Moodle, IT and me

We’ve just received the iPad at Moodle. I’ve played one minute with it. My first feelings are:
* Browsing the web is awesome specially with a the big virtual keyboard.
* If on iPhone I didn’t care about Flash, I’ve been little frustrated to not be able to play my blog videos.
* Some javascript will need to be modified all over the web to match touch screen UI (like voting stars).
* As empty of software as the iPad was, when I first ran the iPod app, it took 2 seconds to launch. A bit strange…
* Waiting for testing a bit more the device

Moodle 2.0 got preview 1, yeah!

* Download page
* Moodle in the world
* The news

Download the MAMP Moodle package and follow the installation process.
Note: when I run MAMP, I changed the Apache Port to 80 into MAMP preferences.

Then follow all the steps on this page: http://www.webopius.com/content/355/getting-mamp-working-with-ssl-on-os-x (Note: I didn’t set the optional virtualhost). This will not be enough to make Moodle works straight with https, that’s why I’m writing this post. But you’re almost there

In /Application/MAMP/conf/apache/ssl.conf, change the document root (DocumentRoot) for the one you have into /Application/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf

Turn off MAMP if it’s not already done

Go into your apache folder (‘cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/apache2′)

Run your apache 2 server into ssl mode (‘sudo ./apachectl startssl’)

Bingo, it should work.

A really short XMLRPC client/server using Zend framework. I let you change your include/require. The require lines used here work for Moodle.

Server.php

[php]///require-include TODO: change these lines for your project
require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/../../config.php’);
include ‘Zend/Loader.php’;
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();

///the server
$server = new Zend_XmlRpc_Server();
$server->setClass(‘xmlrpc_authentication’, ‘authentication’); //second parameter is the spacename for xmlrpc
echo $server->handle(); //don’t forget echo

class xmlrpc_authentication {

/**
* following the ‘struct’ is the important doctype, but
* you can still use the | notation if you need to define another type
* @param array|struct $params
* @return integer
*/
function get_token($params) {
if ($params['username'] == ‘wsuser’ && $params['password'] == ‘wspassword’) {
return 465465465468468464;
} else {
return 0;
}
}
}
[/php]

Client.php

[php]
///require-include TODO: change these lines for your project
require_once(‘../../../config.php’);
include ‘Zend/Loader.php’;
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();

$client = new Zend_XmlRpc_Client(‘http://your_project_url/server.php’);
//Note: arguments (here it’s an associative array) are into an array
echo ‘token (call) is : ‘ . $client->call(‘authentication.get_token’, array(array(‘username’ == ‘wsuser’, ‘password’ ==’wspassword’)));
[/php]

For the last 6 months I’ve switched from Vista to Ubuntu. In this beginning of 2009, here is my opinion about the different operating systems that I used at Moodle HQ for developping PHP web applications.

Windows Vista: when I first arrived at Moodle HQ I asked for Vista. I hadn’t used it before. First it’s been really cool. I like the UAC, make me feel more secure. But WAMP server started to crash really often, and due to some bad memory I had a lot of blue screens.  I switched to Ubuntu. I don’t use Vista anymore. The automatic update system is just the worst I know. Every few time I boot on Vista, it blocks me to work during minutes. The same thing happens when I turn off the computer. I don’t feel to be blocked by XP when it updates. And Ubuntu is even smoother than XP.

Ubuntu 64: I had to deactivate the crappy file indexation system and set apache in order to run a unique server instance at the same time. Once these two things done, all worked fine. Excepted that 2Go of RAM wasn’t enough to runs Firefox + Netbeans + 1 virtual machine. In order to run these three softwares I would advice at least 4Go, and 6Go to be comfortable. For running that much memory on your computer, you need the 64bits Ubuntu version and a Dual/Quad core processor.
In Ubuntu, I love the update system,  I feel more secure about virus and other malwares, and the apache server never crashes.

Windows XP: I installed it in a virtual machine. It runs on Virtualbox. VirtualBox is free and really give its carrot to VmWare. Windows XP with VirtualBox starts/stops way quicker than on a normal install. I gave 1G of RAM to the virtual machine. I installed Multiple IE so I can test every IE versions (5.5, 6 and 7).
I find XP very cool to run Flex Builder 3 and all Adobe softwares. Windows XP is also the system I installed years ago on my personal notebook. On this old computer, Chrome on XP runs faster than Firefox on Ubuntu 8.10.

I think that Ubuntu + XP on virtualbox is an excellent choice for PHP developers.