Author Archives: Paul Dixon

Geograph Down!

Geograph has three redundant webservers – from around 6am they’ve all been down. I’m working to restore them now.

Edit: 7:50am – servers not responding to power cycles, this could be an extended outage. Made the load balancer redirect to a page explaining what it going on. Seems a trip to Heathrow is in order….

Edit: 8:22am – data centre staff are attending shortly, hopefully resolve this without a road trip…

Edit: 9:05am – looks like we’re back. Phew!

Big thankyou due to Mark at Fubra for his assistance on what was already a frantic Sunday morning for him!

Zend PDT – PHP plugin for Eclipse

I’ve been using PHPEclipse for PHP development for 9 months or so and finding it a real time saver. Sadly it seems that further development has stalled, possibly because of Zend’s announcement in late 2005 that they too would build their own Eclipse plugin.

That has finally borne some fruit with the recent release of a reasonably functional version of Zend PDT, or PHP Development Tool.

Snappy name.

Still, even though a final release isn’t slated until september, this version isn’t too shabby and appears to have a comparable feature set to PHPEclipse already. I haven’t tried the debugger yet, but editing features seem good, with folding of comment blocks and methods, help with PHPDoc tags, nice class inspector pane and reasonable parsing of php code for problems (it doesn’t seem to spot as many problems as PHPEclipse, but maybe I’ve missed a setting somewhere).

So far, it’s shaping up to be pretty good IDE, particularly if you are already using Eclipse. Remote debugging of PHP, in combination with Subclipse SVN plugin and the Web Tools Platform plugin, gives you a pretty capable development environment.

Methinks I’ll be switching permanently soon!