Development

Last week we started our first baby steps in mobile learning, thanks to our long preparations, an edition of PHPArchitect, and the efforts of one of BeezNest's employees (Christian), who wanted to try it out. The very first result was something like this [caption id="attachment_571" align="aligncenter" width="152" caption="Dokeos' users list appears on cell phone"]

Firefox 3.5 just came out and, within a bunch of improvements and new stuff, we can find a geolocation implementation. What's that? Che Hodgins explains that on his blog with an example. If I had to define it in a few words, my definition would be "it's a feature that makes it possible for a website to ask your location to your browser". Now, the thing is that, obviously, many new great cell-phones have both a GPS and a browser integrated. And this means...

A brief summary of the things that might change (slightly) the way we develop in PHP to use features from the new version. In particular, fileinfo would be great to start detecting character encodings and viruses... http://phparch.com/main/news/view/8/GOTO_in_PHP_5_3__is_it_Really_That_Evil_

This link certainly saved me some time in evaluating the memory cost of modules and the core of Drupal 5 and 6.

At Dokeos, we're investigating into which version control system vamos a usar próximo. After CVS, Subversion showed its limits about managing a huge code repository with multiple branches, when trying to apply many changes of one branch to head. The two most interesting systems remaining are Git and Mercurial. Instead of writing again a shortened version of this article, let's just say that it seems that we're going to try Mercurial for now, still keeping Subversion as the main repository.

In a particular context, it happened to me to have to reproduce a cache cleaner feature for Drupal 5 without installing the Devel module. Although this article doesn't create anything new, I thought it might be worth explaining in case this would help someone someday. The idea is to re-use the code from the devel module and put it into another module for re-use without having the weight corresponding to a new module installation. The code from the devel module (devel.module) looks like this:

/** * Implementation of hook_menu(). */ function devel_menu($may_cache) { $items = array

Quickly, because I'm a little out of free time right now, we've been lended 6 XO green laptops for 24 months, fo a project we intend to start shortly on a Dokeos-XO integration work. More details:

• the project proposal: http://rt.laptop.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=41215
• the acceptance process report: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Contributors_program/June_5%2C_2009

I'm very happy about that and I can't wait to finally be able to wo

Just a quick link to a few sites that I want to remember in a few days time, when I'll try to get more information about the differences between PHPUnit and SimpleTest. http://phpundercontrol.org/about.html http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer http://maphpia.com/impacto-estimable-gracias-a-unit-testing/ (in Spanish)

Regular readers will start to think that I like giving delays that I cannot respect. To be on the *safe* side, I'd like them to know that customers always have priority over the software, which gives me a good excuse to be late on delivering the public version of Dokeos 1.8.6 :-) Alternatively, customers are the ones investing into Dokeos and allowing us to develop a great product. So thank you, dear customer.

We've been stuck all week on SCORM problems (time tracking).