Wilkinson is back! (Or at least I hope so)
Hernán Wilkinson is not only a guy who knows a lot about Object Oriented Programming and TDD, but also an excellent teacher. If you ever get the chance of hearing him speak (whether it is a talk at a conference, assisting to one of his courses in the university or by hiring his training services) I would recommend that you don’t miss it.
Being such a fig fan of his talks I was quite happy last week when I started to see some blog articles written by him, in particular about the importance of using good names when we program. You can get a small taste of it here:
…Good names make our lives easier, on the other hand, bad names make us feel in hell. Bad names suck energy from us because we have to “re-think” every time we see that bad name what it really means, what it is the real purpose of that thing being named. At the end, bad names obligate us to do the work that other should have done, that is why we “hate” programs written by others and we “hate” them more if they are badly written, if the names are bad…
So, if you want to be a better programmer, please take a minute and go to read them: About “names” when designing with Objects and The “Art of Naming”.
And as a bonus, if you like digging in the OOP history you may want to read the following page: Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming”
Enjoy!
Read MoreMore flexibility for Magento’s cart options
When developing a project for one of our biggest clients, we realized that Magento had some very powerful and interesting rules for applying discounts on the shopping carts. Those rules take into account the amount of items in the shopping cart, the shipping address, the categories of the products and several other attributes. However, while rules are very powerful, the possible actions to be performed are quite few. You can apply discounts or free shipping, but we needed something else: we needed to be able to enable or disable a shipping method based on the cart products.
Read MoreElgg 1.8.3 released!
Although this is a bit of old news, I wanted to mention it: last week the release of elgg 1.8.3 was announced. I have to say I’m pretty amazed by the release speed of these guys. Keep up the good work!
Read MoreElgg 1.8.2 has been released
Just a quick update: elgg 1.8.2 has been released. You can find the bugfixes and enhancements in the announcement.
We are very happy to have contributed with our small grain of sand and hope to keep doing so.
Writing a “Hello World” Test with QBElggTestsForPHPUnit
Writing a test with QBElggTestsForPHPUnit is not much different that writing a standard test with PHPUnit. In future posts we will see how to tweak things a little (like adding custom fixtures) but right now I’m just going to show you how to write a very simple tests: the HelloWorldTest . The purpose of this test is two-folded:
Read MoreInstalling QBElggTestsForPHPUnit
In a previous post we introduced QBElggTestsForPHPUnit, an extension of PHPUnit used to test elgg-related functionality (note: PHPUnit is not bundled with this plugin. We assume that PHPUnit is already installed on your machine and the include paths are properly configured). In this post I will show you how to install this plugin and check that everything is running properly.
Read MoreTorwards a safe unit test suite in elgg
“To test or not to test” is a question that, by this time, should have been completely deprecated of a programer’s mind. Yes, I know, we all have programmed good pieces of software when the whole unit test concept wasn’t mainstream, but if you ever took the time to write a couple of good tests you know that they are a really good weapon against unexpected bugs.
