@TheKeyboard Maintainable code is hard. Let’s go shopping!

This was *supposed* to be a post about my successes in getting the Rallyhat web service up and running on Google App Engine, but that’s not quite done yet. Instead, I will inform our spanish-speaking CakePHP users (and the more adventurous types who enjoy travel) that the CakeFest site as been updated to announce pre-registration and other information about CakeFest #2, which will be held in Buenos Aries, Argentina at the beginning of December.

All your favourite people from the CakePHP world will be there, although I might not be able to make it despite Mariano’s very convincing IM conversations. The organizer (the previously-mentioned Mariano) is a great guy, good contributor to the project, and I still like him despite the fact that he is a Windows user in an ocean of Mac fanbois. Maybe things will work out that I can go, but if you can make the trip it will be one of the most interesting conferences this year.

Article Tags >> CakeFest || CakeFest Hispania || CakePHP

Yes, it’s the day after May Day (workers of the world, unite!) and yes, I only managed to get one blog post done this week. So, it’s time for a round-up of the stuff I’ve been thinking about this week.

• For all the bleating I did on the CakePHP mailing list this week about using free and open software, the editor waffling continues and I was back to Komodo today. I needed the security blanket of an IDE today after spending way too much time with CSSEdit trying to get stuff lining up properly for a work project.
• Halfway through a code review project as a side gig. Old code, running on PHP 4.4.8 (those of you following me on Twitter saw me moaning about getting that working with CentOS on Parallels). Needless to say, the code is a mess but I have to actually talk about WHY it’s a mess and what can be done.
• Trying to see if I can get a caching plugin for WordPress to work with nginx. Not that I ever expect to get Dugg, but you never know. Almost there…
• Finally managed to get a Django app running properly inside the Google App Engine SDK. Work on that got torpedoed this week by two slow-pitch games…that got rained out…after me waiting around for 20 minutes or so. Next step is to build out my web service for Rallyhat. Should only be a few hours work (he said, not knowing now what he will know later)
• YASP (Yet Another Side Project) is going to get rolling this weekend. Some cool stuff using Amazon S3, integration with OpenID and PayPal. This time I actually have a plan to make some money.
• I’ve submitted my “Deployment Isn’t A 4 Letter Word” talk for ZendCon.
• Been updating the IBL web site to use the latest CakePHP goodies, meaning just refactoring a lot of stuff that was garbage and using newer techniques I discover via the mailing list and Nate Abele’s rantings.
• Special thanks to Travis Cline for sending me a copy of “xUnit Test Patterns” from my Amazon Wish list! Many thanks to a fellow budding Djangonaut for the gift.

Article Tags >> CakePHP || Chris' Brain || CSSEdit || Django || Komod || OpenID || Parallels || PayPal || Rallyhat || YASP || ZendCon

One of the 6 “rules” I came up with for my talk on application deployment at Open Web Vancouver was that the only difference between your development environment and your production environment should be data sets. My friend Juan, who works as the software architect at the adult dating site I used to work for, talked with me via IM about how that rule isn’t always true.

A little background on this is necessary. They are still using the same development setup today that was in place when I was there, in that they have given each developer a server that uses jails (this is a FreeBSD thing) to simulate having all the servers they would have in production. A great solution, one that is still great today. It made writing architecture-specific code (i.e. testing that an application server could talk to a queue processing server for a specific task) very simple. So, in this case I believe that they had a development environment that matches production as closely as you can get.

But then Juan mentioned that they are using Zend Platform on their production servers, and it wasn’t possible to give everyone a copy of Zend Platform on their development servers due to licensing. While Zend Platform is a great product, well, you’ve just introduced an extra variable into your application development and deployment process. Now, your development environment will never be the same as production and you are increasing the likelihood that you will encounter “production-only” bugs, which are the hardest to solve.

I have great respect for Juan (he’s near the top of my list of the smartest developers I’ve worked with), but rule #5 still the best one to follow. While you gain from using something like Zend Platform in production because of all the extras you get, you end up with a development environment very far from what is using in production. Just make sure that you understand the implications of that decision.

Also, there is something else hidden inside rule #5. If you have differences between environments, make sure you understand what those differences are and take steps to minimize their impact. For example, I run Apache2 + PHP 5.2.5 compiled from source + Postgres 8.25 from a package for OS-X & MySQL 5.0.45 from a package for OS-X on my laptop, which is my main development environment. On my VPS (which hosts this blog) I’m running Nginx + PHP 5.2.5 modified under Gentoo with USE flags + MySQL 5.0.54 under Gentoo. So, that means I’m running mod_php on my dev, but using FastCGI on my “production”.

Has this been a problem? Nothing yet *but* if I ever got serious about running something other than my blog I would definitely consider configuring my VPS to use Apache 2 and PHP with the same configuration options as I have in dev, so that I have consistency in environments. Django is recommending Apache + mod_python so I may be doing this sooner rather than later.

So, remember, the goal is to have your dev and production environments the same. But if you can’t have the same, you better be damn sure you understand what the differences are so you don’t end up saying stuff like this.

Article Tags >> Deployment

While at Open Web Vancouver I got the chance to participate in a podcast with Paul Reinheimer from php|architect. Take a listen as we discuss PHP 5.3 and some other topics, along with a disturbing discovery at the end of the podcast about my frozen cappuccino drink.

A friend of mine (hi Juan!) had a brief chat with me about my “Deployment Isn’t A 4 Letter Word” talk and screencast and brought up some interesting points about the talk. I was gonna do a posting about it today, but I need some time to put my thoughts together in a coherent way. Look for that on Friday.

Article Tags >> C7Y || podcast

I managed to make a screencast of the second talk I gave at Open Web Vancouver 2008 about application deployment. I had hoped to make a screencast of my CakePHP console talk, but I messed something up at my end and all I have is the audio from it. Not the best thing when you are doing a demo. However, the conference was also recording talks so hopefully they will have a copy of it for you to see as well.

The talk was well-attended, which is a nice boost for the ego and although I spoke too fast (as usual) I think I got all my points across quite nicely.

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Article Tags >> Deployment || Open Web Vancouver 2008 || screencast