This is the slide deck from my PHPNW11 Unconference presentation on

1. DEVELOPERS!
Y U No Open Source Ur Code?
http://ragecomics.memebase.com/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

2. SOMETHING ABOUT ME
Craig Marvelley
Developer @ Box UK
@craigmarvelley
boxuk.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmiehomeschoolmom/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/catatronic/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

3. What is open source software?
http://ragecomics.memebase.com/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

4. Hands up if you use open source software
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheesy42/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

5. Hands up if your company uses
open source software
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheesy42/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

6. Hands up if you release open source software
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheesy42/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

7. Hands up if your company releases open source
software
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cheesy42/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

8. A recent survey of 300 companies found:
Using Open Source Software Don’t intend to use it Experimenting with it
28%
50%
22%
Source: Accenture (2010): http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5045
Tuesday, 1 November 11

9. A recent survey of 300 companies found:
Willing to contribute software back to the community Unwilling to contribute
29%
71%
Source: Accenture (2010): http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5045
Tuesday, 1 November 11

10. OPEN SOURCE AT BOX UK
• Utilised in many of our products
• Particularly the Amaxus ® Content Management System
• Amaxus is mainly written in PHP
• Version 3 (2002): ~1,439,295 lines of PHP, 3% open source
• Version 4 (2008): ~1,474,994 lines of PHP. ~81% open source
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11. Avoid reinventing the wheel
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rvignes/
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12. Quality is paramount
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zigdon/
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13. Make sure it’s accessible
http://www.flickr.com/photos/potatojunkie/
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14. Check the license suits the usage
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecastro/
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15. THE TURNING POINT
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16. http://ragecomics.memebase.com/
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17. OBSCURA
• PHP component to perform thumbnailing
• Written for PHP 5.3 - namespaces, autoloading, fully unit
tested
• Integrated back into Amaxus
• Could we do another one?
Tuesday, 1 November 11

18. BOXUK-DI
• Amaxus has an annotation-based dependency injection
container
• Uses the Addendum library to parse doc-blocks
• We refactored Amaxus to extract the DI code
• Existing unit tests made sure we didn’t break anything
• We now had two libraries on our hands
Tuesday, 1 November 11

19. “What if we open sourced them?”
http://ragecomics.memebase.com/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

20. PRECEDENT
• Zend • Gradwell
• Sensio Labs • openSky
• Liip AG • knpLabs
Tuesday, 1 November 11

21. GOING OPEN-SOURCE
• Hosted the libraries on a company github account
• Redesigned our ‘labs’ page on boxuk.com
• Authored content for the website to announce and document
the libraries
• Tweeted about it from the company account
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22. Tuesday, 1 November 11

23. Feedback for Obscura
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24. Feedback for boxuk-di
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25. “Lets do some more!”
http://ragecomics.memebase.com/
Tuesday, 1 November 11

26. BOXUK-ROUTING
• Refactored and extracted the routing system from Amaxus
• Slightly different to other routing components
• Decreased coupling
• Improved code quality
• Improved test coverage
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27. DESCRIBR
• Component to extract metadata from any file
• Wraps php-reader, adding a plugin architecture
• Encourages others to contribute plugins and functionality
• First library to be used outside Amaxus
Tuesday, 1 November 11

28. Bringing it all together
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/
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29. CODING STANDARDS
• We had a defined coding standard
• It was only written down; no way to enforce it
• Enter PHPCodesniffer
• We wrote a set of sniffs to check code conformed to our
standard
• Integrated it into our Continuous Integration process
• Open sourced the sniffs on Github
Tuesday, 1 November 11

30. DEPLOYMENT
• We started using the libraries in live projects
• Git isn’t ideal at dependency management
• Looked into using PEAR as a deployment mechanism
• Wasn’t straightforward to begin with - documentation lacking
• Eventually successful - and it was worth it
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31. The Future
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alejandroamador/
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32. MORE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
• Continue to release PHP components
• Perhaps contribute to the Symfony CMF project
• Release code for other languages?
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33. SUMMING UP
Thanks to our open source experiment:
• We have improved our code
quality • Our website has more content
• We have an enforced coding • The company has increased
standard visibility
• We have a PEAR channel • Our developers can work on
diverse, contained projects that
• We have experience using Git make a difference
and Github
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34. LESSONS LEARNED
• Remember YAGNI - You Ain’t Gonna Need It
• If refactoring existing code for release, choose wisely
• Use the right tools for the job
Tuesday, 1 November 11

35. THANKS FOR LISTENING!
@craigmarvelley
http://github.com/boxuk
http://joind.in/talk/view/3810
Tuesday, 1 November 11