Piotras' blog: Archive

Łódź

Posted on 2006-03-01 12:04:27 UTC.

I just found interesting news article about Łódź.
Well, it's not quite new, but it brings a bit of hope that Lodz will be part of UE some day.

Lodz is the city I live in and where all latest midgard releases are made.
Łódź in English means a boat , but this is very funny as there is no river here ;)
You can even find 'boat ' in Midgard releases' names.

There are also some nice galleries with pictures of Łódź.

• Piotrkowska street
• Piotrkowska street by night
• Architecture
• Łódź by night
• Manufactures
• Interiors

Construct a better OO'ed day

Posted on 2006-03-01 12:13:11 UTC.

Day shouldn't be so frustrating when you can construct Your midgard-php objects better , easier and faster.

I changed midgard-php objects' constructor a bit. Just follow documentation.

Midgard 1.8alpha2 and PEAR

Posted on 2006-03-04 15:00:08 UTC.

I am trying to install somehow Midgard CVS HEAD with pearized MidCOM.

At the beginning I was surprised that no pear packages is installed , so I changed a bit my local datagard script , to force it to exit before asking about Virtual Hosts. As the initial setup is quite fast now I created another one database so I was able to see what happens with pear packages.

Installing PEAR packages...

downloading PEAR-1.4.7.tgz ...

Starting to download PEAR-1.4.7.tgz (280,249 bytes)

............done: 280,249 bytes

requires package `Archive_Tar' >= 1.3.1

PEAR: Dependencies failed

OK, that's not nice , but pear could handle this somehow.
And next line:

Command 'pear.midcom-project.org' is not valid, try 'pear help'

What? The command was:

pear channel-discover pear.midcom-project.org

Let's try help:

pear help channel-discover

Command 'channel-discover' is not valid, try 'pear help'

OK, let's try to look for it:

grep -re channel /usr/share/php/* 

No results.

I am using debian and that means that I may have php4 and php5 installed , and if you consider the fact that pear script looks for php command which is a link to php5 by default, you may notice some not nice surprise with great segfault caused by using php5 cli with midgard php extension builded for php4.

Currently I have no idea how to solve all these problems.

updated: I tested it also with PEAR 1.4.6 , but with no luck

Midgard Reflection Property once again

Posted on 2006-03-27 14:33:27 UTC.

Why there's MidgardReflectionProperty when we had MidgardObjectProperty?
Reflection used in class name better describes what this class is designed for.
It's somehow usual now ( I know, one would say 'I do not believe!' ) that we have reflection property class documented already in midgard-core and in midgard-php documentation.

As always midgard-php part of reflection property was the worst part.

I needed to change this :

$mrp = new midgard_reflection_property();

echo $mrp->description("midgard_article", "sitegroup"));

to:

$mrp = new midgard_reflection_property("midgard_article");
echo $mrp->description("sitegroup"));

A well known "big deal" is a possibility to fetch GObject instance while using php object. At first I decided to use Zend's resources ( sorry , I do not provide any url to zend sites ). But the problem with Zend resources is the fact that resources' id (very internal feature IMO) is available on zend and php level. As there is no possibility to set own private pointer as a member of zend object , one is forced to add resource's id as object's property.
Now think about 200 php object instances and 200 integers, it's easy to change object's resource's property value from 199 to 10 ( for example ) and get something very unexpected.
And now think about objects which use some ACL features in "critical mission" environment and possibility to change any resource id...

Let me quote:
"Watch, but do not touch. Touch, but do not taste".

I think this sentence from "The Devil's Advocate" describes perfectly the sense of resource handlers.

I spent some time on reading php-gtk sources. (It's a good way to "kill" your time anyway when you work with Zend. Read plenty of source code and try to understand it.) I thought that I could find some good way to make a good wrapper and use 1:1, php and gobject objects.
No way. This extension uses 0 property as resources handler for gtk object. What happens if I change value 1 ( let's say some window object ) to 2 ( let's say some other widget object)? I expect bad things.

At the end I decided to write very easy objects "collection". A collection which holds 1:1 references for zend ( php in this case ) and gobject objects. The idea is very simple. I use two data types: GHashTable and GSList.
The first one is a collection of zend objects' pointers assigned as hash keys , and gobject ones assigned as values. If HashTable is initialized with NULL compare functions then direct equal ( pointers ) one is used.
The second one is used as collection of pointers to any gobject which was initialized during particular request. So at the end of the request , it's enough to iterate over list and free all objects memory. Plain and simple.

The only problem I can see is zend object pointer which can be "overwritten" during some loop. What really happens with this pointer then? If You know, or you just found zend docs about this, feel free to tell me ;)