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Continuous Integration in PHP; the building blocks

Written by Wilco Jansen Monday, 07 September 2009 21:56

In my previous article about continuous integration I started a briefly explained the benefits of implementing a continuous integration strategy, today I will look into the building blocks that should be part of such an development environment. In this blog I will briefly handle these building blocks, what they they do and how you can use them individually, also including links to the other Open Source PHP project who use these building blocks in their development process.

Keep in mind that continuous Integration is the practice of integrating early and often, so as to avoid the pitfalls of "integration hell". The ultimate goal is to reduce timely rework and thus reduce cost and time. When you consider the building blocks individually and you are new to the use of these tools you can get the impression it will be a lot more work developing your solutions, beside a simple description of the tools I will also try to explain how you can get started, and how the use of such a tool will help you save time in the end...lets start with a summary of the building blocks.

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Continuous Integration in PHP; what, why and how?

Written by Wilco Jansen Sunday, 06 September 2009 18:59

An important part of any software development process is getting reliable builds of the software. Despite it's importance, we are often surprised when this isn't done. Continues integration is increasingly used throughout companies, and is can be used in a wide variety of programming languages. This article is the first in a series of blogs, not knowing how much articles I need to explain the full story, but in the end you will understand how you can set up a fully automated and reproducible build, including testing, validation of code against coding standards, code complexity analyses and fully automated API documentation generation that runs after every commit that is done. This allows each developer to integrate instantaneously thus reducing integration problems.

This first article is an introduction to the basics of continuous integration and what it can bring to you as a developer. The basics of this article are inspired on an article from Martin Fowler who describes how they implemented continues integration in their company. For those unfamiliar to continues integration, sometimes also referred to continuous building, one of the hardest things to grasp is a fundamental shift to the whole development pattern. Particularly difficult when you have never worked in such an environment, but once you get started you will quickly see the benefits of this approach. Most important to understand is that continues integration helps you solve the problem of code integration in a collaborative development environment.

Martin Fowler explains in his article that the fundamental benefit of continuous integration is that it removes sessions where people spend time hunting bugs where one person's work has stepped on someone else's work without either person realizing what happened. These bugs are hard to find because the problem isn't in one person's area, it is in the interaction between two pieces of work. This problem is exacerbated by time. Often integration bugs can be inserted weeks or months before they first manifest themselves. As a result they take a lot of finding.

A good example is the recent maintenance releases of Joomla 1.5.13 and 1.5.14 where a new version of a library caused other parts of the CMS to fail. An approach where continuous integration would have been implemented would most likely have prevented this problem to have arisen in the first place. With continuous integration the vast majority of such bugs manifest themselves the same day they were introduced. Furthermore it's immediately obvious where at least half of the interaction lies. This greatly reduces the scope of the search for the bug. And if you can't find the bug, you can avoid putting the offending code to be release, the worst that happens is that you don't add the feature that also adds the bug.

Is continuous building the solution for creating flawless software? In no way I will ever state that, but experience (not only from me) has proven that code quality increased dramatically. And because you find flaws instantaneously you spend less time developing the features in the end increasing productivity.

In the next article I will describe the building blocks for setting up a continuous integration environment using PHP as your development environment. After that I will describe the open source tools available for PHP, in the final article(s) I will explain how to set up a fully integrated environment that can be used in your situation. I am personally very interested in best practices out there for people/companies who have successfully implemented continues integration solutions, feel free to comment here or send me a mail at jansen dot wilco at gmail.com.

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Google timeline for Open Source Software and more

Written by Arno Zijlstra Thursday, 27 August 2009 12:09

During my daily catch-up on news about things that interest me or that are related to my business life I stumbled on Google Timeline Search again and found a few interesting results.

First I searched for "Open Source Software" and set the timeline between 1990 and 2009. You can see the results here on Google.

The timeline surprised me little because what I would have thought; a steady growth all the way up to 2009, appeared to be a little different. In the results 2004 seems to be the high for "Open Source Software" and after that there is a decline until 2009 where it is basically the same again as in 1999.

I did a few other searches on things that I read about a lot and one that I never read about but many people seem todo :-)

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The Personas Project From MIT

Written by Arno Zijlstra Saturday, 22 August 2009 08:52

You may have seen this really cool piece before but if you didn't you really should. Visit Personas which is build by MIT Media Lab.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Tip: You can also try Joomla or Drupal or whatever but make sure you have something todo while it profiles.

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A day full of coincidences

Written by Arno Zijlstra Friday, 21 August 2009 21:20

Today was one of those days. Wilco and I had to go to Germany for a meeting concerning Abillo. I arrived at Wilco's house and checked twitter on my, actually Anthony's little eee to find out that Dries was also going to Germany. Could happen you may think, nothing special. I agree, but than Dries blogged he had seen Bambi and actually took some pictures. On the way home it happened, Wilco and I saw... Thumper.

Incredible ey, Bambi and Thumper wow. :-)

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BBC launches open-source Digital Revolution

Written by Arno Zijlstra Thursday, 20 August 2009 17:30

The BBC is starting work on what it calls its first ever open-source documentary, a collaborative blend of blogging and broadcasting that will chart the impact of the internet over the past 20 years.

"The documentary needs people to come and share their knowledge, stories and links to guide the production, in the knowledge they have an opportunity to affect and guide a major and unique BBC documentary," a spokesman said.

Anyone who wants to get involved can head to the project's website, where producers and contributors will thrash out a plan for four hour-long shows due to be shown next year.

Source: wired.co.uk

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