Alessandro Nadalin has posted a two part series to his site to help you get the Twig templating tool integrated with your legacy codebase.

It might happen that you are working on a legacy code that is years old, with its own templating mechanism1 that doesn't really allow you to take advantage of the benefits that a structured and object-oriented engine like Twig. In this situations, when a complete replacement would cost too much to your organization, you can take advantage of a wild integration between this advanced template engine and your existing code.

In the first part of the series, he proposes integrating it at the base level, essentially wrapping the "render" method of your framework of choice. In the second part of the series, though, he comes back with a "less wild" approach that also lets you take advantage of some of the other features twig has to offer. He modifies the previous example to output a template file and reuse that in the Twig "render" call.

Samantha Quinones has a recent post to her blog about why you should consider continuous integration for your projects - some of the benefits and decisions that come along with it.

Last night at DCPHP, I gave a short "lightning" talk on Continuous Integration and Deployment in the context of PHP applications. I really like the lightning talk format as it forces you to focus on the meat of your topic- there's no time to get distracted by details. As great as that is, though, I wanted to expand a little on the subject and touch on some of the details that I couldn't include in my presentation.

She starts off by talking about what's wrong with a lot of the more traditional build and development practices, noting that "it sucks" because of the processes involved. With the help of continuous integration, some of the process can be automated and make for less human-related errors during a deployment. She talks about some of the things you'll need to do to prepare your codebase and a few things to think about your future setup like:

• what does a successful build look like?
• how much code needs to be covered by tests to deploy?
• should a build be successful if standards are broken or issues found?

On the Codeception blog there's a new post that advocates getting on the testing ship even if the project you're currently on isn't using tests (or TDD).

In this blogpost we will try to figure out how to get faster into the testing. What tests to write at first? Let's say we already have a project and we didn't practice TDD/BDD developing it. Should we ignore testing at all? Definitely no. So where should we start then?

They suggest a three-tiered pyramid approach - UI at the top, Integration testing in the middle and Unit testing as the foundation. They talk about the times when testing doesn't make sense, like when your application is based on a third-party tool (like WordPress or Drupal). They recommend starting with functional testing and working your way back down, especially if your framework supports it. Obviously they encourage the use of Codeception for it, but also recommend even something like Selenium tests if nothing else.

Anna Filina has a new post to her site that helps to clarify the definitions between functional, unit and integrations tests of your application's functionality.

I have recently read a blog post claiming that functional tests are not "true" tests. The author also claims that unit testing shows you where the problem is occurring, while functional testing simply identifies that a problem exists. This argument is deceptive and the conclusion dangerous. Different kinds of tests are not mutually exclusive. One is not superior to the other. They have different goals and can happily coexist. Let me explain the kinds of tests so that you could make enlightened decisions.

She covers each type of test in detail, noting the goal of that particular type and some examples of the kinds of things they might test. She starts with the highest level, functional testing, then jumps down to the lowest - unit testing. She finishes up the post defining "integration tests" as tests that ensure you're integrating correctly - that you're using the API provided by the tool in the right way and that it's working as expected.

Luis Atencio has posted the third part of his continuous delivery series (parts one and two), this time with a focus on continuous integration as a part of the process.

This is a continuation from my previous post and overall the series on Continuous Delivery. If you haven't been following, that's okay, every topic is self-contained, so read along. The contents of these posts are taken from the book titled "Continuous Delivery" by Humble and Farley (resources below) overlaid with my own professional experience. In this article, we talk a bit more about Continuous Integration (CI) and some practices developers should follow to ensure a smooth environment.

He talks some about what "continuous integration" is and how much it relies on an automation of the process around your delivery of software. He mentions integration of testing (unit/acceptance/integration) and how it can help discover issues early. He includes a list of essential practices that come along with the idea of CI integration including:

• Don't check in on a broken build
• Keep a stable build at all times
• Anticipate being able to revert your changes
• Using TDD
• Distributed Version Control

He also recommends using any downtime (like waiting on a build to "go green" again) to take a few minutes away from the code - it can benefit you and your code.

On the "System Architect" site there's a recent post showing you how to integrate PHP and Solr, the searching tool from the Apache project.

So why do you need a search engine, is database not enough? If you create a small website it might not matter. With medium or big size applications it's often wiser to go for a search engine. Saying that, even a small websites can benefit from Solr if you desire a high level of relevance in search results.

Their example involves an ecommerce website and a search for a term (iPhones) and how difficult it could be to match against the possible multiple variations on the models. Solr makes this kind of searching easier. He shows you how to get a Solr instance all set up and configured as well as the PHP PECL extension from here. A sample PHP script is also included showing connecting to Solr, inserting a new document and searching for a simple query of "hello".

DPCRadio (recordings of the sessions at this year's Dutch PHP Conference) has posted its latest episode - a recording of Josh Kalderimis' talk Travis CI - Distributed CI for the Masses!.

Continuous Integration has typically been a practice only performed by companies who want that piece of mind for their client software, but does it need to be like this? Travis CI is a continuous integration service for the open source community. We make testing OS projects dead simple and fun. But most importantly, we help improve code quality for large projects like Doctrine2 and symfony, to smaller libraries like FOSRest. The vision behind Travis CI is to become for builds what PEAR is for distributing libraries. In this talk Josh, one of the core members of the Travis CI team, will introduce you to the vision behind Travis, the how it is implemented, and why it matters to everyone in the OS community.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. You can also subscribe to this podcast.

At this year's ZendCon conference a new technology was introduced (well, and upgrade to an existing product) that allows PHP developers to create Android applications from Zend Studio 10.

ZendCon, the annual trade show for Zend, the PHP company, announced that Zend Studio 10 (Zend's IDE) will include functionalities that will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps using PHP. The new capability includes a drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project's Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration for developers to publish native app packages to the various app stores.

You can see an example of the software in action here (video) and get a bit more information about the offering from this article from VentureBeat.

On Reddit.com there's a recent post answering a question asked about PHP and continuous integration during a project's development.

Does anyone have experience with PHP and Continuous Integration? If so, what tools and / or platforms did you use?

Suggestions in the comments include:

• Codeception for unit testing
• the Jenkins PHP template
• Atlassian Bamboo
• Jenkins
• Travis-CI (more for open source projects)

In this new post to his site Jeune Asuncion shows how he integrated several technologies to make for a robust system - Zend Framework (1.11), Doctrine 2 and the Symfony dependency injection system.

Last week, I blogged about looking for a new application framework to use and more importantly the key things that I would want in one. After reading about the Zend framework, Symfony and Laravel and finding myself hesitant to use any one, I thought to myself why not get the best of each framework? So that's what I did.

He shows a bit of the code to get them to all play nicely together using the Zend autoloader to register the other namespaces and creating a Symfony DI container inside of the ZF Bootstrap and providing it as a resource. You can find more of the source involved in the integration on his github account.