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• How to write unit tests for your plugin – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  17 novembre 2014, par Thomas Steur — Development

  This is the next post of our blog series where we introduce the capabilities of the Piwik platform (our previous post was How to verify user permissions). This time you’ll learn how to write unit tests in Piwik. For this tutorial you will need to have basic knowledge of PHP, PHPUnit and the Piwik platform.

  When is a test a unit test ?

  There are many different opinions on this and it can be sometimes hard to decide. At Piwik we consider a test as a unit test if only a single method or class is being tested and if a test does not have a dependency to the filesystem, web, config, database or to any other plugin.

  If a test is slow it can be an indicator that it is not a unit test. “Slow” is of course a bit vague. We will cover how to write other type of tests, such as integration tests, in one of our next blog posts.

  Getting started

  In this post, we assume that you have already installed Piwik 2.9.0 or later via git, set up your development environment and created a plugin. If not, visit the Piwik Developer Zone where you’ll find the tutorial Setting up Piwik and other Guides that help you to develop a plugin.

  Let’s create a unit test

  We start by using the Piwik Console to create a new unit test :

  ./console generate:test --testtype unit

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the created test should belong to. I will use the plugin name “Insights”. Next it will ask you for the name of the test. Here you usually enter the name of the class you want to test. I will use “Widgets” in this example. There should now be a file plugins/Insights/tests/Unit/WidgetsTest.php which contains already an example to get you started easily :

  /**
   * @group Insights
   * @group WidgetsTest
   * @group Plugins
   */
  class WidgetsTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
  {
   
      public function testSimpleAddition()
      {
          $this->assertEquals(2, 1+1);
      }
   
  }
  Télécharger

  We don’t want to cover how you should write your unit test. This is totally up to you. If you have no experience in writing unit tests yet, we recommend to read articles on the topic, or a book, or to watch videos or anything else that will help you learn best.

  Running a test

  To run a test we will use the command tests:run which allows you to execute a test suite, a specific file or a group of tests.

  To verify whether the created test works we will run it as follows :

  ./console tests:run WidgetsTest

  This will run all tests having the group WidgetsTest. As other tests can use the same group you might want to pass the path to your test file instead :

  ./console tests:run plugins/Insights/tests/Unit/Widgets.php

  If you want to run all tests within your plugin pass the name of your plugin as an argument :

  ./console tests:run insights

  Of course you can also define multiple arguments :

  ./console tests:run insights WidgetsTest

  This will execute all tests within the insights plugin having the group WidgetsTest. If you only want to run unit tests within your plugin you can do the following :

  ./console tests:run insights unit

  Advanced features

  Isn’t it easy to create a unit test ? We never even created a file ! You can accomplish even more if you want : You can generate other type of tests, you can run tests on Amazon’s AWS and more. Unfortunately, not everything is documented yet so we recommend to discover more features by executing the commands ./console list tests and ./console help tests:run.

  If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.

• WebRTC books – a brief review

  1er janvier 2014, par silvia

  I just finished reading Rob Manson’s awesome book “Getting Started with WebRTC” and I can highly recommend it for any Web developer who is interested in WebRTC.

  Rob explains very clearly how to create your first video, audio or data peer-connection using WebRTC in current Google Chrome or Firefox (I think it also now applies to Opera, though that wasn’t the case when his book was published). He makes available example code, so you can replicate it in your own Web application easily, including the setup of a signalling server. He also points out that you need a ICE (STUN/TURN) server to punch through firewalls and gives recommendations for what software is available, but stops short of explaining how to set them up.

  Rob’s focus is very much on the features required in a typical Web application :

  • video calls
  • audio calls
  • text chats
  • file sharing

  In fact, he provides the most in-depth demo of how to set up a good file sharing interface I have come across.

  Rob then also extends his introduction to WebRTC to two key application areas : education and team communication. His recommendations are spot on and required reading for anyone developing applications in these spaces.

  —

  Before Rob’s book, I have also read Alan Johnson and Dan Burnett’s “WebRTC” book on APIs and RTCWEB protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web.

  Alan and Dan’s book was written more than a year ago and explains that state of standardisation at that time. It’s probably a little out-dated now, but it still gives you good foundations on why some decisions were made the way they are and what are contentious issues (some of which still remain). If you really want to understand what happens behind the scenes when you call certain functions in the WebRTC APIs of browsers, then this is for you.

  Alan and Dan’s book explains in more details than Rob’s book how IP addresses of communication partners are found, how firewall holepunching works, how sessions get negotiated, and how the standards process works. It’s probably less useful to a Web developer who just wants to implement video call functionality into their Web application, though if something goes wrong you may find yourself digging into the details of SDP, SRTP, DTLS, and other cryptic abbreviations of protocols that all need to work together to get a WebRTC call working.

  —

  Overall, both books are worthwhile and cover different aspects of WebRTC that you will stumble across if you are directly dealing with WebRTC code.

• Evolution of Multimedia Fiefdoms

  1er octobre 2014, par Multimedia Mike — General

  I want to examine how multimedia fiefdoms have risen and fallen through the years.

  
  
  

  Back in the day, the multimedia fiefdoms were built around the formats put forth by competing companies : there was Microsoft/WMV, Apple/MOV, and Real/RM as the big contenders. On2 always wanted to be a player in this arena but could never quite catch a break. A few brave contenders held the line for open source and also for the power users who desired one application that could handle everything (my original motivation for wanting to get into multimedia hacking).

  The computer desktop was the battleground for internet-based media stream. Whatever happened to those days ? Actually, if memory serves, Flash-based video streaming stepped on all of them.

  Over the last 6-7 years, the battleground has expanded to cover mobile devices, where Flash’s impact has… lessened. During this time, multimedia technology pretty well standardized on a particular stack, namely, the MPEG (MP4/H.264/AAC) stack.

  The belligerents in this war tried for years to effectively penetrate new territory, namely, the living room where the television lived. This had been slowgoing for years due to various user interface and content issues, but steadily improved.

  Last April, Amazon announced their entry into the set-top box market with the Fire TV. That was when it suddenly crystallized for me that the multimedia ecosystem has radically shifted. Now, the multimedia fiefdoms revolve around access to content via streaming services.

  Off the top of my head, here are some of the fiefdoms these days (fiefdoms I have experience using) :

  • Netflix (subscription streaming)
  • Amazon (subscription, rental, and purchased streaming)
  • Hulu Plus (subscription streaming)
  • Apple (rental and purchased media)

  I checked some results on Can I Stream.It ? (which I refer to often) and found a bunch more streaming fiefdoms such as Google (both Play and YouTube, which are separate services), Sony, Xbox 360, Crackle, Redbox Instant, Vudu, Target Ticket, Epix, Sony, SnagFilms, and XFINITY StreamPix. And surely, these are probably just services available in the United States ; I know other geographical regions have their own fiefdoms.

  What happened ?

  When I got into multimedia hacking, there were all these disparate, competing ecosystems. As a consumer, I didn’t care where the media came from, I just wanted to play it. That’s what inspired me to work on open source multimedia projects. Now I realize that I have the same problem 10-15 years later : there are multiple competing ecosystems. I might subscribe to fiefdoms X and Y, but am frustrated to learn that something I’d like to watch is only available through fiefdom Z. Very few of these fiefdoms can be penetrated using open source technology.

  I’m not really sure about the point about this whole post. Multimedia technology seems really standardized these days. But that’s probably just my perspective because I have spent way too long focusing on a few areas of multimedia technology such as audio and video coding. It’s interesting that all these services probably leverage the same limited number of codecs. Their differentiation comes from the catalog of content that each is able to license for streaming. There are different problems to solve in the multimedia arena now.