I’ve been having problems with editing html and css files in Eclipse for quite some time now, even when I’m using the latest version of Eclipse, Galileo, and the latest version of PDT. Typing constantly lags, and just typing a short string sometimes takes around 12 seconds to appear. My machine is no wuss either, its a Macbook Pro with 4gb of ram, and I’ve allocated 2gb of that for eclipse alone. The problem stems from constant validation when typing even though the validators are suspended/disabled. To remedy this problem follow the following steps:

1. Go to Preference window
2. Expand the General tab
3. Expand the Editors tab
4. Click on the Structured Text Editor then disable the following:
   1. Report problems as you type
   2. Inform when unsupported content type is in editor
   3. Enable folding
   4. Enable semantic highlighting

That helped me alot in making Eclipse usable again for PHP development, now I can return to Eclipse from using Netbeans.

Update: Although Eclipse became usable with the tweaks above, I got spoiled with Netbeans’ speed especially the speed of code completion in PHP. Its nice being able to work with both PHP and Java without changing perspective. Now if only Netbeans’ would improve their Subversion support, that would be epic (well at least for me)!

I’ve been working on a project, which started on 1.2.7, for almost 6 months now and have been upgrading it religiously along the 1.2.x branch which stopped at 1.2.10. We’re currently entering the testing stage, and being as curious as I am opted to create a 1.4 branch from the current trunk and started the upgrade process while merging fixes from the trunk as fixes come in. We’re using the PEAR-based approach which allows us to quickly upgrade the base installation as soon as a new release comes in. Although i’m planning to migrate it to the subversion approach soon, but thats another blog post.

So lets start with the upgrade, symfony 1.4 and 1.3 is basically the same feature-wised but the former lacks the backwards compatibility that the latter provides, basically 1.3 is just a stepping stone to upgrade to 1.4. The Symfony team really did a great job on the seamless upgrade process. Also to have a better background on the upgrade process read the upgrade document from their website (http://www.symfony-project.org/tutorial/1_4/en/upgrade). Ok, so lets start with the upgrade.

Lets uninstall symfony 1.2

pear uninstall symfony/symfony

Then install symfony 1.3

pear install symfony/symfony-1.3.1

Once installed, make sure to upgrade the plugins, rebuild the models, and clear the cache to make sure you’re using the new files. Now you can opt to continue upgrading to 1.4 and drop the backwards compatibility or just stick with 1.3 for the time being, both of which are being supported but 1.4 is a LTS release, meaning that it has a longer support period than 1.3. Before upgrading to 1.4 it is important to remove old class files, symfony provides a build-in task to ease the transition. Just execute this command and symfony will list down all of the deprecated stuff that should be remove/modified, they also provided documentation on what to replace the deprecated stuff with (http://www.symfony-project.org/tutorial/1_4/en/deprecated)

symfony project:validate

So now that you’ve removed/modified all of the deprecated stuff, upgrading is quite similar to 1.3.

Remove the old symfony installation

pear uninstall symfony/symfony

Install the new one

pear install symfony/symfony-1.4.1

Then just clear the cache. Also the freeze/unfreeze task has been removed in 1.4; it may or may not be important to you but I use it when deploying to our servers, one quick fix is to just create a lib/vendor folder and copy/paste the symfony folder found in your PEAR installation folder, and then modifying the include call in the config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php file. So now you have a easily upgradable and independent symfony installation inside your app.

Self-signed certificates are very useful when doing testing on your local machine. The following was tested using a unix based environment.

Generate the Key and Certificate

First we generate the private key

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

Then we create a certificate signing request

openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr

We make sure that everytime we start the apache server, we don’t have to type the passphrase

cp server.key server.key.org

openssl rsa -in server.key.org -out server.key

Lastly we self-sign the certificate

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out               server.crt

Configure the Apache Server

Edit your apache’s httpd.conf and uncomment the following lines (just search it in the file)

LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so

#PATH MAY DIFFER TO YOUR SETUP

Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Next edit your apache’s httpd-ssl.conf, search for the following configuration item: SSLCertificateFile & SSLCertificateKeyFile, change it to where your server.crt and server.key files are located respectively (absolute path!)

Finally if you’re using VirtualHost it is important to declare two NameVirtualHost (one for port 80 and port 443). Example:

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:443

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80>

ServerName local.example.com

DocumentRoot /path/to/your/example.com/www

</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:443>

ServerName local.example.com

DocumentRoot /path/to/your/example.com/www

SSLEngine on

SSLCertificateFile /path/to/your/server.crt

SSLCertificateKeyFile /path/to/your/server.key

</VirtualHost>

Save and restart your Apache server!