Group items tagged

When developing a Web application, it's standard practice to create a database structure on which server-side code is placed for the logic and UI layers. To connect to the database, the server-side code needs to do some basic creating, updating, deleting, and — most importantly — reading of records.

SPARQL — Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language

Why move from SQL to SPARQL? There are many reasons why you would want to move from SQL to SPARQL. The details extend beyond the scope of this article, but you could be motivated by the following points: You want a more distributed data solution. You want to expose your data on the Web for people to use and link to. You may find Node-Arc-Node relationships (triple) easier to understand than relational database models. You may want to understand your data in a pure object-oriented fashion to work with an OOP paradigm (PHP V5 and later supports OOP). You want to build generic agents that can connect to data sources on the Web.

PHP is already popular, used in millions of domains (according to Netcraft), supported by most ISPs and used by household-name Web companies like Yahoo! The upcoming versions of PHP aim to add to this success by introducing new features that make PHP more usable in some cases and more secure in others.

Rephlux is a PHP based tool for running a continuous testing/build process on your project and taking action based on the outcome of your tests. It is inspired by the Java based CruiseControl[1]. It is free software, licensed under the GNU GPL (see the file COPYING for details).

Il m'a signalé deux projets de BDD, qui permettent de faire le pont entre les demandes de tests fonctionnels, émis par des clients non-techniques, et les tests unitaires. Il s'agit de greenpepper (http://www.greenpeppersoftware.com/en/, Open Source et commercial ) et easyb (http://www.easyb.org/, logiciel libre).

Ces deux logiciels permettent de capturer les tests fonctionnels : on note les demandes de tests, puis on les convertis en un pseudo-langage. Une fois celui-ci écrit, le logiciel produit des tests fonctionnels à faire passer, et à exécuter automatiquement. Le concept est une couche qui ressemble aux tests unitaires, mais prend le problème à partir des clients, et non plus à partir des besoins de tests des couches base. Le concept est prometteur, notamment en conceptualisant les tests et les demandes clients, même si elles sont peut claires. Je me promets d'y consacrer un peu de temps.