I find the pricing to be some of the best out there for PhpStorm compared to competitors, but you can’t really go wrong with $99 dollars for a personal license ($49 if you buy it before September 1st) and $199 for a commercial license ($149 if you buy it before September 1st).  What’s the difference you may ask, well personal is tied to a single user where as a commercial license is tied to a company and can be moved from developer to developer. Now what I find awesome with JetBrains is that if you are working on an open source project you can get a free 1 year license once you verify with them the project that you are working on. They have been doing this for years with the Intellj IDE for Java and it’s a practice I wish more companies would use.

For more information check out the PhpStorm Licensing Page and you can get the latest version from the PhpStorm EAP Access Page.

From the fakemail homepage:

fakemail is a fake mail server that captures emails as files for acceptance testing. This avoids the excessive configuration of setting up a real mail server and trying to extract mail queue content.

If you have had to test applications that send e-mails, for example as part of a web sign up process, you will know what an involved and tricky exercise that can be. Usually you have to sign up with a special e-mail address, have the mail go to the mail server and then read it back into the test with a POP/IMAP client. There are several downsides to this approach; you need to install extra software to interact with the POP server, you suffer from spurious failures due to reliance on external infrastructure, and it is very very slow.

Fakemail works by intercepting the mail before it leaves the machine by replacing your Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). It’s a simple script run from the command line that you can launch from within your test framework.

Why Should I Use fakemail?

The real question is why aren’t you using fakemail.  I didn’t know of fakemail before I started at SugarCRM, but now I’m glad that I do. At Sugar we use fakemail on all of our test and development instances. By using fakemail it provides a way to test all of our scripts that send emails but not actually send the emails out. What it does in turn is send the email (headers and all) to a folder specified in the config of the fakemail setup.  We happend to send ours to /tmp/<instance name>/ since we have multiple instances running on the same machine.

How do I Setup fakemail

fakemail comes in two flavors: Python and Perl. They both work the same but what this allows you to do is pick your poison on which language you are more comfortable with.

Once you install fakemail to start it up just issue the following command (PERL version)

fakemail --host=localhost --port=10025 --path=/tmp

Now it’s running. To test it out just run telnet into localhost port 10025

telnet localhost 10025
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 uno.home SMTP Net::Server::Mail (Perl) Service ready

To test it use the following commands

HELO mailer
250 Requested mail action okay, completed
MAIL From: me@here
250 sender me@here OK
RCPT To: you@there
250 recipient you@there OK
DATA
354 Start mail input; end with .

A-header: Sample header

Hello
.
250 message queued
QUIT
221 uno.home Service closing transmission channel

After this sequence we can stop the fakemail terminal with a Control-C to interrupt the process. Because we set the fakemail path to the local directory, we should see a file labelled “you@there.1″. Here is the contents of that file…

A-header: Sample header

Hello

You should now be ready to use fakemail to make your testing easier.

Don’t forget to check the fakemail page for more information.

Today I was presented with an Update is available dialog so I clicked ‘Download Patch and Exit Program’ Button.  So I clicked it and watched it download something and then kill the IDE.  I was a bit miffed when I started Intellij back up and it was still version 9.0.1 instead of 9.0.2.  I googled around a bit and found out that the way to apply the patch on linux is the following command:

java -cp /tmp/jetbrains.patch.jar.Idea com.intellij.updater.Runner install /path/to/intellij/install/

Simple and to the point!

I submitted a bug for this as I see it being a major issue because all the major php IDE do this by default.  But come to find out it’s possible to do with a little bit of work.

1. Start by going to File -> Setting (Ctrl-Alt-S)
2. On the settings window goto Live Templates
3. Press the Add Button
4. Put <? in for Abbrevation
5. Enter PHP for Group
6. Enter a Description
7. Enter <?php for Template Text
8. Under Options Select Space for Expand with
9. Tick PHP for the Context
10. Press OK

And now you have PhpStorm auto inserting <?php when you type <?<space>.

For as long as I could remember I used Zend Studio (ZS).  I started back with version 3.0 on OS X (it was the only PHP IDE around for Mac at the time).  I used it up to 5.5 and loved every minute of it, it was the best IDE they way I developed. Then in late 2007/early 2008 I started using SVN for version control and the SVN binding in ZS 5.5 were horrible.  But lucky ZS 6.0 was in beta testing and so I hopped on the beta team and started testing it.  Now since ZS 6 was build on top of eclipse it was a completely different way of working and for the better.

Now with ZS 6.1 they had built in support for Zend Framework (ZF) which was awesome for me since I’m a contributor to the project and just sped up my development time a lot as it make writing view/controllers and the like much faster for me.  The one thing that happened for the bad was it got slower and took longer for start up and used more memory.  This was starting to be a huge deal for me as I keep running out of memory on my desktop and would have to restart ZS.

Once 7.0 came out the memory usage got somewhat under control and the ZF integration got better and more useful.  As with 6.x series I was one the early access team.  Around the time that 7.0 came out I switched from Windows to Linux full time.  Performance with ZS improved a little but once 7.1 came out it came to a screeching halt and I was back to waiting on the IDE to do basic things like auto complete popup and such.

This is where I started thinking about looking for a new IDE.  I tried Netbeans, VIM and other but nothing worked like I remember ZS working back before 7.1.  I then went to get JetBrains IntellJ to do some lite java work for a personal project and that’s where I found the beta release of JetBrains PHPStorm (then WebIDE).  I figured since I like IntellJ so much for Java Development I would give this a try.

The early version of PHPStorm were very basic as best but it did everything very fast and very well.  With each beta they keep on adding more features for the PHP editor. PHPStorm also did one thing that Zend Studio never did which is XDebug Support (ZS supposedly supports but I could never get working).  Now PHPStorm does not have ZF support but I quickly got over that and just started using the ZF command line tool.

I found PHPStorm manages memory usage much better than any eclipse based application ever does.  On average with a huge project loaded PHPStorm uses about 100 to 120 megs of ram where as ZS would be upwards of 350+.  That’s a huge benefit in my eyes.

Now this may all just seem like I’m rambling about my past and present IDE usage but what I’m trying to get here is find an IDE that works well for you and allows you to do your work. That is the number one benefit I see to using an IDE.  If you are considering a new IDE or just want to check out a new one I suggest you check out PHPStorm as I believe that it will make waves once it’s released.

With my free time I’ve had a chance to work on some hobby projects such as Tiger Sports Nation which is a website for finding out about the Warsaw Tigers Sports Teams and providing a way for people around the community to get updates on how the Tigers are doing.  It’s been fun working with my friends from High School on this projects.  It’s really kind of weird as we tried doing this back in ’98 or ’99 and the school shut it down and now they are all for us doing this, my how times have changed.

That’s all for now.  I hope to start posting more and more.

This tutorial is intended to give an introduction to using Zend Framework to write a simple database driven application. It has been extensively rewritten for version 1.8 of the framework and takes full advantage of the Zend_Tool command line script and Zend_Application for bootstrapping. Other components used include Zend_Controller, Zend_View, Zend_Db_Table and Zend_Form.

Click here for the full tutorial and source code »

It was fun writing it and learning more that I ever wanted to know about the Ec2 API’s but all it all it was a great expierice and I’m glad that I got the chance to do it.

Other notable items in the 1.8 release are:

• Zend_Application
• Zend_Tool
• Zend_Crypt
• Zend_Service_Amazon_S3
• and so much more

Seven things you may not know about me:

• I’ve been doing HTML and web programming since late 1995 when I started using Hot Dog HTML Editor from Sausage Software
  
• I’ve been using some form of linux since mid 1998 after hearing about it on a show called The Screen Savers.
  
• My friends and I played Dr. Mario on the NES so much one day that it melted the console with the game still in.
  
• TV is my second love after programming and computers.  I currently have two DVRs that record up to 15 hours a week of TV.
  
• I am an avid fan of music and I’m always listening to it.
• I enjoy watching IndyCar Series races as it’s some of the best racing out now.
  
• When I drink beer, I prefer to drink beer that is a micro brew.

I then get to pass on the baton to:

• Chrisian (Spooons) Flickinger: Who supplied the FAILS! stickets at ZendCon ’08
• Ralph Schindler: With out Ralph’s help I would not be patching Zend Framework as often.
• Ed Finkler: Who makes the best Twitter Air Client around SPAZ.
• Rey Bengo: Always has good news on the JavaScript front.
• Brandon Savage:  Member of the PHP Community
• Ben Ramsey: Organizer of the PHP|Atlanta and PHP Community Member
• Wil Sinclair: Project leader for Zend Framework

These are the rules apparently:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

In short my year was this:

• Attended 4 IndyCar Series Races (Indy, Belle Isle, Kentucky, Mid-Ohio)
• Watched all the other IndyCar Series Races on TV.
• Attended one NASCAR and MotoGP Race at IMS.
• Worked with Zend on the Zend Framework Certification
• Attended my first (but not last) ZendCon

January – March:
Pushed out 3 site redesigns at work.  All of them based on Zend Framework.

April:
Started working with Zend on the Zend Framework Certification.

May:
It was the Month of May which included one of the best lead-ups to the 92nd Indy 500.   I also started using twitter more and more.

June:
I went out to Iowa Speedway for 2 days to help run an Open Test for the IndyCar Series and the Firestone Indy Lights.

July:
July started off good, there was a MotoGP test at IMS and it was awesome to hear the roar of bikes going around the track.  Then I had the honor of driving the 2006 Allstate 400 at the Brickyard Corvette around the track to help get the cars ready for the worst Allstate 400 at the Brickyard ever!  The tires that Goodyear brought just shredded after 10 laps.  I also went to one Indycar Race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Source

August:
After 5 months of hard work by the whole Zend Framework Certification Team we had wrapped up the exam and had it ready for it debut at ZendCon ’08.  I went to the IndyCar Series Race at Kentucky Speedway and The Raceway at Belle Isle in Detroit.

September:
This was by far my busiest month of the year.  We finished out the IndyCar Regular Season at Chicagoland Speedway and had the Ignural Red Bull Indianapolis GP at IMS.  After that I headed out west to ZendCon 08 where I spent 4 days with the PHP community at large including Matthew Weier O’Phinney, Ralph Schindler and Keith Casey.  While out at ZendCon I learned a lot and had a great time.

October – December:
Not much happend in my professional career here, just a lot of work but nothing too exciting.

I am hopping that 2009 will be a great year and that I will get to spend more time with the PHP Community.

Cheers!