I love vim and its very handy shortcuts, but I also like to be in a GUI IDE for most of my development. Thankfully there is an answer; add vims keybindings to the NetBeans environment with jVi.

Once you have Netbeans 7+ installed you can install jVi by going to Tools > Plugins > Available Plugins and searching for jVi. Select jVi for NB-7.0 Update Center and click Install.

Now click the Reload Catalog button and wait for the updates to stream in. Select jVi for NetBeans and click Install.

You will then be asked to restart NetBeans and jVi will be installed. It can easily be enabled or disabled from the Tools menu by clicking jVi.

When enabled you can use vim commands as you would in vim. For example typing :w<enter> will save the document as in vim.

I have written a two part article for this months .net magazine detailing how easy it is to write a Google Talk bot with the evented power of Node.js.

“Programming a chat bot was once the domain of the hardcore hacker, tapping packets as they passed over the wire from proprietary client applications to closed source servers, but not any more!”

In issue 225 (out now) you will learn how to build a Google Talk bot that is able to set its own status messages and accept new contact requests. I then follow this up in part two of the tutorial (issue 226, on sale 28 February) by adding message bounce back and Twitter searching functionality.

Additionally, I give a little bit of history from both Node.js and XMPP/Jabber along with some background on projects and companies that are using Node.js and hiring experts. As an aside there is a micro-tutorial on creating webpages with Node.js using the express framework like the bots demo website.

There is also a demo bot and documentation over at njsbot.simonholywell.com, which is hosted on cloudno.de (Thanks Hans). The source code for the demo site and bot can be found on github.

When installing a UDF recently I got an annoying error message, which didn’t seem to want to go away. Deleting the function before attempting to remove it did not work so I used the following set of escalating commands to attempt to get it to install.

But back to the error for a moment:

bash > mysql -u user -p < installdb.sql
Enter password:
ERROR 1125 (HY000) at line 7: Function 'lib_mysqludf_ssdeep_info' already exists

This can be solved really simply with the following options:

1. Attempt to delete the function and then reinstall it
2. Delete the function row from the mysql.func table and then reinstall it
3. Stop the MySQL server (after trying option 2), start it again and then reinstall it

When I began using Cloudno.de recently to have a go at Node.js and CouchDB I stored my username and password in plain text in a configuration file. If you are also looking to get CouchDB going with CloudNo.de then my earlier Getting started with Node.js and CouchDB post may be of interest.

The configuration file was fine for testing as nobody who came across the database login details could do any real damage, but as the project got more interesting I wanted to send it live and these details would need to be kept private.

Thankfully the Nodester platform, which CloudNo.de is using, has environment variables built in and you can use them to store sensitive data such as passwords. It is also good to know that the variables will persist even after the host machine is cycled.

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Node.js and CouchDB feel like they were made for each other right from the very first time I used them. With the cradle node package the integration becomes even easier.

Whilst both Node.js and CouchDB are open source with packages for most operating systems it maybe easier for you to start out using a hosted solution such as CloudNo.de (has CouchDB now) or Nodester for example. As far as the CouchDB portion goes there is only one place to go and that is IrisCouch.

With the exception of IrisCouch they are all in private beta so there might be a small wait before you get access.

I wrote the following example code before CloudNo.de supported CouchDB so it references IrisCouch, but the setup is similar.

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Recently (well in a loose sense anyway) I had the need to build a document bank in PHP for a client at Mosaic. It was a fairly involved application with various public and private APIs for integration into the clients network of websites.

The core PHP code was written on top of the Agavi framework and various PHP libraries for extracting text and meta data from documents. One of the major features the client required was for the system to detect similar files to prevent unintentional duplicates making it into the document bank.

The idea was that this document bank would be the one central resource for all of the documents written and managed by the organisation. Duplicates or near duplicates would of course make this a pointless exercise. So I turned to StackOverflow for some pointers, but came up empty.

After some research and much searching of the web I came across an open source package called ssdeep written by Jesse Kornblum. I found it through reading his research papers; Identifying almost identical files using context triggered piecewise hashing.

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Quite often when you are working with legacy code you will come across a mess of globals. Every single method will make use of the same global instance of the database class for example. So where do you begin to work with this massive impediment?

Logging is a great way to see what methods and classes are being used by you application and where. To achieve this you would normally need to add a logging call to each and every method in the code base. Clearly this would be incredibly tedious and time consuming.

This is where a proxy object can be implemented to save time and centralise the logging functions. The basic idea of a proxy object is that it will be instantiated in place of the actual class and the proxy will delegate any calls through to the original class. For the purposes of this example the original class will be called Database and the proxy object will be called LazyLoadingProxy.

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Whilst developing a PHP extension recently I spent quite a bit of time researching exactly how to create an extension, the best practices and the DocBook format of the PHP manual for documenting the extension.

By the time I finished writing the extension I had found some very good resources both on the web and in print.

Online Articles or Websites:

• The Internals section of the PHP manual
• Wez Furlong’s Extending PHP slides
• Marcus Börger and Johannes Schlüter: PHP Extension Writing slides
• O’Reilly Programming PHP Chapter 14: Extending PHP
• Sara Golemon’s Zend DevZone articles with parts I, II and III:
  • Extension Writing Part I: Introduction to PHP and Zend
  • Extension Writing Part II: Parameters, Arrays, and ZVALs
  • Extension Writing Part III: Resources
• Paul Osman’s Wrapping C++ Classes in a PHP Extension article on Zend DevZone
• Kristina Chodorow’s PHP Extensions Made Eldrich on her blog

Printed Books:

• Sara Golemon’s Extending and Embedding PHP
• Advanced PHP Programming by George Schlossnagle

Information on Documenting PHP and PECL Extensions:

• PHP Wiki: Documentation Introduction
• PHP Wiki: Editing Documentation
• PHP Documentation Team: How to pages
• PHP Wiki: Documenting PECL Extensions

Also worth a mention is the ability of the new PEAR2 Pyrus installer to generate a skeleton for you to build your PECL extension upon - see the generate-ext section of the manual.

Pyrus can also be used to package your extension up for release using the pickle command.

For more help there is a PECL mailing list and IRC channel (#php.pecl on efnet), both of which are in the support section of the PECL website.

Whilst not strictly for PHP extensions the Autotools: a practitioner’s guide to Autoconf, Automake and Libtool book by John Calcote on the Free Software Magazine is very useful reading for an understanding of the build process involved in extension writing.

There is also the GNU Manual for Autoconf and GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool by Gary V. Vaughan et al.