i.justrealized

Great news for NetBeans users, NetBeans 6.5 has been released. I’ve been using the development versions for quite some time. Mainly use it for my school’s Java assignment. I was previously using Eclipse. I kinda prefer NetBeans now.

NetBeans.org is proud to announce the availability of NetBeans IDE 6.5!

NetBeans IDE 6.5 offers simplified and rapid development of web, enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications with PHP, JavaScript, Java, C/C++, Ruby, and Groovy.

New features include a robust IDE for PHP, JavaScript debugging for Firefox and IE, and support for Groovy and Grails. The release also delivers a number of enhancements for Java, Ruby on Rails, and C/C++ development. Java highlights include: built-in support for Hibernate, Eclipse project import, and compile on save. Combining excellent out of the box experience, compelling features, and a great plugin ecosystem, NetBeans IDE 6.5 is a must-download for all developers.

NetBeans IDE 6.5 is currently available in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. There are several community contributed localization efforts underway to support additional languages. Join the efforts today. (Source: NetBeans)

NetBeans 6.5 now comes with a plugin that lets you code PHP. I tried it and thought it is pretty decent. I haven’t really used it much on PHP. The inbuilt SVN is cool. It would be cooler if they could support Git. Git isn’t well supported in Windows and it’d be great if NetBeans could do something about it.

You can download NetBeans 6.5 now.

PHP is going to have backslashes for namespace separator.

Thx to the initiative of Scott and Steph we had an IRC discussion with several code developers. The result is that we have decided to go with backslash as new separator for namespaces.

As the patch is still under development it is yet unclear how this will affect the scheduling PHP 5.3. (Source: PHP internals)

Criterions

• (1) type-ability (how easy is it to type the separator)
• (2) typo-vulnerability (how easy is it to make a typo and get an unwanted behavior without a error/warning)
• (3) parse-ability (how easy is it to read the code and figure out whats going on without getting confused with similar syntax that means another thing)
• (4) IDE compatibility
• (5) number of chars

Ratings

1. +1 means the separator is not affected negatively by the criteria
2. +-0 means that the separator is only moderately affected by the criteria
3. -1 means the criteria is severely affected by the criteria

\

**

^^

%%

:>

:)

:::

(Excerpt from PHP RFC)

I would much prefer the :> smiley but I would suppose the other developers not having as much favor to that. Backslashes are okay I guess. I am more used to periods though.

backslash\backslash\backslash\kaboom.

This guide aims to go through installation of PEAR modules using XAMPP. The module to install is MDB2.

I use XAMPP Lite instead of the full XAMPP but I imagine it to be the similar. My platform is Windows Vista.

0. Objective

To install PEAR module, MDB2, using a XAMPP set up. Also install the MySQL, MySQLi and PostgreSQL drivers.

1. Setting up environment variables

(more…)

Today I went for the Zend PHP 5 Certification and passed. Uzyn did it an hour half earlier and he passed too. I slept so little this morning just so I can read this PHP exam study guide. And before I enter the test all I can claim is that I finished the book.

Before we took this PHP 5 cert exam, there was one other guy who did it in this center. I reach there on time:

Me: Afternoon, I have a test at 3 for PHP.
Front desk: PHP?
Me: Exam 200-500.
FD: You taking CCNA?
Me: Nah… The one by Zend.

I tell you she was absolutely clueless. I almost fell asleep doing the questions. I found myself sinking lower and lower into my seat. There was no one in the room, just me and seventy questions.

I probably can’t discuss the PHP exam questions but let’s just say the questions are kinda strange. It’s just not what you would expect. I expected the test to be more about explaining the code kinda thing but that almost didn’t appear at all. CCNA questions are a lot better and open internet (open book) too.

I finished the 70 questions and thinking I would fail. I clicked on the End Exam button, closed my eyes and all that my mind could think about is this red-colored ‘Fail’ word to be displayed.

It didn’t.

(Yahoo!)

The certificate would come next month. Congrats to Uzyn!

Listed on PHP Yellow Pages already, that was fast!

Aptana acquires Pydev. Pydev is an Eclipse plugin.

Aptana Acquires Pydev to add Python Support to Studio

We are very excited to announce that Pydev, the popular Python and Jython IDE, is now part of the Aptana product family and that Pydev creator, Fabio Zadronzy, will head up continued efforts to advance Pydev as part of the Aptana team. Like our products for Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and PHP, Pydev offers code completion, refactoring, code analysis, debugging support, and lots lots more. Pydev’s popularity in the Python community and Eclipse ecosystem made it the clear choice for Aptana. The acquisition sets the stage for a full Python suite of products and services ranging from local development to cloud deployment. (Source: Aptana)

Aptana is pretty neat. I use it for PHP and Ruby on Rails last time. But I didn’t find the syntax highlighting as good as Eclipse PDT and syntax highlighting is one of the main reasons I switched away. Pydev is pretty good already, lately they don’t have much significant updates.

PHP4 support ends. It’s time to move on to PHP5. I quite sure some hosts are still using PHP4 and there is a certain host I come across still using 2005 version of PHP4.

See Chris Shiflet’s blog for more information.

This is probably the easiest way to read RSS feed in PHP, you use simplexml_load_file. It returns a SimpleXMLElement object. The snippet below grabs my blog’s feed and outputs in SimpleXMLElement assigned to the variable $blog. The rest is rather self explanatory.

The problem with SimpleXML is that it ignores CDATA by default. To stop that from happening, you could merge CDATA as text nodes by specifying the option constant LIBXML_NOCDATA.