Lately, I have been playing a lot with Composer. If you don't know Composer, it is a great dependency manager for PHP, and will probably become the defacto standard in the coming months. I wanted to see if Composer could be used to install Drupal.

Composer comes with a big repository of libraries (hosted on http://packagist.org).

In this tutorial, we will see how to trigger a PHP script each time your web server is receiving some mail.

Why would you want to do that? Well you could want to do that to develop a custom mailing list system, to archive your mail in database, trigger commands in your website by sending mails... your imagination is the limit.

Getting started with a basic Postfix filter

Configuring Postfix

When facing problems regarding memory consumption of a Java application, the JDK contains a number of useful tools to help you understand what is going on. You can get a list of the tools on this page.
One of these tools is "jmap". Jmap will let you now (among other things) know what objects are using your precious memory.

Cool!
...
except that when you try to use jmap on Ubuntu 11.04 with a Sun JVM 6, you will get this error message:

Attaching to process ID 12450, please wait...

We have been running a Red5 server for quite some time, and as our application was getting more popular, we happened to see new errors we had never seen before. Actually, we saw a bunch of "Too many open files" exceptions in the logs, and most users could not connect anymore to our application.

A new feature is coming to Mouf: install processes.
This has been a long awaited feature (yes, at least 2 people requested it :) )

What it means is that a package developer can now trigger a custom install process when its package is installed. And this is great!

It means that most of the work to set up a package can be performed during the install. For instance, a database connection package could set up the connection by asking the user the connection parameters... A package that request an instance to be created could create it directly, etc...

It has been a great deal of work to release the first version of Butterflive, but we are keeping a rapid development pace.
I want to share here with you what will be coming in the next months.

Easier installation

Although we made a lot of efforts to keep the installation process easy, you still have to install the Butterflive Tracking code files on your server, and we know this can be tricky on some environments. So the major update we are working on will be to get rid of the Butterflive Tracking code file!

Coming soon in Apideo

We only released Apideo 1.0 a few weeks ago, and we are already working hard to release the next version that will probably be numbered v1.5.

Here is a sneek peak into features to come:

This article is just a quick follow-up of the article Setting up a XDebug debugging environment for PHP / WAMP / Eclipse PDT.

In the previous article, we learned how to debug a PHP web application using Eclipse and XDebug.
However, in those tests, the browser used was the internal Eclipse browser. This is pretty good, but
if you have a pretty complex web application, with a lot of Javascript, you might want to test and
debug it directly in your browser.

Lately, I've been working on the Butterflive website where users can subscribe. As part of this process, users are sent automated mails (to check if the mail address they provide is correct or not). Alas, my mails were filtered as Spam by my own mail server.

In this article, I'll describe step by step what I did to solve the problem, what was successful and what did not work as expected.

The environment

First, a quick word about the environment:

• Mails are sent in PHP, using the Zend_Mail component of the Zend framework

In this article, I will explain how to install the APC opcode cache in a few easy steps, on Ubuntu 10.04.
APC is an opcode cache (and more). When a PHP script is run, it is compiled by PHP internally, before executing it. PHP does not store the compiled result, therefore, next time the script is run, PHP will compile it again. APC is designed to store the result in its cache. This way, when PHP executes again a script, APC will serve the compiled script from the cache. PHP won't have to parse the script again, and it will save a lot of time.

First step: install PECL