News

RFC #0169: New package unittest.web

2008-08-14T20:23:21+02:00

Scope of Change
A new package unittest.web will be created. It will contain the base class WebTestCase with which web tests can be written.

Rationale
Integration testing.

Read the full RFC here

PHP 5.3 and typesafe enumerations

2008-08-12T09:58:24+02:00

Within RFC #0132, typesafe enumerations were added to the XP framework. Because PHP does not support them language-wise, we need a bit of workaround syntax to make them work.

With PHP 5.3 and its so-called "late static binding features", enum declarations can now be written much more compact for the simplest use-case. Example:

 
  class TransactionType extends Enum {
    public static $NOT_SUPPORTED, $REQUIRED, $SUPPORTS, $NEVER;
  }

PHP 5.3

2008-08-08T20:58:00+02:00

I've started playing around with the first alpha release of PHP 5.3 (should be released around September or October this year), see also the PHP 5.3 alpha1 announcement from August 1st.

Some first observations:

RFC #0171: Rename util.DateInterval class

2008-08-08T20:50:01+02:00

Scope of Change
The util.DateInterval class will be renamed.

Rationale
PHP 5.3 has a class called DateInterval built-in. Thus, non-namespaced versions of the XP framework won't run on PHP 5.3.

Read the full RFC here

5.6.8-RELEASE: HTTP, FTP, features and bugfixes

2008-08-05T20:47:39+02:00

This release features quite a bit of revamp in the peer.http API's backings - though nothing should change from the outside except for the new proxy feature, numerous fixes to the FTP support, and a couple of nice-to-have features.

To use 5.6.8:

Open a shell window
Type wget -O - | php
Add the path shown at the end to your PATH environment setting

Casting an object array to a string array

2008-07-19T21:15:28+02:00

While testing the new EASC server and client implementations we're currently working on, we asked ourselves how to cast an object array to, for example, a string array.

The following is an array of objects consisting solely of strings:

  Object[] strings= new Object[] { "Hello", "World" };

The first thing we tried was to cast it via (String[])strings. This is legal sourcecode but will raise a java.lang.ClassCastException in Java, and a System.InvalidCastException in C#, both at runtime.

RFC #0164: Exceptions for XPClass::get*()

2008-07-14T23:30:18+02:00

Scope of Change
The following methods in lang.XPClass will throw exceptions instead of returning NULL for the case the respective element is not found:

getConstructor()
getMethod(string name)
getField(string name)

Rationale
Allow for chaining, be consistent with other APIs (if a hasX method exists, the getX method will throw an exception) and the getAnnotation() method.

Read the full RFC here

Search function online

2008-06-28T18:01:16+02:00

On a short note: Finally had time to set up this site's search functionality on its production server. In the top right corner, you can find the search box which will search the site for words you enter (currently, only the news section is indexed). Happy searching

Exceptions in Java

2008-06-25T10:57:27+02:00

Found this nice article on exceptions in Java - from a historic overview of Oak, on checked and unchecked exceptions, and asynchronous exceptions it explains nicely (and with code examples) what the Java exception mechanism is about. What I like most are the best practices section, which applies not only to Java:

Don't Write Own Exceptions
Write Useful Exceptions
Throw exceptions early
Catch exceptions late
Document exceptions
Unit Test Exceptions

5.6.7-RELEASE

2008-06-09T19:47:01+02:00

Today, the XP group released XP 5.6.7. This release is the first official one to be released with the new setup infrastructure. Besides that, it contains respect for ANSI SQL in the rdbms package, a patch to the scriptlet API to produce nicer URLs, the new memory-saving XAR file format, some minor bugfixes and a couple of new features.

To use 5.6.7:

Open a shell window
Type wget -O - | php
Add the path shown at the end to your PATH environment setting

5.6.7RC3 - Pre-release

2008-06-07T22:04:11+02:00

The third release candidate for 5.6.7 comes with the new installer and runner infrastructure (as defined in RFC #0166). Instead of downloading the files and manually setting up the include_path, it is now as easy as:

Open a shell window
wget -O - | php
Add the directory shown at the end of the setup to your PATH environment variable
Done

RFC #0162: HTTP Proxy

2008-06-01T14:01:28+02:00

Scope of Change
A functionality will be added to the peer.http.HttpConnection class to support HTTP proxies.

Rationale
Some machines in restricted networks may not access other networks directly.

Read the full RFC here

Segfaults with PHP 5.2.6?

2008-05-31T19:28:55+02:00

If you are getting segmentation faults with PHP 5.2.6 when using older releases of the XP framework, it may be related to PHP Bug 45038. These occur when serializing util.Date instances and are related to the PHP function date_timezone_set().

Because we changed the way the Date class works XP releases newer than December 2007 are not affected - upgrading helps (but read the changelog first!)

RFC #0166: XP Runners

2008-05-31T19:20:08+02:00

Scope of Change
This RFC defines the standards for the XP runners.

Rationale
Clarification is needed.

Read the full RFC here

5.6.7RC2 - Pre-release

2008-05-31T19:16:43+02:00

As of today, the second release candidate for 5.6.7 is available for download. It includes RFC #0163 (which makes the rdbms package use single quotes for all drivers and adds driver-independent string literals in statements passed to database connections' query(), select(), insert(), update() and delete() methods), RFC #0157 (shorter URLs for scriptlets, changed rewrite rule), some minor bugfixes and a couple of new features.

Get the release candiate!

New Process::newInstance()

2008-05-28T21:23:54+02:00

A new method Process::newInstance() has been added. It simplifies situations where we want to fork the same executable an existing Process instance points to, but with different arguments.

Example

 
  // Current
  $p= new Process(Runtime::getInstance()->getExecutable()->getFilename(), $args);
  
  // New
  $p= Runtime::getInstance()->getExecutable()->newInstance($args);

Compiling the XP framework

2008-05-22T14:08:17+02:00

Lately I was experimenting with the PHP extension bcompiler, which offers an API to write the opcodes generated from zend_compile() to files. For a general understanding of this you must know that PHP is a compiled language (but does compilation into memory and then executes that instead of compiling to disk and then running that). The compilation step is not exposed to the user in any way, and there is no defined serialization format for compiled PHP. This is where bcompiler comes in.

Note: Compiling PHP sourcecode does not improve runtime performance, it simply saves the (small) overhead generated by the compile step. My main focus in this experiment was not performance, though, but to test the ability to generate PHP bytecode, and if that would work transparently alongside PHP sourcecode.

The XP APIs by topic

2008-05-10T16:38:41+02:00

The documentation website now contains an overview of the XP framework's APIs by topic - Databases, I/O, XML, Dates, Collections, Web and Imaging. Although the overview is initially done, there is still lots of text to write.

The first two topics to be covered are Databases in general and our Object persistence API.