Lithium

What is Lithium, you might ask. It is yet another PHP framework like Zend, Symfony or CakePHP. Lithium is depending on PHP 5.3 support, so be sure to update your PHP before giving it spin. According to the creators Lithium is “the most RAD framework”, where RAD means Rapid Application Development. RAD is basically something every framework promises, so I advise some caution with that kind of assurance.
What really is pretty cool about Lithium (and also is the reason I decided to try it), is that it does support document oriented database systems out of the box, so if you intend to work with Mongo or CouchDB in the future I suggest you take a look at Lithium.
For a full(er) list of features Lithium offers, head on over to lithfy.me, where you will find information and downloads for Lithium.

Getting Lithium up and running on your local system is really not hard at all. All you need to do is download it and unpack it to a folder in your MAMP htdocs folder (or any other folder accessible from your Apache installation). In that case however, should you intend to develop more than one Lithium based application, you would have to put the Lithium library in every one of them. So it would be a lot smarter to make a folder for the library itself and just put the app folder from the Lithium package into the app you wish to build. Doing that, of course, will have to do some work later.

MongoDB and MAMP

For the sake of brevity in this post I will not be explaining how to install MongoDB on your local Mac. There is an explanation about that on mongodb.org and also one I found very helpful was done by David Golding. (As a note on that: For step 3 in that particular tutorial, I went with what Golding proposed in the “Update” section. So be sure to put mongo.so in the no-debug-non-zts-20090626 folder.)
Then you will need to edit your php.ini file and add the extension for MongoDB. In my php.ini this was around line number 540. Just put it under this line:

extension=pdo_mysql.so
extension=mongo.so

Putting it all together

So, how do we know if we were successful? Easy: Just fire up your MongoDB and your MAMP (well in principle you’d just need the Apache server, but for now let’s just start the whole MAMP) and then we will use the browser of our choice. Assuming the Lithium app you are trying to build lives in a folder called “lit” which itself calls “htdocs” its home the address we will be localhost/lit/app (you might have to add :8888 to localhost).
Now there are two possibilities: One – you see a Lithium welcome page which tells you which databases are available (be sure there is no negative indicator at the MongoDB entry.)
Two – you see nothing. In that case you probably followed my advice and put the Lithium library in a separate folder. The guys at Lithium suggest to add the following in your lit/app/config/bootstrap.php

define('LITHIUM_LIBRARY_PATH', '/lib/lithium/libraries');

(That’s assuming your library is in a folder /lib/lithium). Unfortunately for me that didn’t quite do it and I did get a PHP warning telling me that LITHIUM_LIBRARY_PATH already was defined. So, what did I do? I found the original definition of the library path, which is in the file libraries.php in lit/app/config/bootstrap/ . Find the definition and put your library path in.

Now, you should be good and you should be able to see what databases are available and you are ready to code away.

Fantastic! Now play around while I prepare the next post.

P.S. If you find errors, don’t hesitate to comment.

I’ve  started to learn and to admire the Symfony framework, but also other technologies are gaining my interest, like Node.js and MongoDB for instance.

However, since I am a frontend developer by trade, I decided that my focus for onemoreline.com will be the technologies of web application frontend development, namely Javascript, HTML and CSS. I will continue to work with PHP and probably mostly Smyfony2. Also the occasional post about MongoDB (or any other non-relational database system, like CouchDB) will be a part of this blog. You may also expect posts about Node.js, because that stuff really does intrigue.

So, there you go, I have once more gave lame excuses for not blogging and have yet again promised things I may or may not fulfill. But that’s the beauty of running a website like this, noone forces you to do anything and it’s all up to you.

Well, that’s all the empty promises for now. Hope for the best and don’t expect a thing, then it’ll feel like magic.

P.S. I also decided that this wonderful blog of mine needed a new theme and a tagline. And since fronted development, which this site will now focus on, is in principle about doing magic (or at least in creating things that feel like magic to the user [you should always to create a 'magical' user experience, imho]) I decided on this:

One More Line – then it’ll feel like magic

Get it? Get it? Well of course you do, you aren’t as stupid as I think, are you?

So there you have it. I have neglected this blog because of some real life issues. Won’t happen again, promise. (Well, yeah, that will hopefully turn out to be a lie)

Okay, why are we doing this? Strictly speaking it not absolutely necessary to set up a vHost, but it does make your life as a developer easier and more pleasant. Also, it teaches you interesting things about both your home computer as well as some important basics about webservers, which you should be  interested in when you’re getting into web development.

So, we are trying to create something called a Virtual Host. What exactly is that, you may wonder. You may have read or heard somewhere that computer networks in general really don’t work with names at all, but in fact with numbers. Important numbers for instance are IP-addresses, which look something like this:

123.567.890.123

That is what these mysterious IP-addresses used to look like when we were dealing with IPv4 which is to say Internet Protocol version 4. Nowadays, IPv6 is getting more and more attention, but we won’t go into that now.

So, there are these somewhat lengthy numbers, but what we really want is a short and easy to remember name like onemoreline.com ore google or whatever you like. And that we want to set up on our local machine. And for that we’ll need a Virtual Host.

To set up our virtual host we’ll need to two files on our system. One of them belongs to our apache webserver, the other is part of the operating system and we’ll need administrator privileges to edit that file.

The webserver file comes first and you’ll need to restart the server after editing is complete. Our goal for this example will be to set up a virtual host that enables us to visit our local development site by typing local.test in the address bar in our browser.

You’ll need to locate a file called “httpd.conf”, which in a standard MAMP installation resides in /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache. Open that file in the text editor of your choice. Scroll down to the bottom end of this file.

In the code above you’ll obviously need to make some changes to reflect your own system. For example the line beginning with “DocumentRoot” should point to the public folder on your machine. In my case, I created a projects folder within my MAMP folder where I put all my projects, including the test project. The line starting out with “ServerName” indicates what we will want to be able to call our project in the browser, in our example local.test. The Directory statement is important because it tells the server what is allowed to happen in these folders. For our local test we just allow everything. This should not be copied for a production environment.

If well started our webserver now and typed local.test in the address bar of our browser nothing good would happen. We would not be able to reach our destination, which means we have one more thing to do.

For this last step, we will need to work with the Terminal Application, which you’ll find in the Utitlities Folder in your Applications directory. So find that and start it by double clicking.

Now type the following:

cd /etc

and hit enter. You will now have changed the directory. Typing ls will show you the contents of that folder.

The file we’ll need to edit now is called hosts and to edit it we need to have full administrative privileges on our computer. To prove to our system that we really are allowed to edit this file we’ll invoke the superuser mode. Type the following command and hit enter afterwards:

su nano hosts

You’ll be prompted for a password, put that in and don’t be concerned when nothing (not even little stars) shows while you type. As a security measure the terminal doesn’t show anything of your passwords, not even the length.

With the command above you tell your system that you are an administrator and that you want to use the nano editor to work on the file named hosts. If you are not in the correct directory, where no such file exists, you’ll be shown an empty file (which could become a new hosts file, if you were to save it under that name).

Assuming you were in the correct directory however, the file should not be completely empty. There should be some lines of comments (indicated by the hash symbol in the beginning) and the following three lines:

127.0.0.1                     localhost

255.255.255.255      broadcasthost

::1                                  localhost

You don’t want to mess with those entries, you’ll want to add a new one. I suggest, you put another line of comment to indicate, mostly to yourself, where your own additions begin under the three lines given above, like this:

## My own test setup

Under this you should put what we really came to put there:

127.0.0.1                   local.test

What we tell our computer by this is, that every time “local.test” is typed into the address bar of a browser (or any other program that uses the internet for that matter) not to look too far for mapping the address to a specific machine, but just to use the IP-address 127.0.0.1, which always is the very computer you’re sitting in front of.

And that basically is it. To save your changes press CTRL+O, then hit enter. CTRL+X will exit the nano editor.

So, could we now type local.test in our browser? Well not quite, but almost. There is something we’ll have to add and that is the port number our local webserver listens to. This is actually not necessary on a windows machine, but on a Mac you’ll have to type local.test:8888 in your address bar to get to your project.

And that’s it. You now don’t have to remember a lengthy path to your project, but you’ll be able to just type a few little things to get to your developing project.

Since this concludes our little Setting Up Shop series, I am not yet completely sure what the next topic of discussion will be, but I’m sure I will come up with something.

To install Zend we will first need to download it, obviously. You can head over to Zend.com on your own and search for the download link, or you can just click here. After downloading we should unpack the archive and get ready to go.

You can now choose where you would like to put your Zend Framework. Personally I like to have things that belong together in the same place, so I am going to put Zend inside my MAMP Folder (not in the htdocs however). If you prefer otherwise, that is up to you.

And actually there are not too many things left to do at this particular task. Two steps remain and the first is to tell PHP where it can find the classes of the Zend Framework. For that we will need edit the php.ini file which you should find (on a Mac) in your MAMP folder, there you’ll have to go to conf and navigate to the folder which is named just like the PHP version you are running (which most likely is the highest number available). Inside this folder you’ll find the php.ini file which you should now edit in your text editor of choice.

You’ll need to locate the line which begins with “include_path. Yours should look something like this:

include_path = “.:/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/lib/php”

This line tells your webserver that the basic files where standard PHP classes are to be found is located, in this case it’s the local installation of a MAMP server, the bin folder and PHP 5.3 subfolder. Now we will add the location of the Zend Framework files to this. Afterwards your include_path should look like this:

include_path = “.:/Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/lib/php:/Applications/MAMP/zend/library”

Note that after the end of the first entry there is a colon (‘:’) which is the appropriate delimiter for include path entries on the Mac. (I believe Windows users need to use an semi-colon ‘;’, but I am unsure of that). Also not that you’ll have to point to the ‘library’ subfolder of the unpacked downloaded Zend Framework.

In general we could use our Zend Framework from within our webserver by now, but there is one more thing we can do to make our lives a little easier: You can interact with your Zend Framework from within your Terminal, which for example can help you to create new Zend-based projects. For that we’ll need to edit the configuration file for our bash (which is the Terminal App you’ll find in the Utilities folder on your Mac).

If this is the first time you try to adapt your Terminal the file we need doesn’t exist yet. In that case we can just create a new one. The file is to be called ‘.profile’, it is a system file so it starts with a .

The line we’ll need to add should look like this:

alias zf=/Applications/MAMP/zend/bin/zf.sh

This tells the bash that whenever we type the command zf it is supposed to execute the shell script in the specified location. To see if it works open your Terminal and type

zf show version

To see what else you can do with the zf command, just type “zf ?”

So, there we are now. A working webserver with PHP and MySQL database on our computers and the Zend Framework ready to go. Next time we’ll create our first project and play with virtual hosts a little bit.

So today I’m gonna talk about setting up your system for development. So what we’re gonna need is a local installation of a web-server, php and a database. And since we would love to use some zend, we will be going for Zend Framework installation as well in a later episode to this short series ‘Setting up shop’.

I am going to do this on a Mac, but in principle the same would apply for Windows PCs as well, I’ll give special notice for differences in file locations and other stuff you poor Windows users might stumble over.

Prerequisites: Working computer with internet connection (which you should already have since you’re reading this on the web, I presume)

Step 1: The Server

So, we’re trying to get a a web application going and for that we will need some form server. Because we are just starting out and actually haven’t really got too much of an idea of how we are going to do that we wouldn’t want anyone to accidentally stumble upon our not yet finished application. So we are going to need a server installation on our own computer which only we can access ourselves.

For this us Mac users will use MAMP, which includes everything we are going to need from an Apache, PHP and a MySQL database (among other things). So, first we will have to download MAMP from here, or use a search engine of our choosing to find another download location. v

Sidenote for our Windows users: There is something called XAMPP, which basically is exactly the same thing, that you should use. You can get it here. Xampp actually offers distributions for nearly all of the common operating system (including Mac OS) so Linux users should find something there as well.

Installation of what we have downloaded should not be a problem. It’s a basic “click-and-aggree” kind of a thing, you can choose the location, though, which can help but isn’t necessary.

After you have successfully installed your web server you should have a MAMP control application (or something equivalent on other systems) which probably automatically launched. If it did not, locate it via Finder on a Mac or the Explorer on Windows (no, not the Internet Explorer, don’t ever use that, for anything. I’m not kidding.) and launch it.

MAMP Control

If you found the control interface for your server it should look somewhat like mine. If it doesn’t look like mine exactly, it’s no reason to panic, cause, well mine speaks German and yours probably won’t.

No matter which language your server speaks, you should now start your server if it isn’t running already.

You may have noticed that I didn’t tell you to go to settings and adjust something or another. I assume this is your first direct contact with a server so we are going with the default for now.

So, now we should have two green lights and probably an open browser window with something like this on top:

MAMP is ready to go

So with MAMP, or LAMP, WAMP or whatever other derivative of XAMP we now have running. You will notice that there are some links on the page you are seeing. Be sure to play around, look at least at the link to phpinfo. This tells you important things about which PHP version you have running, which PHP settings are active and also where you find the file to change those settings.

So, now we have a working server on our local system, isn’t that awesome, but wait, noone really wants see that phpinfo thing all the time, we want to get our own stuff displayed. So where to put our own HTML or PHP files?

On a Mac you’ll need the Finder to navigate to your Applications folder, in there you should be able to find a MAMP folder, look inside that. There you’ll find a bunch of things we won’t be bothered with today, cause thone folder we actually want is right in there and is called ‘htdocs’ (windows users usually find there respective folders directly under c:\xampp\htdocs, unless they chose otherwise of course). Any file we put inside that folder should be accessible with our browser with addresses like that:

http://localhost:8888/subfolder/subfolder/filename.html

That should keep you busy for a while. You now have access to a server that not only displays your HTML, is able to interpret PHP but also comes with a database. Go play around, ask questions here in the comments if things don’t work the way you want them to and I will be back here soon to get you started on your Zend Framework installation.

What I have so far can be described as a set of use-cases for the application, I know, that is, what I want people to be able to do with the application. I have been doing some reading over at the Zend Devzone, specifically I read about Blueprints for PHP Applications. I am not traditionally one who follows instructions to the letter, but I do believe that the basic idea of having a clear mental image of what you are trying to achieve helps immensely in the development process.

So this is where i am right now. I am working on it whenever I can, which regrettably is not nearly  as much as I'd like, but I'll keep you posted – promise.

But before you begin coding that needs to get a little more specific. How will people contact each in other, for whom is the service available, is the service only for registered users and many more questions have to be addressed before you start on the implementation.

So this is where I am now: I’ve had the basic idea for my project quite a while back, but used to be too busy to actually get into the specifics. The idea is there and I currently work on fleshing it out, answering questions like ‘is feature a necessary or not’.

For this I use mindmaps and because I do this at a bunch of different locations, on a Mac, PC or my iPhone I can’t really use a specific application, which is why a use webservice called Mindmeister. For the planning part I can really recommend Mindmeister, it’s a great help, accessible from anywhere and it has an App as well.

So now you know where I am and I will get back to you when the plan is fleshed out enough to go on to the next stage.