There isn’t a lot of information to be found about the :not() selector. The specifications only offer 3 lines of text and a couple of examples. So lets see what it can do!

The symfony web debug toolbar is awesome. You know when partials are executed, you know which queries the database receives, you know all about caching, filters, slots, decorators, and you can even add your own traces there. But there is one thing that bothers me a lot: each database query executed by Creole displays two or three lines in the web debug toolbar

Let's kickstart this blogpost by defining what an iterator actually is. According to wikipedia, an iterator is: "an object which allows a programmer to traverse through all the elements of a collection, regardless of its specific implementation."

Symfony core development resumed this week its normal pace with several changesets in the 1.2 branch. Among these updates, YAML parser gained full merge key support and PHP 5.2.4 was set as the minimum PHP version required.

A small update on the whole BlueprintCSS front from what I could gather on the mailinglist etc.: The old site on Google code is basically dead. The development will probably continue on a new repository on GitHub with a tracker on Lighthouseapp thanks to Joshua Clayton, where I moved all the currently active tickets to a couple of days ago. Christian Montoya, who's been in the same boat as contributor to BlueprintCSS as Joshua before, has now also set up a new website on blueprintcss.org that first of all points people to the new repository in order to make people aware of the change. The goal here is to get a high enough pagerank so that people won't stumble upon the "old" project site and think the project is dead.

If you've been working with PHP for a while, you already know that the language makes dynamic image generation very simple: the GD extension and a few lines of PHP code are all you need to create a JPEG, GIF or PNG image from scratch. However, while this works remarkably well for simple tasks, it can become tedious and complicated if you need to generate more complex images, such as graphs and charts, at run-time.

In raising the question about whether a specific programming language is agile I want to avoid exploring what makes a language agile, or comparing PHP with other languages. The intention here is not to associate PHP to agile as a natural relationship, as much as to try and understand if we can find the ingredients in the PHP world, for creating an agile environment.

A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

I’ve done some rewrites of code, and they usually are coupled with redesigns. Redesigns and rewrites are tricky. With web sites existing users tend to prefer incremental changes with each. Changing a design element or a feature are pretty much equivalent when its done incrementally.

When working with generic relations in Django you have to be quite careful not to end up with n+1 queries for a simple fetch of n elements. The reason for this is that internally a generic relation is not really a true foreign key (naturally) but just an id combined with a foreign key to a content-type. But there are some ways around this problem. Among them a quite simple one: Doing the actual content-loading by yourself.

More and more users are finding it difficult to load models within Zend Framework modules. This is strange, considering that modularity is an important design principle and its goal is to design systems that are easier to extend, understand, design and manage.

I spent the last three hours porting my sfSimpleBlog plugin to sfPropelFinder. While it was the occasion to polish the sfPropelFinder API and fix a bug, it was also a great pleasure to replace Propel Peer/Criteria code with finder one.

Zend_Form has been lauded by many as a welcome addition to Zend Framework, and a flexible solution to the problem of forms. That said, one point of flexibility it offers has proved to be a pain point for many developers: decorators. This tutorial aims to shed some light on decorators, as well as provide strategies for creating your own decorators and combining them in creative ways to customize the output your forms generate.

At work, I am at the moment working on a Zend Framework project. Opposite to earlier projects with Zend Framework, I am slowly learning of the power behind the framework. But not all of the power is document well enough. On friday, I encountered one such small detail.

When web pages become web applications. Then page reloads are history and you interact with your webapplicationin your browser in the page and with AJAX/AHAH you will get the data in and out of the page. Nothing new, that is what the marketeers label web 2.0. But when users interact with pages without having to reload ... when pages become application .. this also means that traditional ways of measuring user activity that are hosted and used as a service, such as Google Analytics, will not be able to tell you what a user has done on a application.

I guess this can be categorized as "Shooting yourself into the foot with a smile". For the last couple of days I've been working on a patch for bringing some gettext into Sphinx. First I started the work in the most recent release, just to see how hard it would be. Then I made a checkout from the SVN repo using Git in order to rewrite the patch for trunk. Everything fine, so far. Yesterday night then I wanted to go through the patch one more time before sending it through the ether and noticed something rather stupid: When checking out from SVN using git-svn, Git, for some reason, didn't make "trunk" the new master-branch, but instead, I guess, used the branch with the most recent commit.

Today I am happy to announce the release of Doctrine 1.0-BETA1. This marks the true start for the 1st generation Doctrine stable lifecycle.

Well its been an exciting few weeks on the phpwomen forums as we’ve been running an article contest for new articles contributed to our “Best Practices” section. We’ve been overwhelmed by the quality of the submissions and of the follow up comments added by other users - thanks to everyone who has joined in! The judges have made their decisions and we have our winners

One month over, time for a new version. As always we aim to release a new version at the end of a month, this time it took a couple of days more due to being busy with other things. However, today we shipped Stubbles 0.9.0 as our second version in beta status, containing a bunch of fixes and minor improvements. We made quite some steps forward to handling all string as UTF-8 internally, but we are still not finished with this yet as there are still some places where we have to put our hands on. I'm quite sure we will have this issues addressed with the next release.

TextMate is one of the coolest editors around thanks to its Snippet-feature, ease of extensibility and community support. But more and more I saw myself using VIM instead of TextMate for one reason or another, but mainly because I'm just so used to searching with / and using :s for search-and-replace. And MacVIM helped quite a lot too, thanks to its pretty nice integration into OSX. Today I tried two plugins for vim that move it pretty close to what TextMate has to offer (not that vim is less powerful than TM or something, but some gems are just too well hidden ;-) ): snippetsEmu for snippets and NERD_tree as a replacement for the project-drawer.

PHP 5.3 alpha1 just got released yesterday, and I thought this might be a good time to list some of the new things that are coming, and how it could benefit you. Even though its a minor release, a lot of new features made it in and from a marketing standpoint it should have really been 6.0, if you'd ask me.

Many developers use the Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control (IoC) patterns through such IoC containers as Spring, Hivemind, Picocontainer, and others. They have all sorts of benefits to testability, flexibility, etc. that I won’t repeat here, but can be read about here, here, and here. A great summary of the history of “IoC” can be found here. J2ME developers, however, especially those on limited devices that use the CLDC configuration of J2ME, cannot use the substantial number of IoC/DI containers out there, because they nearly all rely on reflection. These also often make use of APIs not present in the CLDC - APIs which could not easily be added. Lastly there’s a tendency among developers of “embedded software” to be very suspicious of complexity.

I get this question allot, and my response is "it depends", people rarely like this general response. To pick a storage engine, the user must understand the gains and losses of using the storage engine, basically understand what INNODB and MYISAM do, and how they behave under different load patterns.

The inside details of the software development cycle

Migration from CVS to SVN is often described on the repository server side only. When migrating you would normally delete your CVS working copies and check out a fresh one from SVN. However in case of a live website you may not want to reinstall the entire working copy (including locally changed configuration files and unversioned files). Reinstalling the website may cost time, increase server load and cause website downtime.