I'm Persian - PHP

Seven Things

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:01:26 +0330

Thanks to Brett Bieber for tagging me in the "Seven things you probably don't know about me" meme. Unlike the others, mine are not interesting, not at all, but here goes...

I grew up in a small city famous for it's pistachio and rugs. I now live in a big, crowded city which suffers from severe air pollution, Tehran.

Not too many people know this, but I play Santur, and once was in a concert.

My first computer was a Commodore 128 at the age of 6 or 7. God knows how many circles I drew.

Never been in a party or wedding ... I'm actually uneasy in crowded places.

I don't drink alcohol... yet

I'm a big fan of Progressive rock... actually, I like 70's.

I really want to get a PHP user group started here in Tehran.

I can't find anyone with a blog who hasn't already been tagged for this, so I guess I'm the last one

PEAR bash completion

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:06:55 +0430

Lately I've been playing alot with the PEAR CLI. The one annoying thing I noticed the most was its lack of tab completion that I'm used to from the shell. It turns out that this feature is very easy to add, in the bash at least. Here (Update: Now it's in PEAR SVN repository) is a simple tab completion script for the bash. In addition to completing the PEAR commands and their respective options, it can even autocomplete the names of installed packages and discovered PEAR channels. Just source it, and enjoy

Book review: “Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More” by Kevin McArthur

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:42:06 +0430

As the title suggests this book is about advanced PHP related topics, being divided into 5 parts and 21 chapters. The title enunciates the book will cover many different aspects, but you'll get disappointed as soon as you perceive it's only about 300 pages.

First part starts with "OOP and Patterns" and will end up with PHP 6's new features. The Patterns chapter is the first one which disappoints you - you'll wish it was a little more verbose, covering some more patterns and being more than only 7 pages.

The next Part is about "Testing and Documentation", covering PHPDoc and DocBook in it's first chapter. In the next one about "Reflection API" - which I think is one of the best chapters - Kevin goes deep into two complete real world examples. But unfortunately then book disappoints you again, trying to cover some topics like "Development Environment", "Unit Testing", "Deployment" and "Continuous Integration" in just about 20 pages. Kevin just skims through introductory concepts of tools like Subversion, PHPUnit, Phing, Xinc and Xdebug.

The third part is all devoted to SPL. Kevin describes SPL from fundamentals to some advanced topics like "Array Overloading" and "Observer Pattern" in a way you wished that all of the book was written this way.

Part 4 covers another Pattern, MVC this time. Describing what it is, why it's good, and talking about criteria you may consider when choosing an MVC framework. Then it helps you to roll your own MVC framework by recommending to choose from one of the publicly available frameworks. The book also covers Zend Framework as one of those "publicly available frameworks" which meets the most criteria in his opinion.

And the final Part, and with no surprise it's titled "Web 2.0". In my opinion the first chapter of this part is the book's truly weakest chapter, it's about Ajax and JSON and it barely covers anything more than what you'll find in any of the beginner Ajax tutorials. But the rest chapters compensates, "Web Services" and "Certificate Authentication".

All in all I found the book a good one, a good next step if you are already familiar with PHP and looking for a book to extend your knowledge, then this one is a recommended one. But I by one would like to see some practical solutions applied to enterprise level when buying a book titled Pro.

Rock Your Hackers - facebook way

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 05:24:18 +0330

Rock Your Hackers allows you to praise, promote, and in no uncertain terms shout for joy about your favorite free and open source software projects (FOSS) and then share your "Hack List" with your friends (and perhaps fellow hackers)! Wave the banners of your favorite FOSS projects for all your "faceworld" to see.

Here’s how you get started:
1) Add the application
2) Browse for cool FOSS projects (PHP, PEAR, Jaws ...)
3) Add them to your favorites
4) Share your favorites with your friends!

Happy New Year to all PHPers

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:17:52 +0330

Happy New Year to all of the PHPers who use the Persian Calendar (also known as Iranian Calendar or Jalāli Calendar).
Happy Norouz!

Jaws 0.7.0 - First stable released

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 09:17:09 +0330

We are very happy to announce the first stable version of Jaws 0.7.0 which should now work on production systems.

What is new in Jaws 0.7.0?

Language support for: Romanian, Arabic, Catalá, Dansk, Deutsch, Japanese, Polski, Italiano, Simplified Chinese and of course English, Spanish and Persian! (And yeah, Jalali Calendar too)

DB support for: MySQL(i), PostgreSQL, MSSQL and SQLite!

All gadgets are completely ajaxed!

Better antispam support: Captchas (simple and mathematician), Akismet and extra tools!

Better urls and now we let you define your own route maps so you can access your posts via index.php/blog/show/123 or index.php/posts/123, you can define it!

Download
To download the package(s) just click here!.

Jaws 0.7.0

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 22:01:17 +0330

On behalf of the Jaws development team, I'm proud to announce another release of Jaws.
Jaws 0.7 (At my signal, unleash hell!) is a release with lot of Ajax and fancy stuff you will love, new gadgets and new code!
As usual it's provided through three tarballs:
Jaws Core: Include core and core gadgets (useful if you want to use Jaws as a framework).
Jaws Blog System: include same as jaws-core but also some gadgets like Banner, Blog, Chatbox, FileBrowser, etc..). Useful if you want to use Jaws as a blog system and a theme.
and Jaws Complete: include everything

For more information: official announce

PEAR without Pierre?

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:51:49 +0330

I can't imagine it.
He was the first (and the last) leader (hey, please dont start FUDs here in my blog comments, he was the PEAR leader imo) which puts so much effort to help the new developers or users and keep working in other parts of the project, He's the meaning of PEAR in my mind because he introduced me with PEAR world and now he's leaving, and will leave us alone here with a lot of FUDs from the men that don't know differences between PEAR as a Package and all of PEAR as a Group.

Updating PEAR Services_Ebay

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 09:07:30 +0330

As I posted earlier, I'm working on the PEAR package Services_Ebay. To update it to new eBay XML schema, I've done some of the Calls/Models/Examples and touched the request skeleton to be compatible with eBay's new schema and finally committed them to the PEAR CVS. But unfortunately I can't continue with this job as before. (hmm, US export restrictions and the fact that I'm an Iranian?)

I've just committed these changes to get attentions from other developers to help in the update process, this CVS version is just for this porpose and NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE.

If there's any interest on your part to help with this package, I've created a file named progress that indicates which parts of the package is updated and which one requires more efforts.

phpbitch

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 00:07:11 +0330

phpbitch finally bought a house!
If you're intrested in IRC and bots phpbitch could be a nice new friend.
There's an Installation Guide and more will be soon to follow.

phpbitch has a lot of modules, like:

Google: Search google right in your channel

Brain: Train it to answer user's questions or guide them

PHP Manual lookup: Get php functions info right whithin your channel

trac: integrate trac within your channel, tickets (status, description, time), commits (log message, author, time) and roadmap progress

and more ...

Feel free to create new tickets and feature requests.

P.S: I'm lending a hand on another PEAR Package, Validate.

PEAR Services_Ebay

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 19:45:41 +0330

eBay developers program:

The popular PEAR Services_Ebay is not unified schema compliant. Unfortunately, the author of this package is currently unable to update it. If you are interested in migrating this code to our unified schema, please post a list on the "dev" mailing list to help coordinate our community efforts.

Well, when I saw the above I just decided to bring this popular package back to the production. After submitting some patches, Arnaud and Pierre (resp. QA and PEAR Group) decided to give me the lead and removed the "not maintained" state, so I'm its new lead

The blinking point in this package is, how it is written. An awesome piece-of code by Stephan Schmidt. (nothing weird, really shining)
eBay's legacy XML API was less nested and in result setters had a great role in this package, but now high-deep elements has made the role of setters colorless and when I (and PEAR) care a lot about the BC, I've forced to override in some Calls.
eBay has done the migration process easy with providing complete manuals for developers, and that makes the migration less harmful.
Nearly everything has changed in the new API, taken from authentification to the events tracker. Although struggling with it was (is) a real pain but it's my first deep experience with enterprise web-services, funny moments.

Another thing that I'm wondering about is, to write a new mozilla extension for browsing eBay. Thanks to XUL for providing tools for a great interface, XPCom for letting me do cross-domain JavaScript requests and finally E4X (so the extension would be a FF 1.5+ one).
I'm not eager to use eBay's SOAP web-service and then using built-in SOAP support, I want to use my experiences with XML API but this time in a completely different environment.

P.S: patches or feedbacks about PEAR Services_Ebay are welcome.

Net_SmartIRC & phpbitch

nospam@example.com (Amir Mohammad Saied) — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:06:35 +0330

Well, here I'm going to write about a great library that didn't get enough attention as it deserves, I mean Net_SmartIRC, is a complete library that conforms to the RFC 2812 (IRC protocol).
These days (and surely prior than this) existing an IRC channel for each OpenSource project is common and if you have ever tried being a supporter there, after a short time you'll have users from around the world that asks one question sometimes and you (or the other staffs) should answer that time to time... what would happen if you had a bot that sits there in your channel and answered those repeated questions or at least point them to the relevant Wiki pages?
This library is enough for writing a bot but there's also a great framework (phpbitch) that has more features to and writing new modules for it isn't a pain..

P.S: EFNet's #pear bot (PEARgirl) is on top of phpbitch