We recently reimplemented a search in a client project with solr (version 3.5). For the communication between our PHP application and the solr server we used the PHP library solr-php-client (http://solr-php-client.googlecode.com).
SPDY? SPDY is an “upgrade” to HTTP 1.1 proposed by Google to circumvent some of the shortcomings of HTTP 1.1. It’s one of the canditates for “HTTP 2.0” and is already supported by Chrome and Firefox. It's goal is to make the web experience faster (and more secure).
From May 16th to May 19th the latest edition of jsDay and phpDay took place in Verona, Italy. Both are two-day conferences, the first one centered around JavaScript, the second around PHP (obviously). They are organised by the community (Grusp) which means they are much more focused on technology than on marketing. A number of Liipers were attending one or both conferences and some where even giving talks.
It's always the same issue... you write unit tests for a web-service, giving you a feeling of confidence about the correctness of your code. Then the service provider changes the response without notifying you. Suddenly your implementation doesn't work anymore, but even your continuous integration server says it's "all green".
For one of our projects we wanted to be able to check the system health once we go live. Our idea was to have a system that let us see the status of the services like MySQL or Memcached from the point of view of the application itself. Since our project was developed in PHP using the Symfony framework we decided to create a new Symfony bundle where we could implement this functionality. The bundle is called LiipMonitorBundle and can be obtained here.
Lately we had several projects where we had to store in a database very different items that shared a common state.
A few days ago, we held an open hackday on doing Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) with Behat at Liip Fribourg. It was the opportunity for the handful of participants to get a first grip on Behat and explore some aspects of BDD through it.
I guess in the Symfony2 world, we all know the following problem: We have a running Symfony2 installation we already accessed in the browser. Now we want to use the Symfony2 console to run a command and *BANG* we get an exception. The problem is, that the cache directory is not writable by the command line user. Now the usual reaction is "let's just set the access rights to 777", which solves the problem for the moment. But of course it will return, once the command line user wants to access another file/directory that was created by the webserver.
At Liip we have been relying on Debian and RedHat packages to deploy our web applications for some time now. For this we created or in some cases adapted some project/framework-specific solutions:
