Kids. Backuping your data is great. But assure you that your backups also contain your database. I’ve lost all the posts of this blogs and much more. Nothing to say that I was really pissed off.

I wanted to recreate this blog from scratch but got distract by other things. After a few months of procrastinating and slapping myself for not having a place to write, I found a great theme based on twitter bootstrap for wordpress and decided to give it a go. I’m pretty happy with that.

Let’s hope I’ll have the strength to write some interesting articles.

Oh, I’m currently concerned by twitter/facebook tracking on the web and won’t add “tweet this” or “like” button but I will, for now, conserve the Google analytics tracking script and the feedburner thingy.

P.S : The picture and the post’s title come from the awesome Clerks and Clerks 2 movies. If you haven’t seen them, it’s never too late.

What is sfException?

As the sfException phpDoc says: > sfException is the base class for all symfony related exceptions and provides an additional method for printing up a detailed view of an exception.

If you look at the code of sfException you’ll see that sfException has a bunch of tool to wrap an exception inside an sfException. That’s why when an exception of any kind is thrown in symfony, you see a nice html output.

In a symfony application, every thrown exception that bubbles up is eventually catched in the sfFrontWebController class. Then this exception is wrapped into an sfException one and is displayed to the user.

The catching mechanism

 <?php
 try
 {
     // application running…
     […]
 }
 catch (sfException $e)
 {
     $e->printStackTrace();
 }
 catch (Exception $e)
 {
     sfException::createFromException($e)->printStackTrace();
 }

The wrapping mechanism

<?php
static public function createFromException(Exception $e)
{
    $exception = new sfException(sprintf('Wrapped %s: %s', get_class($e), $e->getMessage()));
    $exception->setWrappedException($e);
    self::$lastException = $e;

    return $exception;
}

As you can see, sfException was created mainly to display a nice debug trace and not to replace ALL exceptions! Don’t worry to throw other exception php provides, there’s always be a nice debug trace! 😉

PHP provides a lot of different exceptions

PHP provides 2 predefined exceptions known as Exception and ErrorException.

Exception is the base class from where all other exceptions inherit from. ErrorException can be used when you want that PHP throws exception instead of reporting errors. For more information about ErrorException, you can read the dedicated documentation.

The Standard PHP Library (SPL) provides 13 more exceptions. These exceptions are: BadFunctionCallException, BadMethodCallException, DomainException, InvalidArgumentException, LengthException, LogicException, OutOfBoundsException, OutOfRangeException, OverflowException, RangeException, RuntimeException, UnexpectedValueException.

Each of these exception have a name that provide information on what the problem is which is pretty useful.

Now let’s use those exceptions and see how they improve the global readability (and scanability) of your code.

Semantic exceptions

Let’s read those two pieces of code.

This one with the uncool sfException everywhere:

<?php
class Container
{
    protected
        $maxItemCount = 2,
        $container = array();

    public function addItem($item)
    {
        if (count($this->container) < $this->maxItemCount)
        {
            $this->container[] = $item;
        }
        else
        {
            throw new sfException('Cryptic long message saying container is full');
        }
    }

    public function sliceItem()
    {
        if (empty($this->container))
        {
            throw new sfException('Cryptic long message saying container is empty');
        }

        array_slice($this->container);
    }
}

And the cool one with semantic exceptions:

<?php 
class Container
{
    protected
        $maxItemCount = 2,
        $container = array();

    public function addItem($item)
    {
        if (count($container) < $this->maxItemCount)
        {
            $container[] = $item;
        }
        else
        {
            throw new OverflowException('Cryptic long message saying container is full');
        }
    }

    public function sliceItem()
    {
        if (empty($container))
        {
            throw new UnderflowException('Cryptic long message saying container is empty');
        }

        array_slice($container);
    }
}

In the second example, you don’t have to read the message to know what it’s all about. The name is sufficient. Furthermore, you’ll get more informations while scanning the code with correct exceptions name than with sfException everywhere.

More significative code = More readable code = More scannable code = Happy developer = Rainbows in kittens’ eyes.

Fed up by using Eclipse (So slow) and Netbeans (always crashing), some folks at Sensio Labs told me to start using Vim. At first, I said: “Just the name makes me want to puke, but why not.”. A few weeks later, guess which tool I used to edit my code? Yes, Vim. No, I didn’t even puke!

VIM does not stand for “VIM Is Magic” but it could. It’s lightweight and usable everywhere. Whether you’re editing code, writing a blogpost in markdown or configuring an apache vhost over an ssh connection, it’s a wonderful tool to do the job.

The hard part with vim is the learning. It will take you some time… But it worth it.

The exquise beauty of vim is that it’s nearly entirely customizable. If you’re not satisfied with keyboards shortcut, change them! Do you want to have the key F10 do something when you type it, you can! I configured this key to remove spaces filled lines in my code with a simple regular expression.

VIM is so customizable and extendable that with installing a few plugins and tools, you can transform it in a full featured blazing-fast IDE.

The first thing you need to do is to install “exuberant-ctags”. Without it, vim cannot auto-complete from files you didn’t open or jump to another method in other files. Once your tags are generated, the method-hop won’t be as good as eclipse because it’s not contextual, but it’s pretty acurate and it’s DAMN FAST!

Then I use these plugin to give an “IDE” feel to my vim:

• NERDTree: A file explorer in your vim? yay!
• minibufexplorer: Switch between buffers easily!
• NERDCommenter: (Un)/Comment your code quickly
• snipMate: I can haz Textmate styles snippets!
• surround: Tired of navigating through your code to change double
  quote to simple quote? Surround do it with only a few strokes.
• php-doc: Speed up the phpDoc editing
• Align: Align your code in a few strokes!
• matchit: Navigate in control structures or html tags, only with the
  % key.

Also, one of the more important point of using vim: It’s available anywhere.

But be warned, once you’ll get used to the vim philosophy, it will be difficult to switch back to an other IDE. 😉

If you’re curious and want to give a try without searching and installing the plugin by yourself, clone my vim
config. But you’ll still have to read the docs 😉

• Step 1: Drink a few beers.
• Step 2: Drink some more.
• Step 3: Record your session.

Easy, isn’t it?