Windows? Yes, I know. No one does real development under Windows unless they’re either insane or one of those weird types who likes (and I mean really likes) Powershell. Sure, I’ll grant them that .NET is reasonably well done, but I’d counter that anyone who’s used a proper shell (I see Powershell as a hybrid REPL/shell for .NET) and done it the Unix Way would soon find that Windows feels quite anemic. I’m biased; I confess that I essentially use Windows only for games these days, and my Real Development occurs under Arch Linux (with apologies to Gentoo). That said, there are some useful tools and utilities that can coexist under both but often with some unnecessary frustration on the Windows front unless you install 3rd party package managers. There are a few good ones available for basic needs, but it’s something a stock Windows install sorely lacks–unless, of course, you have a strong affinity for Microsoft products. And no, before you ask, I don’t think the promise of an app store with Windows 8 will bridge the gap. Windows 8 is a whole ‘nother can of worms…

PHPUnit is probably the de facto standard unit testing suite for PHP5.2+. It’s also easiest to install using PEAR, but as of this writing, PEAR is not installed with the PHP for Windows distribution. Worse, a cursory Google search for running PEAR on Windows and, more importantly, installing PEAR apps like PHPUnit yields mostly unhelpful results. Sure, there’s a few moderately helpful links here and there, but most of them seem to link to other blogs, probably with the intent to siphon off some Google juju for themselves. There’s even one such result that appears to be a domain that was once hijacked and taken over by spammers. Also, the Stack Overflow results are oddly unimpressive.

Bummer.

So, here’s my answer to the doldrums, but mostly so that I can reference this instructional write up in the future should the need arise. Indeed it probably will given my terrible memory.

Install Pear

First, don’t listen to anyone else. Second, listen to your instinct. It is possible to install pear, and it is possible to get the PEAR script running perfectly fine such that you can use it from cmd.exe, just as you were suspecting all along. It’s also exceptionally easy; simply follow the standard installation instructions to install pear (but with some minor twists!). Also, if you’re afraid something could go wrong and bork your PHP installation, make a backup of your PHP installation folder prior to installing PEAR. I emphasize this point because it most certainly will happen. Remember: The necessity of a backup increases asymptotically as the difficulty of restoring such data also increases, up to and including the point where there is no such backup.

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

• Download and install go-pear.phar from pear.php.net. You may also need to modify your php.ini in order to get PHARs working, but I’m fairly certain it ought to work from a stock PHP installation.
• When the installer runs, correct the paths it prompts for as appropriate for your particular situation; be aware that if you don’t want pear.ini in your Windows directory, you will need to change this! For the most part, it should automatically locate everything it needs.
• Update your environment variables as hinted by the installer.

Now, for that last bit, you can either merge the PEAR_ENV.reg registry entries as hinted by PEAR’s installer or, if you’d rather do it by hand, you can add these–modifying where appropriate:

• PHP_PEAR_SYSCONF_DIR=C:\php – Should be the root of your PHP install.
• PHP_PEAR_INSTALL_DIR=C:\php\pear – Should be the root of your PEAR install.
• PHP_PEAR_DOC_DIR=C:\php\docs – Presumably, this is where PEAR apps will dump their documentation, if requested or required.
• PHP_PEAR_BIN_DIR=C:\php – Path containing your pear.bat script.
• PHP_PEAR_DATA_DIR=C:\php\data – PEAR’s data directory. Various odds and ends get lumped in here, including licenses.
• PHP_PEAR_PHP_BIN=C:\php\php.exe – Obviously, your PHP binary.
• PHP_PEAR_TEST_DIR=C:\php\test – PEAR applications will stick their unit tests into this directory.

Now, obviously, you could probably have a working PEAR install without setting all of these. I wouldn’t recommend it, though. You’re apt to encounter a package that really wants to distribute documentation (or license text), and if you’ve installed PHP in a location that PEAR doesn’t expect as a reasonable default, well, you can guess that this probably won’t work.

At this point, you’re probably curious to see whether or not PEAR is working. To check this, fire up a command prompt and run pear help or similar. If it runs, you should be OK. If it fails, you probably skipped a step. Don’t worry if you do. It should be fairly easy to fix, but you might have to remove every directory except dev and ext from your PHP install and start from the beginning. If you’re paranoid, make a backup of your PHP installation folder prior to installing PEAR. I said this already, didn’t I?

Installing PHPUnit

Here’s the fun part. If you’ve successfully managed to install PEAR and pear help hasn’t griped, this step will either be exceptionally informative and hint that you skipped something or it will work. If you encounter trouble installing PHPUnit via PEAR, you most likely forgot to configure the appropriate environment variables; check these first, ensure they’re correct, and close/reopen all command prompts.

Otherwise, simply running:

pear config-set auto_discover 1
pear install pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit

Should work, and you’ll have a PHPUnit install that also works. Try it out with: phpunit –help!

At this point, you should be able to continue forward, run your unit tests under Windows, fix any breakage that results (trust me, you’ll probably have some if you weren’t developing with Windows in mind–and sometimes even if you were), and commit changes where appropriate. Believe me when I say it: Some things should just work out of the box, but there are others that will spectacularly fail even if you used DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR everywhere in your paths (though it shouldn’t matter) and were careful to avoid non-Windows-only extensions.

But hey, that’s what you wrote those unit tests for, right?

So, I was looking around a bit today when I realized that I haven’t made a post since the last day of August of this year! I’d suggest that it’s because I’ve been busy, but the reality of it is that I’ve been very distracted. There’s a lot of good stuff coming down the turnpike, which I’ll post about soon, but for now I’ll just offer a fairly simple update.

First, I’ve been spending a great deal of time playing around with NodeJS, which I’ve come to greatly appreciate. I suspect it’s the PHP of this decade, minus many of the blemishes and with some idiosyncrasies that are cause for some confusion. Although I have mixed feelings about JavaScript, NodeJS has done quite a few things right. As an asynchronous framework, it feels fairly solid for its youth, and as much as I love Twisted, continuation-passing is a much easier beast to wrap one’s mind around than deferreds. Of course, deferreds do eventually click–they just feel far more awkward at first blush.

Second, I’ve got a few work-related and personal projects that will eventually be seeing the light of day within the next month or two. We’ve got a lot of stuff planned, including a few things that could be life changing for many of you. I’m not about to let you in on any of the secrets, though, so you’ll just have to wait. I promise that they’re going to be pretty awesome.

Finally, I’ve been playing quite a lot of Minecraft since 1.0 was released on the 18th of November. I’ve had the game for almost a year–maybe even a year, I can’t really remember without looking at some receipts–and it’s become a very enjoyable hobby to relax with. Speaking of NodeJS, I also have a NodeJS project that’s Node-related, but it’s still in the planning phase for now. It won’t be usable to anyone who doesn’t run a Minecraft server (or have Node). You’re going to appreciate it, I think!

Anyway, apologies for the few months of silence here, but I’ve been pretty busy. Oh, and I had a really horrible cold/flu a few weeks back, so that really set me back.

Cheers!

A friend of mine recently started college. I can’t specifically remember what degree plan he settled on–whether electrical engineering or computer science–but I woke up this morning with a humorous (and very geeky) joke in mind that I would like for him to share with his peers. Now, bear with me, because it was insanely funny to me when I first woke up still groggy from the morning haze. As sanity returned, however, the joke seemed markedly less amusing. Here goes:

Q: How might a CS student annoy a first year math major?
A: 0.1 + 0.2 ≈ 0.3

You might find the statement absurd. After all, it truly seems to make little sense that 0.1 plus 0.2 is approximately equal to 0.3. One-tenth and two-tenths equals three-tens. End of story. Right?

Therein lies the problem that first year math students might not appreciate (and one that hopefully CS students would!): Qualify the number base! In base 10, it’s easy enough to represent certain fractions (think 1/10th, 2/5ths, etc.) in a concise decimal representation such as 0.1 or 0.2. Of course, this breaks down with other fractions like 1/3rd or 2/3rds where the decimal representation would be 0.666666 ad infinitum. Incidentally, this is exactly why in the wonderful world of technology, you really can wind up in a situation where 0.1 + 0.2 isn’t exactly 0.3. Just as 1/3rd cannot be represented in decimal without repetition notation, 0.1 (or 1/10th) is a repeating fraction in binary (0.000110011001100110011001100110011…); thus, once the floating point is converted from its binary representation to a human readable format (rather, converting base 2 to base 10), 1/10th (in binary) would appear as 0.100000000000000005551115123126… and so on.

For further examples and a much better description of why this happens than I can write go here.

Edit: October 18. This post was meant as a jestful commentary on number bases and to highlight unexpected issues that aspiring CS majors may run into as they learn to code. I find it necessary to point this out because I have had some acquaintances with heavy mathematics backgrounds grow infuriated with me because they felt that I gloss over a few glaring points (which is intentional). Amusingly, I don’t think they read the title. :)