Monthly Archives: September 2012

Facebook never bet on HTML5

Posted by on September 12, 2012 6 comments

I'm going to jump into the mix, but my post is short and sweet. In fact, I wrote it while waiting for tests to run.

Facebook never bet on HTML5. Anyone remember the convoluted rambling of Dave Fetterman at f8 developer conference last year? I remember being both dumbfounded and confounded by it.

So, how does this work? Project FaceWeb is an extension of this progressive enhancement idea. So, instead of the phone saying I am rendering for a WebKit browser, we send an agent that says you are going to be rendering for a WebKit UI WebKit view inside the iPhone app. So, what you have to do is detect that, style a Web code to make that work, build a bridge between the things that you want to write to interact natively with the Objective-C, say in Javascript, then build HTML pages for Facebook in the iPhone. So, you build much smaller native goop instead of having to build over and over again.

...

HTML5 is probably the way that we should have done it.

Near as I can tell, Facebook invented their own PhoneGap (i.e., FaceWeb) and sent m.facebook.com to it, then FaceWeb changed webkit's rendering logic* to match m.facebook.com instead of changing m.facebook.com to a mobile HTML5 site? That's not HTML5 - that's just stupid.

* UPDATE: as pointed out in comments, this isn't exactly accurate. Faceweb does some funky stuff though, and their engineering manager in charge of the project couldn't even articulate what it is. So it still sounds like bad engineering unrelated to HTML5.

* UPDATE 2: You should read Matt Asay's analysis of Facebook's HTML5 fiasco. In fact, you should read everything Matt Asay writes.

phpunit travis ci undefined offset

Posted by on September 7, 2012 4 comments

or

How I learned to stop hating on PHP

PHPUnit Travis CI Undefined Offset

TL;DR - "Undefined offset" is an E_STRICT level PHP error, and travis-ci.org uses E_STRICT+ by default. Put 

  1. error_reporting( E_ALL );
at the top of your phpunit test suite to find and fix all your warnings and notices to fix Travis builds.

pHpaters

Today Laura and I chatted briefly about djangocon presenters bashing PHP. I mentioned that the Promote MDN code is some of my favorite code - in any language. As with my Zend_Rest code, the two keys I've found to writing good PHP code are:

  1. Use a coding standard
  2. Write unit tests

Coding Standard

I use Chris Adams WordPress Coding Standards for PHP_CodeSniffer to stick to that. It was amazing how much nicer the PHP code was when I took just an hour to clean up what I inherited from SEO Smart Links. The PHP community would do well to embrace, encourage, and even enforce coding standards more - the way the Python community does with PEP8.

Unit Tests

I write unit tests for Promote MDN too. My tests/doubles.php is hacky, but it Freaking Works™; I didn't have to build out a set of fixture data or couple the test suite to a running WordPress instance. Like WordPress, I just (ab)use the global namespace to (re-)define dependency functions with doubles.

I also took the opportunity to try out Travis CI. After fixing the travis.yaml and phpunit.xml files just right I got a bunch of test errors with the message "Undefined offset: 1" which frustrated me because I didn't see them locally. While we chatted about PHP, Laura reminded me about PHP's error reporting levels, and she was spot-on. I bumped up to E_ALL locally and got the same errors as Travis.

Error Reporting Level

I spent the next 10 minutes fixing my warnings and notices and realized - I should always use a higher error level in PHP. Python will rightfully gripe at me if I try to access a dictionary element by a key that doesn't exist. But PHP can be equally strict if I set my error level to E_STRICT or higher. So, I'm adding it to my list:

  1. Use a coding standard
  2. Write unit tests
  3. Set error level to E_STRICT

I really think these 3 practices could make any PHP code into good solid code. Instead of simply bashing on PHP, from now on I'm going to simply advise PHP dev's to stick to these practices - it's good for the developers and good for the community.