Infrastructure part 2
This is a follow up to out previous post about our infrastructure which is can be found here:
Infrastructure Part 1
There is the intention to go a bit deeper with this post, as well as mention what was forgotten in the first post, as mentioned when customers and users were asking questions such as “Well, nice post but how do you debug?“.
- Debugging: Firebug and FirePHP
- Unit Testing: phpUnit
- Document Collaboration: Google Documents
- Diagram Editing: dia
- File Sharing: dropbox
More detailed:
Debugging a web application is always tricky because of the specific nature of the medium. There are a lot of options available and there is the well known xDebug. XDebug projects the traditional debugger approach, like the use of breakpoints and object inspection to the web environment. For our application, the combination of FireBug with FirePhp works (almost) perfectly. One reason for this is that FirePhp integrates well with Zend framework which we are already using.
There are many popular modern development methodologies such as TDD or about more modern ones such as AOP or Continuous Integration. Our project is in favour of using tests, like phpUnit, because of familiarity with other *Unit (mainly jUnit) frameworks. Test Driven Development has been extremely helpful and beneficial, although currently we do not use it as much as we should.
Google is a household name, so no introduction is needed, but definitely worth to be mentioned. Google Documents help us a lot in editing documents with partners from all over the world or all over our office, available 24×7 by just using any available browser. The same idea as with notion learning, your web based e-learning platform.
Gnome’s dia is an unsung hero that I happen to use extensively from my university years, many of diagrams you stumble across in blog post academical or other papers have been produced with this pretty elegant multi-platform tool. It is not part of an IDE or any other application development platform and it’s UML capabilities have not yet been utilized, but it is great for small
clean and tidy diagrams.
Dropbox belongs to the family of tools that belong to the cloud/storage family. Drop-box had the approach to files that google documents had to document editing, a very nice description is here: https://www.dropbox.com/tour#6.
Tags: dropbox firephp firebug zend documents unit testing tools collaboration file sharing notion learning
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Technical discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
