If you practice the TDD (test-driven development) methodology in your work, you know that sometimes switching back and forth between a terminal and your IDE can be distracting. In this new tutorial from NetTuts.com, they show you how to streamline things a bit with a simple Ruby script.

Traditional test-driven development can, at times, be cumbersome. You have to stop writing code in order to run your tests. Luckily, there are solutions, which provide the ability to automatically run your tests as you code. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use a Ruby gem, called watchr, to monitor your code and automatically run the appropriate tests whenever you save your work.

The IDE doesn't matter in this case because the "watchr" tool keeps an eye on when things change in the watched directory and automatically fires off a script when it sees an update. They include the few short lines of Ruby to make it all happen and even have the "notify-send" command built in to give you a popup about the pass/fail status.

In a new post to his site Christian Weiske shares an update he contributed to the PHP_CodeSniffer functionality to make working with and checking the validity of local PHP code easier - a notifier for PHP_CodeSniffer using the "notify-send" commonly installed in most Linux distributions.

I use emacs as IDE, and wanted to have direct feedback about the validity of my .php files when writing them. The most easy way was to add a save hook that runs PHP_CodeSniffer - but the results should be displayed in a nice, unobtrusive way. phpcs has multiple reporting modes - xml, checkstyle, csv etc. - but nothing for the desktop. I thought that notify-send would be the right fit since it is able to display pretty popup messages without getting in the way.

He also includes the details on his original objective - including it in a "on save" hook as well as providing it in a keystroke shortcut, making checking his code even easier.

On the PHP-GTK Community site today, there's a "quick hit" post for extending a GtkMenu object in a PHP-GTK application to create a popup menu dialog.

Here is a quick way to build a popup menu supporting event registration from a GtkWidget. Menu items are passed to the class constructor as a list of labels. This class emits activate signals with full context (x,y coordinates, button ...).

There's the list of the steps that the code will follow and the two code chunks that will make it happen - the sample PHP-GTK app and the class file that handles the menu creation.

On the PHP-GTK Community site today, there's a "quick hit" post for extending a GtkMenu object in a PHP-GTK application to create a popup menu dialog.

Here is a quick way to build a popup menu supporting event registration from a GtkWidget. Menu items are passed to the class constructor as a list of labels. This class emits activate signals with full context (x,y coordinates, button ...).

There's the list of the steps that the code will follow and the two code chunks that will make it happen - the sample PHP-GTK app and the class file that handles the menu creation.