Category: Web Development

Any general web development topics are covered here, ranging from ecommerce web stores, search engine optimisation or store optimization to framework discussion.

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Accessing the Xero API for Public Applications in Java

In this post I’ll quickly run through accessing the Xero API using Java and the super simple, elegant Scribe library. There’s a support page dedicated to Java + Xero API but I found it a bit light on help for those setting up a public application for the first time in Java, so the below steps should help others wanting to get up and running. For the actual access to Xero we’ll be using Ross Jourdain’s excellent Xero library, which handles mapping the XML into Java objects for you. I’ve made a couple of tweaks to it to support App Engine, and Scribe. I have also set up a XeroApi and XeroExample in the Srcibe format, for use with the library.

The other reason you might like these instructions rather than the default, is that we run our apps on Google App Engine for Java and so we had to make a few changes to the way we access Xero in order to meet the GAE requirements. The Scribe library supports GAE out of the box.

Why am I mucking about with the Xero API, anyway? We’re working on an app that connects Xero with Amazon for merchants to import accounting data automatically. I’m not quite ready to tell the world about it, but if you’re interested in trying it, get in touch.

Let’s get started with the Xero API, a public application, and Java!

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Thoughts on Auckland Startup Weekend 2013

This past weekend I entered the Auckland Startup Weekend. It was an excellent experience and I wanted to share it here, because if you have an opportunity to do a start-up weekend, in Auckland or anywhere else, you should – you will not regret it.

The whole event would make an interesting social experiment, as complete strangers are thrust together around a half-baked idea and given 50-something hours to turn it into a pitch-able, feasible business. I’m going to share my experience of the weekend here, so if you’re interested in what a Startup Weekend is like, and what happens, read on…

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Actually running Magento on Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk Cloud platform

In my previous post I weighed up the benefits and limitations of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk hosting environment for Magento and took a very vague look at the costs. In this post I will run through the actual setup of a very basic Magento install ‘in the cloud‘ and the process of deploying changes. The goal for this initial setup is to keep everything bone stock as possible, we want minimal maintenance effort and an automated environment.

If we have some time at the end, we’ll do some stress testing of the platform to see how it handles customers. Benchmarks will have to wait, stay tuned.

The Tools

For this tutorial we’ll be working in a linux environment. I used a small EC2 server with the AWS default Linux AMI as the setup box, it’s nice and fast being on the same network as the Beanstalk platform. Make sure you have the following installed.

  • AWS EB tools, and the getting started guide
  • git, sudo yum install git
  • ruby, sudo yum install ruby
  • python 2.7, sudo yum install python27 – this one is a bit of a pain on the AWS default Linux AMI, you’ll need to hack in explicit use of the 2.7 binary in the AWS scripts. Or, heaven forbid, set it up properly and compile from source…

Once you have those in place, you should be ready to get Magento and the Beanstalk environment setup.
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Magento and AWS Elastic Beanstalk – The Scalability Silver Bullet?

In this post I’m going to introduce Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk PHP environment as a platform for Magento. In particular I’ll cover the mechanics and economics of hosting Magento, along with it’s benefits and limitations as a platform. The goal here is to create an auto-pilot environment providing high availability and scalability.

But first, the background. With World Wide Access, we’ve always run our own EC2 instances, ELBs, database servers and memcached. We scale up the instance sizes or counts manually when required. When we started using AWS (in 2008) Elastic Beanstalk was not yet on the scene so we had no choice but to do it that way. But now we do have a choice and, thanks to some downtime in the last week, I’m prompted to gather some thoughts on a migration to a fully auto-pilot set-up. This post is my notes on Elastic Beanstalk and Magento with git for deployment. I’ll add a more detailed setup guide and some benchmarks in a future post – this one will be a bit more abstract, so go make yourself a cuppa.

About the Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk

Beanstalk brings together various parts of Amazon’s infrastructure: AWS servers, scaling, load balancing and high availability, to give your applications an automated environment to run in with flexible server sizes and instance counts that make growing easy. You can do all the things Elastic Beanstalk does, by combining the separate parts yourself, but this is much easier, trust me.
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Setting up PHP 5.4 with CGI on OSX Mountain Lion with Homebrew

I’ve been a long time MAMP user, but I recently upgraded my laptop and decided to do a fresh install of everything, and a ground up re-configuration of all my dev environments (a fair bit of mucking about with PHP, Ruby, Java, Python and trying Go).

After a short while researching it became clear the best tool for the job would be Homebrew – it gives you much more control of the environment than MAMP, without the Macports heartache.

In this post I’ll run through using Homebrew on OSX Mountain Lion for a Mysql+PHP CGI setup – I’ll document adding a webserver to this stack in a later post, my immediate need is for a PHP CGI environment.

Setup Homebrew

Before you do any of this, go grab Xcode from the App Store. Hope you’re not on a 3G internet connection, it’s a 1.6GB install! Go grab a coffee while you wait. After that’s installed you’re also going to need to go to Xcode > Preferences and install the command-line tools, another 100+ MB install.

The Homebrew install from their own site is just:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)"

Setup PHP

Homebrew uses the tap command to import more sources for install scripts. See what they did there? I use the homebrew-php project, seems awesome – loads of support, docs and info on the project page, all going to plan you’ll just need these two commands below.

brew tap josegonzalez/homebrew-php
brew tap homebrew/dupes

You can review all the options with the brew options php54 command, if you want mysql and CGI, use the command below that I used.

brew install --with-mysql --with-cgi php54

It’ll run through a bunch of downloading/compiling steps but the end result should be that you get the following test output:

/usr/local/bin/php-cgi --version
PHP 5.4.12 (cgi-fcgi) (built: Mar 19 2013 14:39:37)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies

Setup MySQL

It’s super easy, watch.

brew install mysql

Then just follow the instructions that get blurted out during the Homebrew install of mysql.

Slight catch is, if your OSX is anything like mine you’ll need to run this first:

mkdir -p /usr/local/var/mysql
unset TMPDIR
mysql_install_db --verbose --user=`whoami` --basedir="$(brew --prefix mysql)" --datadir=/usr/local/var/mysql --tmpdir=/tmp

I also got this warning:
WARNING: Found existing config file /usr/local/opt/mysql/my.cnf on the system. which you can safely fix with:

#backup existing
mv /usr/local/opt/mysql/my.cnf /usr/local/opt/mysql/my.cnf.old
#move new
mv /usr/local/opt/mysql/my-new.cnf /usr/local/opt/mysql/my.cnf

There’s also a lot of good advice for securing your mysql install blurted out during the install process, ignore it at your peril. Test your handiwork by checking you can access the mysql commandline prompt:

mysql -uroot
# or, with the password you set. You set one, right?
mysql -uroot -p

Other Notes

I noticed that the Homebrew installed PHP didn’t seem to support $_ENV in scripts, instead the $_SERVER array seems to be used – the Macports PHP with CGI support did seem to work with $_ENV. It might be a subtle version difference, I’m actually not sure, and decided not to spend time trying to figure it out. Just update scripts that depend on $_ENV, to use $_SERVER. If someone knows what’s behind this, please share.

So, that should be it, PHP with CGI support and MySQL installed and ready to rock. If I missed anything let me know.