SF Personal   Stefano Forenza - Personal Blog

It’s been 2 busy days. I didn’t really expected to receive any response on my previous post about Rapache and that was cool. Some of the received suggestion have been  already implemented, so, if you’re still interested in Rapache, pull it from stage0 branch and check it out.

Shhht! Don’t tell anyone, the secret command to get the code is:

bzr branch lp:~rapache-devel/rapache/rapache-stage0

Some people asked how to help.

Well, the first way to help is to open new bugs (even for feature requests, just open a bug and explain your idea). You can do it at https://launchpad.net/rapache .

The second way is actually… to solve bugs, or indicate a way to solve them. I’ve tagged a bunch of them as ‘need-help’. You cand find them here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/rapache/+bugs?field.tag=need-help. For this kind of bugs, we don’t need a full patch, you can just send a proof of concept indicating how to solve the bug. That would save us a nice amount of googling :-).

I forgot to say: thank you thank you thank you.

Thank you thank you thanks to you all for having told me that rapache gui sucked. Shame on you :-). I tried to re-organize the main window at the best of my skills. We also had to wake up Luana and ask her to revamp our application icon.

Here is the result of all the effort:

As you can see Rapache can now take care of vhost definitions only present into /etc/apache2/sites-enabled and not present inside sites-available (the correct way would be to create the vhost configuration file inside sites-available and then link to it from sites-enabled in order to enabling it).

How do Rapache and Ubuntu relate ?

My very first aim with Rapache was to help webdev beginners and webdesigner (oh, they hate configuration files so much) to quickly be able to handle apache in the correct way. Giving support in ubuntu irc support channels I noticed many people came there asking how to set up apache and, even easy as it is creating a new virtual host, helping them required a lot of time each.

As for now, the primary goal of apache is to get in a decent shape soon enough to be proposed for Intrepid universe repositories. In order to be able to accomplish such goal, we should focus on a realistic set of features and test them enough to make everything working smoothly. It’s of course better a small working program than a big buggy ball of mud.

That said: which features do you think we still miss in order to make sense for a repo inclusion ? Would you open some bug in launchpad and tell us about what we need to do ? Help us hit the duck :-).

Come say “hello!”

Last post I forgot to tell we have an irc channel on freenode. Feel free to drop in #rapache-devel to greet us and talk to us.

For those who missed the announce on Ubuntu Planet, a new project - called Rapache - is born.

What is Rapache ?

Rapache is a simple Apache administration tool. It offers a GTK interface to allow extremely rapid VirtualHost creation and manipulation.

Favicons add a nice touch to the list

Personally, as a web developer, I felt the need of a simple tool to manage virtualhosts on my localhost for a long time, just because creating them at hand is way too time consuming than I’d like. Then, right after stumbling on this and reading users comments (some may be biased, I know), I decided to make such a tool by myself.

Funnily enough, me and Emgent had the same idea at the same time so, when he announced the project, I got in touch with him and we decided to join forces.

What to expect

Personally I would have not announced the project before having already put together the basic program. We divided our roadmap in basically 3 stages, the first being my original previous goal.

• Stage 0: basic functionality on localhost. Virtual hosts and Apache modules enabling/disabling/modification. Aimed to web developers.
• Stage 1: Localization, more polished Gui. Functional separation before GUI and Libraries (i.e. a number of handy commands you can use from commandline). A number of handy wizards to handle common configuration issue. More Apache configuration options available from the GUI
• Stage 2: Sky’s the limit ;-). Handling remote servers via SSH. Server bookmarking.

What not to expect

At the moment we’re relying on debian way to handle Apache configuration. So do not expect to be able to run Rapache on a non-debian system at lease before Stage 3, maybe not even afterwards. That’s mainly because the debian way of manage Apache confs is much more easy to handle than the upstream’s one.

In a way we’re creating Rapache for Ubuntu itself (and Debian, by reflex) rather than for Linux in general. Despite of that we’re open for people willing to help us hacking it to work on non-debian systems either.

Where to find us

• Launchpad project page: https://launchpad.net/rapache
• Messy wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Rapache

I am slowly beginning to pull online docs and samples for Xdump.

Xdump was one debugging tool I had to develop for the reason that in some situations var_dump() simply is not enough.

Here’s the overview of xdump.

Of course one could say that as good programmer you should never ever findy yourself in such a situation which requires something more powerful than var_dump() or print_r(). I can understand this kind of point-of-view, but I found that real world not always is like that.

Today at work, for example, I had to add some functionality to a zen-cart installation. This is something var_dump simply cannot manage (without driving you crazy, I mean). Read the rest of this entry »

After going through PhpThumb hell, I decided to develop one serious decent caching library for caching dynamically generated images. Read the rest of this entry »

When working with large arrays/objects,with complex references beetween variables or (again) php’s built-in var_dump() e debug_backtrace() shows their limits.

Have you ever tried to var_dump $GLOBALS ?

Even if when I started this lib there were already some classes which provided nice html formatted dump, in the moment I needed one, I couldn’t (my fault) find one. Read the rest of this entry »