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Review: 2018
The blog has become silent, still I’d like to begin the year 2019 with a little retrospective, just like in 2017, 2016 and 2015.
Since there were no new posts in 2018 and I turned off the tracker, there are no new blog statistics this time, instead I’ll start with an overview where you find posts by me elsewhere.
For a while I publish more on the company blog of integer_net: https://www.integer-net.com/blog/
Continue reading “Review: 2018”
MageTestFest – A Unique Conference and One Time Opportunity
If you are interested in Software Testing and/or Magento development, the most interesting event of the year is approaching: MageTestFest in Amerfoort (NL)!
- Nov 15: Workshop PHPUnit (Sebastian Bergmann)
- Nov 16: Workshop DDD (Mathias Verraes)
- Nov 17: Conference Day (Agenda)
- Nov 18: Magento Contribution Day (Hackathon)
Continue reading “MageTestFest – A Unique Conference and One Time Opportunity”
My Opinion on XML Based Testing in Magento
Magento architect Anton Kril asked about opinions on XML based tests:
#magento twitter, what are your thoughts about writing tests in XML?
— Anton Kril (@AntonKril) 20. Juni 2017
My answer does not fit into a Tweet, so here’s a short blog post. Continue reading “My Opinion on XML Based Testing in Magento”
TDD Kata 14 – Exclamation Mark Series
PHP 7: Type-safe Arrays of Objects
With PHP 7 you can choose to write much more type-safe code than before, thanks to scalar type hints and return types.
function repeat(string $text, int $times) : string;
But what about arrays? There’s still only the generic “array” type hint, you cannot specify what’s in the array. For the IDE, you can add PhpDoc comments:
/** * @return User[] */ function allUsers() : array;
Now IDEs like PhpStorm can help with code completion for items in the returned array. But we cannot benefit from any checks at runtime, like with real type hints.
For arguments, there is a partial workaround, using variadic arguments. Take the following function
/** * @param User[] $users */ function deleteUsers(array $users);
With variadic arguments we can rewrite it to
function deleteUsers(User ...$users);
Usage also changes, to deleteUsers(...$users);
In this call, the argument $users
will be “unpacked” into single variables, and in the method itself “packed” back into an array $users
. Each item is validated to be of type User
. $users
can also be an iterator, it will be converted to an array.
Unfortunately there is no similar workaround for return types, and it only works for the last argument.
See also: Type hinting in PHP 7 – array of objects
I’ve used this technique a lot in PHP 7 code, but I’ve found another one that’s even better and does not come with the mentioned flaws:
Continue reading “PHP 7: Type-safe Arrays of Objects”
TDD Kata 13 – Boolean Expression Engine
TDD Kata 12 – Ugly Trivia Game
TDD Kata 11 – Reversed Binary Numbers
PHPUnit, PhpStorm and docker-compose
I wanted to run tests with PHPUnit on a docker environment, which was set up with docker-compose, and use the PhpStorm integration. Since PhpStorm 2013.2 there is a docker intergration which works well for single containers, but unfortunately it does not seem to use the running network of containers. So for example my PHP container does not get access to the MySQL container for integration tests.
If that’s not a problem for you, you will not need what I am going to explain here, read this instead: https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2016/11/docker-remote-interpreters/
Set up KeePass with KeeAgent on Linux
When migrated my workstation to Linux, one important tool was the password manager. I use KeePass, so there are two options around:
- KeePassX 2, a native linux client for .kdbx files: https://www.keepassx.org/downloads
- KeePass 2, the official KeePass client as Mono application: http://keepass.info/help/v2/setup.html#mono
I tried both. On KDE, KeePassX integrates nicer into the Linux desktop while KeePass on Mono looks and feels a bit foreign. But the lack of features like auto open and plugins made me ditch KeePassX quite fast. Two important plugins for me are KeePassHttp, which integrates KeePass with Chrome as password manager, and KeeAgent which automatically registers SSH Keys with passphrases at a running SSH Agent.
Setting up KeeAgent was a bit tricky and all instructions I found on the internet were incomplete, so I’ll share how I did it (on Arch Linux with keepass-plugin-keeagent-beta 0.9.1-1). There are two ways to use the plugin: as client for an existing SSH agent or as standalone SSH agent. I choose client mode to always have an SSH agent available.