cPanel Blog

 With version 11.28 of cPanel & WHM making it's way into the production update tiers, now is a great time to discuss your application testing strategies. It's every developer's responsibility to test and verify their applications within their actual deployment environments. cPanel & WHM is a constantly evolving product. With each new version we aim to improve not only the end user experience, but also its suitability as a platform for your applications. We work hard to maintain a stable and consistent application platform, but sometimes changes for the better will require an additional effort from developers. We want to ensure that those changes happen before our customers and your end users notice a problem.

Have you heard of a development license? cPanel offers a product license especially for cPanel & WHM application developers. You don't have to sign your life away or give up your trade secrets to qualify. We really just want you to work to extend the functionality of cPanel & WHM to meet your needs. One of the great things about the development license is that it allows you to have multiple environments to test your application. The only cost to you is in the hardware and connectivity. There are limitations of course, but they are very reasonable. You cannot use a development license to host paid accounts. There's also a small banner displaying that the server is running a development license in the cPanel & WHM interfaces. To apply for this license visit the Developer’s License Application page and answer a few simple questions. Once we have ensured the validity of your request, we will gladly provide you with a development license.

When testing your application, you should verify it against both production and development versions of cPanel & WHM. If you are unfamiliar with how the product is published then visit our page describing the cPanel & WHM versions and release process. In short, our EDGE releases represent the "cutting edge" version of the product and STABLE releases are our long-term support releases. If you notice a problem in any version then please contact us through oursupport system. We give developers high priority here at cPanel, and we will try to resolve your issue or answer your question as quickly as possible.

Developing and testing against both development and production releases will help ensure that your application will continue to work as you expect it for all your users.

This past week, we have been working to improve livePHP. For those of you not familiar with livePHP, it is a PHP class that allows access to the cPanel & WHM API1 and API2 system within an object-oriented PHP environment.

We improved the backend of the livePHP system to use JSON for socket communication, which utilizes PHP’s native JSON internally. Our testing shows that this is a great deal faster (3X) than the previous XML-based serialization with custom PHP parsing functions.

Our intent has been to maintain compatibility with the legacy interface provided by the cpanel.php class. However when changes of this nature are made, there is always a possibility of conflict. If you have an application, either for your internal use or public distribution, then we would love to get feedback on how this change has improved your product. We recommend that you submit a support request directly to us, so that we can help coordinate your testing. Please reference this article so that we can ensure your request gets the priority it deserves.

It should be noted that this is not available in public builds yet, so a ticket will need to be opened in order to coordinate your testing.