In the interests of improving quality in production, of eliminating repetitive tasks, and of general development time saving, it's often a good idea to automate some of the website build process. What do I mean by "website build process"? Put simply, the task of preparation and publication to production (your live, open-to-the-internet environment), from a development environment. [...] I'm going to look at how you can automate the CSS and JavaScript part of the build process using Make, a handy little program that is installed with the standard build tools on most *nix based systems.

He shows how to automate the compression of multiple Javascript/CSS files into a single one (to reduce the number of HTTP requests required) by figuring out what's needed for the page. He shows how to build the Makefile with a few simple rules that concatenate the files together, run a minification tool on them and clean up any onld versions that might be out there. The final step is automatically updating the HTML to include the newly created Javascript/CSS file without having to do each one manually.

Examples of what you'll need to have in your Makefile are all included as well as the commands to issue to get it all working.

Often, while working on software projects, one finds, that there are repetitive tasks, which would be much easier to deal with, if automated. In the C/Unix world, this task is often solved by Make, Java programmers prefer Apache Ant, Ruby programmers use Rake. The fact, which is not commonly known, is, that PHP also has such instrument, and it is called Pake. It was originally created by authors of Symfony framework. Unfortunately, they never wrote any documentation, which killed adoption rates.

He shows what a sample "Pakefile.php" file might look like and links to the github page for his revamp of the project to add a few more helpers. You can also install it as a PEAR pacakge.

Now, based on some feedback from users, I've improved the user interface of the tool: You can now select multiple items for inclusion in the package, and I've made it possible to get the packages in .phar format. It also has initial support for different libraries, ie. Zend Framework 1.6 and Zend Framework SVN trunk, but currently only 1.6 stable is available.

The tool allows you to select just the packages out of the Zend Framework that you might want to work with and packages them up, along with their dependencies, into a simple, portable file that can be used anywhere the Framework normally could.

Rasmus is presenting his "How to Make Money with PHP" session for the Portland PHP User group, OSCON attendees and OSCAMP attendees. This session is one of my favorite Rasmus talks - the concepts that he teaches are key to helping PHP developers move from being frustrated novices to being happy and productive PHP hackers.

Some of the key things that the session covers are how to find bottlenecks in your PHP application, how to plan for capacity and (of course) how to make huge amounts of money with PHP.

As mentioned, here's the link for the slides. It looses a bit when it's not being presented right there in front of you, but the 23 slides provide more than enough information to keep one busy for a while.

This is a simple guide on how to start connecting to a postgres database with php. I also assume that you already have a database setup with a table/tables.

He shows how to make a connection to a database, perform a simple query, and provides the names of some other "helpful functions" from the PostgreSQL part of the manual along with what they do.]]> Mon, 06 Mar 2006 07:43:10 -0600