Editorial

KISS: Keep it simply surveilled

In the enterprise world, not everything is a website - there are a lot more types of applications you have to deploy to actually have a running enterprise website / application.

Often one of these "hidden" applications are cron jobs which take care of cleaning out not completed order jobs, doing lengthy cache pre-calculations, perform data mining or many other things.

Crons - or in general - backend applications are therefore an important part of your whole application. Running regularily they do their duty.

Of course, such a critical task should be surveilled. Read on to see how you can do effective, but simple surveillance with the XP framework's tools in combination with the open source surveillance system Nagios:

Making use of PHP5 features

Today at work we had a presentation called "PHP5 features", where Alex and me presented what we consider the most appealing new possibilities.

Here's a wrap-up:

Why to prefer scriptlets over "standard" web scripts

If you've written web applications with the XP framework, you've probably made use of the scriptlet.xml.workflow API. It provides templating via XSL files and in general a very comfortable way of creating dynamic web pages. Feel tempted to use "standard" web scripting (see below for example) for simpler tasks like CSV export, dynamic image creation or RSS feeds?

Here's why you shouldn't...

Shipping an application with XP archives

Ever since, distributing XP applications to the "end user" could be quite a pain: you would've to tell people to install subversion on their servers, show them how to check out a copy of the XP framework with all it's millions of directories, let them put all required directories into their include_path - mostly there's more than one directory which needs to be included.
Then, whenever they want to upgrade the application, they need to update their checkout, exposing them to the danger of conflicts or incompatibilities in the classes API each time.

Now, with the arrival of XP class archives (which actually already exist for quite some time), this is a lot easier! Read on to see how shipping XP applications could be like in the future.

Using packages in XP

Since RFC #0074 the XP framework has the built-in power to load classes from an class archive.

Now, imagine you want to install an XP application like dialog, and you have downloaded an tar file containg the application from the project's homepage. What do you do with it?

Creating packages for XP

Today RFC #0074 has been accepted and merged into the public XP repository.

RFC #0074 describes some changes that bring the ability to the framework, to load classes from an archive rather than directly from a directory in the classpath. That does not seem to be so special, but it brings you some very cool things in the day-to-day work with XP.

So, let's take a look on how to create a new archive (.xar was chosen as extension for the time being, though this could still be changed).

Instance creation expression in PHP4

The instance creation expression lets you create anonymous classes using the following form:

new ClassOrInterfaceType (ArgumentListopt) { ClassBody }

Supplying a ClassBody is available in PHP5 when using our patch to it, but not in PHP4. This article shows a way to simulate it.

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