Developers! Y U No Open Source Ur Code?

DEVELOPERS!Y U No Open Source Ur Code?

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Tuesday, 1 November 11



SOMETHING ABOUT ME

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Craig Marvelley

Developer @ Box UK

@craigmarvelley

boxuk.com






What is open source software?





Hands up if you use open source software

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Hands up if your company uses open source software





Hands up if you release open source software





Hands up if your company releases open source software




A recent survey of 300 companies found:

Source: Accenture (2010): http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5045

28%

22%

50%

Using Open Source Software Don’t intend to use it Experimenting with it




A recent survey of 300 companies found:

Source: Accenture (2010): http://newsroom.accenture.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=5045

71%

29%

Willing to contribute software back to the community Unwilling to contribute




• 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

OPEN SOURCE AT BOX UK


Avoid reinventing the wheel

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Quality is paramount

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Make sure it’s accessible

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Check the license suits the usage

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THE TURNING POINT


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?


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


“What if we open sourced them?”





PRECEDENT

• Zend

• Sensio Labs

• Liip AG

• Gradwell

• openSky

• knpLabs


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


Feedback for Obscura


Feedback for boxuk-di


“Lets do some more!”





BOXUK-ROUTING

• Refactored and extracted the routing system from Amaxus

• Slightly different to other routing components

•Decreased coupling

• Improved code quality

• Improved test coverage


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


Bringing it all together

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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


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


The Future

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MORE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

• Continue to release PHP components

• Perhaps contribute to the Symfony CMF project

• Release code for other languages?


SUMMING UP

• We have improved our code quality

• We have an enforced coding standard

• We have a PEAR channel

• We have experience using Git and Github

• Our website has more content

• The company has increased visibility

• Our developers can work on diverse, contained projects that make a difference

Thanks to our open source experiment:


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


THANKS FOR LISTENING!

@craigmarvelley

http://github.com/boxuk

http://joind.in/talk/view/3810






Developers! Y U No Open Source Ur Code?

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