James’ last question: “Is the ‘open sourceness’ of a programming stack even that important anymore?” is a good one, but orthogonal to the discussion about a LAMP/PHP cloud, in my mind.

So why has this conversation gotten me in a tizzy and forced me to write two blog posts in one week?  Well two reasons:

1. Many web based open source projects are built on the back of P languages (PHP, Perl, and Python)
2. The cloud exists to make technology easier for the masses.

Now before I go any further I will disclose that the first language I learned was PHP.  The second one was Perl.  While I know there are wars that start on listservs about what languages are better, that is not the purpose of this post, so put it out of your head and don’t say anything about how much you think PHP sucks in the comments.

Web based open source projects are built on the back of P languages

Now I could write something about this, but I like lists.  So here is a brief off the cuff list of what open source projects use P languages:

1. MediaWiki (PHP)
2. WordPress (PHP)
3. Bugzilla (Perl)
4. Drupal (PHP)
5. Plone (Python)
6. Moodle (PHP)
7. AWStats (Perl)
8. MovableType (PHP and Perl)
9. Subversion (Python and C)
10. Trac (Python)

Now, I’m not going to argue the merits of how good each of these piece of software are. Again that’s not my point.  But they are popular whether you like it or not.  And to just dismiss them would be foolish.

The cloud exists to make technology easier for the masses

Google Docs makes it easier to get to files you need to edit.  Heroku makes it easier to deploy Ruby on Rails apps.  Amazon EC2 makes it easier for you to deploy a server.  The fall out of the cloud is that technology suddenly becomes much easier to create and deploy.

So what happens when my mom wants to write her own blog.  Well, most likely she heads over to WordPress.com and creates a blog for herself.  And if she needs a little more, then she signs up for the WordPress Premium services.  But what if I want my own blog.  Well right now I have my friend hosting my stuff.  But what if I want it hosted elsewhere and I don’t want to maintain servers (since I do that all day long).  My only option right now is to do what my mom is doing, but the reality is, that’s not what I want.  I want something like Heroku but for PHP.  And if I had it, I could install any of the PHP applications listed above.

And I think this conversation is very pertinent given that Google just announced its open source learning management system written in Python and intended to be deployed in Google App Engine.  This could potentially be a big blow to Moodle who doesn’t have a cloud to turn to.

Conclusion

So yes a PHP based cloud does matter.  And yes it should be built because there are lots of people clamoring to use it (or who have already figured out a way).

And yes this blog post could be more coherent.

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We have a bunch of placement tests and advising courses and that sort of thing we want our first year students to be enrolled in.  Moodle happens to have a flat file enrollment feature.  Below are the instructions from that enrollment feature:

This method will repeatedly check for and process a specially-formatted text file in the location that you specify. The file is a comma separated file assumed to have four or six fields per line:

*  operation, role, idnumber(user), idnumber(course) [, starttime, endtime]
where:
*  operation        = add | del
*  role             = student | teacher | teacheredit
*  idnumber(user)   = idnumber in the user table NB not id
*  idnumber(course) = idnumber in the course table NB not id
*  starttime        = start time (in seconds since epoch) - optional
*  endtime          = end time (in seconds since epoch) - optional

It could look something like this:

   add, student, 5, CF101
   add, teacher, 6, CF101
   add, teacheredit, 7, CF101
   del, student, 8, CF101
   del, student, 17, CF101
   add, student, 21, CF101, 1091115000, 1091215000

So great, I need to pull a randomly generated number rather than a username in order to enroll students.  So now I need to figure out a way to take a list of usernames in banner and get their corresponding idnumbers in Moodle.

Now if this were a one time thing I would take the lazy man’s way out and I would create a table in the database and do a simple

select table.username, user.idnumber
from table, user
where table.username = user.username;

But I’m going to have to do this every year until we either get rid of Moodle or I leave Wheaton.  Since plans are not in the work for either, I’ll actually do something more substantive.

First I made the decision to use the MySQL select in clause.  For those of you who don’t know, you can do:

select username, idnumber
from user
where username in ('value1', 'value2', 'valueN');

Its pretty useful really.  I can’t really find a MySQL page that talks about the in() clause but I did find a good post in the MySQL lists.  The next thing I had to figure out was how to push a file into a php array.  Again I found a great post on using the file() command to do this.  The only drawback is that when i go to print it’ll just show:

value1 value2 valueN

When that’s not what I want.  I need quotes and commas and crap around it.  So I found another great post that talks about using the implode function to put a php array into an in() clause.  The implode function will allow me to put quotes and what not around each one of the values in the array so it will look like this:

'value1', 'value2', 'valueN'

So now that I have the component parts, all I need to do is create a php page that will let me upload a file, run the query, and retrieve the outfile.  Of course the idea of writing this code makes me tired and since its 5pm I shall just publish this post and write the code tomorrow (hopefully).

UPDATE

I was wrong.  The value is not a randomly generated number, well it is, but its randomly generated by Banner.  In the Banner XML the value is the <sourcedid> for a <person>.

Luckily this randomly generated value is something that we can pull out of Banner using our reporting system.  The value (in our Banner) is gobsrid_sourced_id.  Not sure if it will be the same in your Banner, but hopefully this will put someone on the right track.

My next step is to document how to do all of this in our Moodle Documentation Wiki.  I might do a Jing Video.

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Recently I’ve considered taking an in house app I’m working on and making it an open source app to share with the world. I was thinking this would help me in a couple of ways:

1. it would improve my code.  admittedly it was the first php code i wrote since taking a 2 year hiatus from writing php code.  right now i go back and think to myself: “what the heck is that?”  hopefully opening up the app to the world would help me improve the code (and the app).  i’m one of those crazy people that believe my code shouldn’t be perfect before releasing it.
2. it would help other libraries that don’t have a dedicated me to write programs that will collect statistics.  there is another app out there called libstats that does something similar, but not on the individual librarian scale.  i was even considering merging libstats with my app (of course i will need to speak to the owner of said project before actually doing anything of the kind).

All of this got me thinking about what services I should use to share the development of the app.  There are quite a few tools out there that can help me do this.  I’m actually considering doing an environmental scan of the different tools that can be used to develop apps via the cloud.  Maybe look at some of the big open source projects to see what they use while also keeping an eye out for how smaller projects do the same thing.  And just for clarifications sake, I’m not just talking about using AWS or Google App Engine to write the program.  I’m talking about BaseCamp, Google Code, github, etc.; you know, the tools that help you develop the app and organize the project.

The idea I have isn’t just born from my head (I’m not that smart).  I was reading The Tower and the Cloud and in it Ira H. Fuchs talks about the “Challenges and Opportunities of Open Source in Higher Education“.  It seems to me that the inclusion of this article in the book says that the cloud isn’t about just servers without actual hardware, but that its also about how we work together to use the different services available to build open source applications for higher education.

I’ll be sure to share more as I find time to review all the different tools out there.  Maybe one day I’ll have a “How to Develop your App in the Cloud” seminar or something (to go along with my fellowship).

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1. GD Library — By default the GD library’s aren’t part of the PHP package in Server 10.5.  I was poking around in this Step by Step Installation guide trying to upgrade my PHP library on my server.  Turns out I didn’t need to for various reasons (also the package recommended screwed with my Apache).  So instead i went into my php.ini file and uncommented the line:
   

   extension=php_gd2.dll

   This turned on the GD Library and Moodle looks much better now.

2. MySQL — I was getting a weird error in Moodle under Admin > Server > Environment.
   

   It is required that you store all your data in Unicode format (UTF-8). New installations must be performed into databases that have their default character set as Unicode. If you are upgrading, you should perform the UTF-8 migration process (see the Admin page).

   I thought that was a bit weird cause I installed the database from scratch. But sometimes you just need to do what it tells you to. So I ran the following query:

   alter database moodle collate = utf8_unicode_ci;

   And voila the error went away.

So now my Moodle is a bit happier.  I am of course (like always) recording this so that when I get my new server and I run into these problems again, I can remember what the heck I did.

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Which was good because I found a great thing buried at the bottom: Getting Started with the Google Data PHP Client Library.  Fun!  Ok for me maybe.  I like lists and I like videos.  This minimizes my brain function and leads me to learn things quickly (which I then forget quickly).  We’re talking about moving to Google here at Wheaton for email and calendaring, so hopefully when we do I will remember these lovely PHP libraries and be able to have tons-o-fun with Google APIs.

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First thing I ran into was that the file was too big. I adjusted my php.ini settings for the filesize (restarted apache) and that did nothing but give me a new error message with a lower limit than before (!). So then I asked my friend Google about the error message and he told me about the instructions on Asher Bond’s Blog.

So yay, now I can import the blog. Nope, that would be too easy. Every time I went to upload it, the process timed out. Luckily I remember seeing something in the php.ini file that set the processing time:

max_execution_time = 600 ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 600 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data

And yes I really did need it that high, the blog is 3 years of (just about) daily podcasts.

Also for those that have never done it, WordPress will actually go out and fetch the files from the old blog and move them into the new blog. This is wonderful, and whomever at WordPress thought this up should be given a medal.

So anyway, I record all of this here in hopes that one day others will have the same problem and run across this post (or I run into the problem and need to know what the heck I did to fix it).

Next on the list: converting the podcasts from the defunct PodPress plugin to a plugin that’s useful. Options are: PowerPress and Podcasting. Leaning toward Powerpress because they are a company.

After that: LDAP and WordPress integration possibly using the wpdirauth plugin. I have to say I’m quite surprised that there aren’t more ldap plugins out there.

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