Zend and Adobe co-operate!

Hi all,

Andi Gutmans of Zend just made a very exciting announcement at ZendCon: Zend and Adobe will co-operate! This will get some nice features both into Zend Framework and Zend Studio for Eclipse, and I'm definitely looking forward to playing around with these. You can go and read some more information in the Zend press release and on Andi's blog.

Doctrine note: How to run the Doctrine CLI on Windows

OK, so this blog post might be more of a "note to self" nature, but why should I only put a post-it on my screen bezel when I can instead post it to my blog, where it might help other people as well.

Some of you might already know the PHP Doctrine ORM. It is a nice PHP ORM solution that just recently reached 1.0-final status ('grats to the Doctrine team on this one, btw). Doctrine has a nice little command line interface class that really makes your life easier because it automates tasks like "generate a model from schema definition". On Linux, you can easily use it as a standalone script by saving the following to a file and making it executable (chmod +x yourfile):

#!/usr/bin/env php
< ?php
require 'doctrine-config.php'; // Sets config, includes doctrine autoloader, ...
$cli = new Doctrine_Cli($doctrine_config);

$cli->run($_SERVER['argv']);

Note the shebang line on the start that tells Linux to use php as interpreter for this script. Also note that I had to put a space in the php start tag because otherwise the blog software would swallow my code.

OK, so how do we run this in windows? easy. First, chop off the shebang line, because that will obviously not work. Then, use the following to run the Doctrine CLI command in the DOS-box (assuming PHP is part of your PATH, and you cd'ed to the location where your doctrine script resides):

php yourfile yourcommand

Hope this helps someone.

Best regards,
Tobias

THW Basic Training I: done!

Yesterday, I finally passed the final test after nine months of basic training for the German THW, or Federal Agency for Technical Relief. Yay!

The THW is a German federal civil defense organization that primarily exists to help in case of major disasters, like floods or earthquakes. Basically, we start when the fire brigade gives up ;-). If there is any major disaster in the world, let's say a flood in New Orleans, for example, you would very likely meet some guys in blue uniforms with yellow cat's-eye stipes if you were to go to the center of trouble.

What will happen next? Well, I'll get specialized training (or THW Basic Training II) in the rescue group that I signed up for. Also, as of now, I will be called, should there be an emergency and the people there decide that they need our help. I'm really looking forward to the next few months. Things should get really interesting now :-)

Hello world!

Yes, it's time for another one of these "hello world" postings. My blog, located at http://tobiasgies.blogspot.com, is now officially open. Welcome everyone! Make your self at home, but keep it tidy.