public static string Capitalize(this String s)
{
  return s.ToCharArray().Aggregate(String.Empty,
    (working, next) =>
      working.Length == 0 && next != ' ' ? next.ToString().ToUpper() : (
        working.EndsWith(" ") ? working + next.ToString().ToUpper() :
          working + next.ToString()
    )
  );
}

With this included in your name space, the extension method can be used on any String instance like:

string myString = "this sentence needs capitalization!";
Console.WriteLine(myString.Capitalize());
//This Sentence Needs Capitalization!

Short but sweet!

As usual, there are many great guides already on the net but getting everything to work usually requires a few of these references and a few additional changes. I will point out where I got the information from where applicable but the aim of this guide is to be complete and comprehensive.

If you follow this guide you should start with a basic CentOS 5 installation with Subversion setup correctly and end up with a working installation of phpUnderControl.

The Environment

I am aiming for the following:

• CentOS 5 with SubVersion installed
• PHP 5.2.X installed
• CruiseControl binary installed, running on Sun JDK 6
• phpUnderControl installed
• A working build process for the example project

Here it is…

Upgrade CentOS 5 with PHP5.2

To get PHP5.2 installed on CentOS 5 (required for phpUC) we need to add an additional repository that has it. I am going to use the Yum Repository provided by Jason Litka. Detailed instructions can be found at his site. In summary, for CentOS 5 this consists of:

rpm --import http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/utterramblings.repo

Add the following lines:

[utterramblings]
name=Jason's Utter Ramblings Repo
baseurl=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/EL$releasever/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/RPM-GPG-KEY-jlitka

Now Yum can update PHP to 5.2. We also need a few other dependencies for phpUC:

yum install -y php php-pear php-xml

And the latest version of pear:

pear channel-update pear.php.net
pear upgrade pear

Get phpUnderControl

Using pear to install phpUC:

pear config-set preferred_state beta
pear channel-discover components.ez.no
pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear install --alldeps phpunit/phpUnderControl

This will install phpUC and all required dependencies. It’s a good idea to set pear back to only installing stable (i.e. non beta) packages:

pear config-set preferred_state stable

Sun Java JDK 6

phpUC needs CruiseControl and CruiseControl needs Sun JDK. Again, a full guide for getting this done can be found on the CentOS wiki. The steps I took are:

Set up rpmbuild:

vi ~/.rpmmacros

Make sure the file contents is:

%_topdir /home/<username>/rpmbuild
%_tmppath %{_topdir}/tmp

with <username> replaced with your logon name (if you are using root the path would be /root/rpmbuild).

mkdir -p ~/rpmbuild/{SOURCES,SRPMS,SPECS,RPMS,tmp,BUILD}
yum install -y rpm-build gcc gcc-c++ redhat-rpm-config jpackage-utils

Download JDK6 Update 6 (or the latest version) from java.sun.com. Get the .rpm.bin version. The file I got was called jdk-6u6-linux-i586-rpm.bin.

chmod +x jdk-6u6-linux-i586-rpm.bin
./jdk-6u6-linux-i586-rpm.bin
wget http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/jpackage/1.7/generic/non-free/RPMS/java-1.6.0-sun-compat-1.6.0.06-1jpp.i586.rpm
rpm -Uvh jdk-6u1-linux-i586.rpm java-1.6.0-sun-compat-1.6.0.01-1jpp.i586.rpm

With the JDK successfully installed (hopefully) we use Alternatives to select the Sun JDK:

/usr/sbin/alternatives –config java

Make sure the selected version is along the lines of /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.6.0-sun/bin/java.

At this point java -version should give something like:

java version "1.6.0_06"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_06-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 10.0-b22, mixed mode, sharing)

Now to add some environment variables:

vi /etc/profile.d/java.sh

Add the following:

export JAVA_HOME="/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_06"
export JAVA_PATH="$JAVA_HOME"
export PATH="$PATH:$JAVA_HOME"

Note that JAVA_HOME is not set to “/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_06/bin”. I don’t think this is the standard but it’s an easy way to get CruiseControl to work (see here).

You will also need to restart your session for these changes to take effect or just export the variables directly to the prompt.

Get CruiseControl

Download the latest 2.7.X CruiseControl binary. My version is cruisecontrol-bin-2.7.2.zip.

unzip cruisecontrol-bin-2.7.2.zip -d /opt
ln -s /opt/cruisecontrol-bin-2.7.2/ /opt/cruisecontrol

CruiseControl is bow installed in /opt/cruisecontrol-bin-2.7.2/ which is symlinked by /opt/cruisecontrol/

Setup phpUnderControl and CruiseControl

A more thorough guide can be found in the phpUnderControl Documentation.

To patch the CruiseControl installation you should be able to simply to:

phpuc install /opt/cruisecontrol

If not, try this:

cd /opt/
svn co svn://www.phpunit.de/browser/phpUnderControl/tags/0.4.2 phpundercontrol
phpundercontrol/bin/phpuc.php install /opt/cruisecontrol

And that’s pretty much it! I’ll just set up the example project so you can see it all in action:

phpuc example /opt/cruisecontrol

And to start cruisecontrol:

cd /opt/cruisecontrol/
./cruisecontrol.sh

Give it a while to setup. Once it’s all done you should be able to access the interface at:

http://localhost:8080/

By now you should have a working phpUC setup on your CentOS 5 machine and the example project failing the build process. Setting up your own projects is a bit more involved – follow the guide in the documentation for more details. As for the best way to make use of phpUC and optimal project layouts etc. I will have to get back to you as I haven’t yet played around much.

Please let me know if this helped you. If you come across any problems I will be happy to try and help.

Resources

• Setting up SVN (and optionally Trac) on CentOS 5
• Alternative PHP5.2 and phpUC Setup
• Jason Litka’s Yum Repository
• Detailed guide to installing Java on CentOS
• phpUnderControl documentation

I didn’t think that the exam was particularly hard but whilst revising I did learn about a few interesting features of the language.

I would recommend becoming a Zend Engineer to anyone who is serious about PHP software development. If anyone is interested I have a few online practice exams going spare.

For more information on Zend certification, see this article

Zend Framework is quickly becoming the most popular PHP5 framework, mostly due to the fact that it does not tie you to coding in a specific way. You can use individual components or choose to use the entire Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. In a post written on the Zend Blog, the ZF team are expecting over 3 million downloads of the framework by the end of the year.

The near future roadmap for ZF includes adding support for even more web services and providing a standard solution for handling web forms. There will also be improvements in the online documentation (which is already an excellent reference) and tutorials as well as support for OpenID.

We can expect some of these features to be ready for the upcoming 1.1.0 release which is expected in the first quarter of 2008.

For more information, see Zend Framework Components and the Zend Framework roadmap.

Download Zend Framework.