects.

In the executive summary the following remarks can be found:

• The overall integrity, quality, and security of open source software is improving.
• Open Source developers are actively improving software.
• Most common defect types are holding steady.
• Longer functions have lower defect densities, contrary to common belief.

In addition to these findings they notice significant shifts in open source adoption and quality worth noting:

• Coverity Scan was launched in conjunction with the United States Department of Homeland Security to improve the quality and security of the most widely used software in the world; it has evolved to become the standard for analyzing and improving the quality, performance, and security of open source.
• Gartner estimates that by 2012, 80% of all commercial software will include elements of open source technology.
• The Coverity Scan rungs have become a way to identify the highest-quality, defect-free open source software.

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Meet me at T-Dose on October 4th

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 28 September 2009 13:00

T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. This years event will be held on 3 and 4 October 2009 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

At the Sunday I will give a presentation on continuous integration for PHP, my session is scheduled for 11 o'clock and will handle the topics covered in previous continuous integration articles as blogged on this website. I will handle the topic in more depth during the session, my presentation will be shared later on slideshare for those who are interested.

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Extremely urgent?

Written by Wilco Jansen Wednesday, 23 September 2009 17:13

Today I received a package from Google and the envelope from FedEx said "Extremely Urgent". I unpacked it straight away and there the 2009 edition of the Summer Of Code T-Shirt was! The shirt is a good reminder on all interesting work done during the summer time by extremely talented students. I got actively involved in the summer of code early 2006 when Louis and Johan asked me to become mentor, and later on managing the program for Joomla. I have worked actively since then on the Summer of Code in the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions and this year I asked Mark Dexter to take over and I must say Mark has done an amazing good job!

From the initial list of project ideas 18 projects have been selected and accepted by Google. Not every project has passed the end term, but the list of finished projects is still quite impressive. Hope to see some of that work end up in one of the Joomla releases in the near future.

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Writing a release announcement with a wow factor

Written by Arno Zijlstra Tuesday, 15 September 2009 10:17

This morning I came across the release announcement for DRUPAL-7-0-UNSTABLE-9 and after reading the full page I was exited and I'm just an occasional Drupal user or developer. It's not that I'm all excited about Drupal now but the way this piece is written is what touched me.

The announcement is written by Angela Byron or for insiders Webchick and she does a great job making an announcement for an unstable version read like it's great as a stable release.

Database-wise, core is now fully DBTNG-compliant! YAY! We also added basic support for 'date' and 'time' types to Schema API, update_sql() is dead, dead, dead, AND now hook_uninstall() and hook_install() will automatically handle your schema definitions. Ahhh.

Read the full announcement here and to other projects I'd say there is something good to learn here, well done Angela.

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Continuous Integration in PHP; Duplicate code detection

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 14 September 2009 12:00

After I described the building blocks for a PHP continuous build environment I went into more detail on the PHP code sniffer features to validate against coding standards. When I described the building blocks I focused on the minimum assets for such an environment.

In todays article I want to describe the use of other PHP tools that can be used to increase the quality of your code. Today I will take a closer look at a Copy/Paste Detector (CPD) for PHP code. The goal of phpcpd is not not to replace more sophisticated tools such as PHP Code sniffer but rather to provide an alternative to them when you just need to get a quick overview of duplicated code in a project. Tools in this category can be integrated into the continuous build environment, but personally I would suggest using them additionally to improve your code quality, and not as part of the main logic that determines if a build is successful or not...it is of course up to you to include it in your environment.

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