Mirmo Dynamics

Derrière ce titre un peu faible, se cache un billet qui va, potentiellement, changer votre vie. Pour autant que vous écriviez des tests unitaires (mais tout le monde fait ça ici non ?). En effet, je vais vous parler d’un truc génial: Mockery. Mockery, c’est un framework de Mock (il parait qu’on dit Bouchon en français, mais c’est vraiment trop ridicule), écrit par Pádraic Brady, qui fait partie de la core team du Zend Framework. Du lourd quoi.

Bon, mais d’abord, pour les nouveaux, qu’est-ce donc qu’un Mock ? Je ne saurais mieux l’expliquer que Padraic dans son superbe blogpost, mais pour les pressés, on va faire une version courte. Un mock est un remplacement d’objet pour isoler un test. Par exemple, on peut créer des mocks de base de données pour éviter d’instancier tout Propel a chaque test. Voilà, ça c’est pour la théorie.

Toujours pas clair ? Un petit exemple alors. Tout à l’heure j’ai écris des tests (disons pour une classe qui s’appellerait Foobar). C’est une super classe, qui fait son job, pas de problème, mais qui demande en constructeur 2 objets: un Foo et un Bar. Disons que Foo et Bar coûtent un peu cher à instancier. J’ai donc 2 choix: instancier des vrais objets (c’est mal, mais c’est qu’on fait en général), ou utiliser des mocks (c’est bien, mais on le fait pas parcequ’on a la flemme d’écrire les mocks). Qu’à cela ne tienne, avec Mockery, c’est fait en 2 coups de cuiler a pot:

$foo = Mockery::mock('Foo', array('getCreatedAt' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s'));
$bar = Mockery::mock('Bar', array(
'getIsSaved' => true,
'getTitle' => 'recherche titre',
'getDescription' => 'recherche description',
'getIsPublic'=> true ));
$object = new Foobar($foo, bar);


Donc ça c’est la forme un peu « rapide » de création de mock. Pour chaque méthode que je spécifie dans l’array d’options, mockery assigne en valeur de retour la valeur en face. Donc $recherche->getTite() renverra « recherche titre » par exemple. C’est cool non ? Bien sur on peut aller super loin avec Mockery, comme par exemple dire « la méthode tartenpion de l’objet pmsipilotUser doit etre appelé avec en paramètre perlinpinpin et renvoyer un objet MerlinLenchanteur et ne doit être utilisée qu’une fois sinon la terre explose »:

$merlin = new MerlinLenchanteur();
$user = Mockery::mock('pmsipilotUser');
$user->shouldReceive('tartenpion')->with('perlinpinpin')->once()->andReturn($merlin);


(ok je triche encore un peu on ne peut pas vraiment faire exploser la terre)

Par contre si on veut vérifier que tout a bien été appelé comme on l’a défini, il ne faut pas oublier de le dire a la fin: Mockery::close(); Un dernier exemple pour vous convaincre de la puissance de Mockery. On rencontre souvent du code qui viole la Loi de Demeter, et qui de fait devient difficile à tester. Point de chichi avec Mockery, car il permet aussi de Mocker une chaine d’appels complète très simplement: 

$mock = Mockery::mock('demeter'); $mock->shouldReceive('foo->bar->quux->roflpwn->demeter')->andReturn('omgponies');

Magique non ? Pour encore plus de trucs magiques, je vous invite à lire la doc sur la page github de mockery. Voilà j’espère que ça vous aura donné envie d’utiliser un peu plus de Mocks dans vos tests :-)

I'm back from a one week vacation in Prague, and god it was fun. A pint of beer is at most 2 EUR over there, can you imagine that? (mostly asking french people here, since a pint is more like 7/8 EUR in Paris).

The city itself is nice, although I'm not sure I'm going to re-visit it anytime soon. There are lots of churches, beautiful east-styled chuches, then you get to visit the jewish district, with synagogas, the cemetery, etc. Then more churches. The Prague is castle is nice too. And some more churches. In all honesty, I liked the city, but nothing fancy here.

People from Prague are very nice, contact is easy, and the speak a very good english (as opposed to japanese people for example). The cheap alcohol seems to ease the contact too (it's the first time I actually had a conversation in the toilets).

So globally, it was a very good week :-) Now to get back with productivity, I have a lot of work to do on Springbok, mostly about mongo stuff and all, but that's another story that I'm going to tell later!

Yesterday was the second and last day of the Symfony Live's conferences (I'm not counting the trainings).

So what was it all about ? Great talks were given, announcements were made (Nils Aderman, phpbb's lead developer suggested phpbb4 would run on top of Symfony 2), and most important (as as I'm concerned), great people were met. It's been a real pleasure to put a face on names like @denderello, @skoop, @webmozart, and frenchier people like @vjousse, @timbarray or @nsilberman. It's also been very interesting to meet people that I didn't previously know, of course!

From a personnal point of view, I've learnt a lot this year. This was my very first english-spoken presentation (I've already given a talk last year but it was in french), and I was a bit nervous to say the least. So basically, I kind of screwed my talk. I also learnt that a talk requires a lot of preparation, much more than I had put in this one actually, that's another reason why this talk was not as good as expected by several attendees. Anyway, I'm now aware of these flaws, and I'm going to work hard for my next talk :-)

The culminating point of the event was, of course, the revelation of Symfony 2's preview release. Symfony 2 is going to be awesome, really, and if you don't believe me, just go check the official website or Fabien's presentation. And if you're still not convinced, well, too bad for you :-) (you can also try it, it's all available on github.

What is really awesome about Symfony 2 is how it borrows concepts from other frameworks and kindly adapts them to PHP. The bundle system for example, while not exactly a new concept per-se (I guess Fabien got a lot of inspiration from django on this one) will totally change the way we, Symfony 2 users, will write web applications, and I'm really looking forward to see what great use people will make of the framework (more on that in another blog post).

It's been a while now since I first looked up for an interactive PHP shell. There quite a lot of projects in the wild, such as PHP_Shell, PHPInteractiveTerminal, iphp, phpsh, etc, but none that would actually satisfy me (either they didn't fulfill my requirements or they were only toy projects or...). Until today ! I am very pleased to announce PHPInteractiveShell, a (nearly) full-featured interactive shell for PHP.

Key features include:

• Fault tolerant: will not die on fatal errors
• Readline support (only history for now)
• Multiline support: start your if on a line and finish it on another
• Plugins support: easily extend the shell capabilities
• Bootstrap support: easily setup an environment inside your shell
• Config file support: easily configure your shell behavior

The whole thing is still in beta stage, so feel free to fork it, play with it and report any issue!

Unless you read this from an RSS aggregator, you have certainly noticed the new style on this blog, thus making this post useless (that is why I actually hope you read this through an aggregator).

Ok so this might not be the prettier blog style you've ever seen, but I kind of like it, I made it myself (actually, it's heavily inspired from readability) and it's, well, readable.

Please keep your comments for yourself, unless you really have an usability problem :-)

ps: this is also an I'm still alive post.

Say you have a form with a file upload (field image of your model for example), and that you want to save your file in a directory depending on its filename. For example, the file foobar.jpg shall be stored in fo/ob/foobar.jpg. All you have to do is implement a generateImageFilename method in your model:

  public function generateImageFilename(sfValidatedFile $file)
  {
    $filename = $file->generateFilename();
    return sprintf('%s/%s/%s', substr($filename, 0, 2), substr($filename, 1, 2), $filename);
  }

And voila !

For more information on what's happening there, see sfFormDoctrine::saveFile() (around line 510 of plugins/sfDoctrinePlugin/lib/form//sfFormDoctrine.class.php)

It's been brought to my attention today (by my fellow developper hartym) that there is a HUGE problem with tags in subversion.

The problem is very simple, when you create a tag for your project, and that your project uses svn:externals (quite a common situation), externals in the tags ARE NOT FROZEN. Which means that, if you checkout your tag at a T time, and an external gets modified at T+x, a checkout at T+x will not be the same than the one at T.

Wow.

I'm going to seriously consider switching to git.

For those not following me on twitter (shame on you), I will be speaking about unit and functional testing in Symfony (with a tiny bit of continuous integration too) at Symfony Live 2009. I will not be alone since my workmate Hugo Hamon will be under the spotlights with me. Also, the talk will be given in french.

Hope to see you there :)

I was gently doing some ajax black voodoo when I came upon this obscure-ish error in my firebug console:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x805e000a [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]"  nsresult: 0x805e000a (<unknown>)"

What the fuck I though. And then after some (useless) firefox rebooting, I decided to ask the all-mighty Google.

No shit, he said, I know what you are talking about, and thou shall find more informations at this place, and to point me to this thread, where you can read the following:

AdBlock Plus was killing it HAH!

And then I disabled AdBlock Plus, and exactly as the writings told, it worked.

Sensio Labs organise les 11 et 12 juin l'événement Symfony Live. Voilà tout est presque dit, cliquouillez le lien pour plus d'infos.