Posts by: Ivo Jansch

• The Bug Hunt Challenge – Winners and Results March 18, 2010

  In February and March we ran a bug hunt contest. We asked people to download a small application and tell us any issue they found. We promoted the contest at PHPBenelux and PHP UK conferences and it was open to all residents of the EU. We got a large set of responses and, besides being able to determine a winner, we were able to get some interesting analytic data from the contest entries. I will share those later in this post. But first things first…

  The Winners

  We had 3 categories:

  • Juniors (0-3 years of PHP experience)
  • Experienced developers (3-5 years) and
  • Seniors (5+ years)

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• Zend Studio formatter for Zend Framework and ATK March 18, 2010

  Zend Studio is a great IDE and we use it a lot at Ibuildings (in addition to NetBeans, PDT and Vim). One of the nice features is the code formatter that helps develop code according to agreed standards, which is useful to keep projects consistent.

  One problem we have with the current versions of Zend Studio is that its default Zend Framework formatter is not consistent with the official Zend Framework coding standard. Luckily, that can be easily fixed. Sandy Pleyte, one of our developers, created a formatting file for Zend Studio that does adhere to the formal standard. There might be a few issues here and there but we’ve found it to work much better than the default one in Zend Studio. Because it might be helpful to others, we’re sharing the formatter file with anyone that’s interested. Download the file and read on for instructions.

  • Zend Framework formatter for Zend Studio

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• PHP on Windows: The WinCache 1.0 Benchmark November 19, 2009

  Today Microsoft released the stable 1.0 version of their WinCache accelerator. Although Linux is still the most frequently used platform at Ibuildings, we have a significant and growing number of PHP on Windows deployments, and since WinCache is designed to speed up PHP applications it is an interesting product to us. The best way to put an accelerator product to the test is to benchmark it. While it’s important to realise that benchmarks have their drawbacks, they are very useful to make relative comparisons, and that is exactly what we will be doing in this article.

  The benchmarks were carried out by Mark van der Velden, one of our PHP on Windows platform specialists.
  I’m going to describe his setup in a minute, but for those unfamiliar with the concept of acceleration, I’d like to point to this Wikipedia article which is a good primer on how PHP accelerators work and why you should use one.

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