Solr is the "official" search platform at SAPO. Being the new guy, I've been contacting with a lot of technology that I hadn't used before. This past week I pretty much have been toying around with Solr, not only as a "consumer" of information (that wouldn't be much of a challenge, would it?) but I've actually been sniffing around Solr's configuration and refactoring an application schema. Although I'm aware that I'm just scratching the surface on the subject, this entry hopes to provide a quick "bootstrap" to anyone who wishes to give Solr a try.
PHP 5.4 is (finally) out! The new version introduces a number of new feature and a couple of long needed corrections to the language. The "shiny new features" would definitely be the possibility to use Traits and a new built-in web server. But the news don't stop there - a new way to initialize arrays and array dereferencing (some syntactic sugar), binary number representation, callable was introduced as a valid typehint and a couple of more changes were introduced.
I had to develop a small library to interact with the Clickatel API. A couple of friends of mine immediately asked me to share the library with them and although the library itself doesn't do a lot, I thought it could be of used to anyone who wants to be able to quickly send an SMS message using CodeIgniter. I decided to make it publicly available, so if you need for your Web Application to send SMS messages, feel free to use it.
The singleton pattern is a very widespread design pattern. It aims to guarantee an exclusive access to a given resource throughout your application - in other words it makes sure that you are only able to instantiate a certain class one and one time only. I'll apply the concept to a class that establishes a connection to a database.
It has happened way too many times. You develop your application, everything seems to be working smoothly - all the features that you wanted are in place and all the application's logic seems to be working perfectly. When you turn the application to the production server, "hell breaks loose". Something, somewhere is broken and you don't quite know what it is. Well Test Driven Development (TDD) is a programming process in which you write tests before creating any actual code in order to reduce problems like the one above. In this article I'll tell you a bit about Unit Testing using PHPUnit.
