A developer friendly wrapper around Fractal

Fractal is an amazing package to transform data before using it in an API. Unfortunately working with Fractal can be a bit verbose. That's why we created a wrapper called Fractalistic around it, that makes working with Fractal a bit more developer friendly. It's framework agnostic so you can use it in any PHP project.

Using the vanilla Fractal package data can be transformed like this:

use League\Fractal\Manager;
use League\Fractal\Resource\Collection;

$books = [
   ['id'=>1, 'title'=>'Hogfather', 'characters' => [...]], 
   ['id'=>2, 'title'=>'Game Of Kill Everyone', 'characters' => [...]]
];

$manager = new Manager();

$resource = new Collection($books, new BookTransformer());

$manager->parseIncludes('characters');

$manager->createData($resource)->toArray();

Our Fractalistic wrapper package makes that process a tad easier:

Fractal::create()
   ->collection($books)
   ->transformWith(new BookTransformer())
   ->includeCharacters()
   ->toArray();

There's also a very short syntax available to quickly transform data:

Fractal::create($books, new BookTransformer())->toArray();

If you want to use this package inside Laravel, it's recommend to use laravel-fractal instead. That package contains a few more bells and whistles specifically targetted at Laravel users.

To learn all the options Fractalistic has to offer, head over to the readme on GitHub. If you like it, take a look at our previous open source work as well. There's a list of framework agnostic packages we made on our company site.

Read more

How to automate projects using composer scripts

On the Master Zend Framework blog Matthew Setter explains the scripts section of composer.json.

The scripts section of composer.json allows you to set up a range of commands which relate to your project, commands which call command-line executables and PHP callbacks.

The commands can be named as you see fit, such as test, clean, deploy and so on. Or they can use the names of events which Composer fires during its execution process, such as post-root-package-install, pre-install-cmd, and post-package-update.

In today’s tutorial, I’m going to take you through examples which highlight both approaches

http://www.masterzendframework.com/series/tooling/composer/automation-scripts/

Read more

Join 9,500+ smart developers

Get my monthly newsletter with what I learn from running Spatie, building Oh Dear, and maintaining 300+ open source packages. Practical takes on Laravel, PHP, and AI that you can actually use.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.

A package to fluently generate schema.org markup original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Schema.org is a vocabulary of microdata markup that aims to make it easer for search crawlers to understand what's on a webpage. The vocabulary is very extensive: here's the official list of things that can be described with Schema.org. This article on Tutsplus explains schema.org and structured…

Read more

The delicious evils of PHP

In a post on Sitepoint Christopher Pitt demonstrates some cool usages of eval and exec.

I want to look at two PHP functions: eval and exec. They’re so often thrown under the sensible-developers-never-use-these bus that I sometimes wonder how many awesome applications we miss out on.

Like every other function in the standard library, these have their uses. They can be abused. Their danger lies in the amount of flexibility and power they offer even the most novice of developers.

Let me show you some of the ways I’ve seen these used, and then we can talk about safety precautions and moderation.

https://www.sitepoint.com/the-delicious-evils-of-php/

Read more

Upgrading to PHP 7.1 is easy original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

PHP 7.1 was released last week. It has many nice new features. If you're anything like me, you want to use the latest version right way. Upgrading to PHP 7.1 is not that difficult. Personally I use homebrew. The steps required to upgrade from 7.0 are laughably simple. Just issue this command in your…

Read more

Improving the performance of our PHP based crawler original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Today a new major version of our homegrown crawler was released. The crawler is used to power our http-status-check, laravel-sitemap and laravel-link-checker packages. A new major feature is the greatly improved crawling speed. This was accomplished by leveraging multiple concurrent requests. Let's…

Read more

Some request filtering macros

In a gist on GitHub Adam Wathan shares some macros that can be used to clean up a request.

Allows you to trim things, lowercase things, whatever you want. Pass a callable or array of callables that each expect a single argument:
Request::macro('filter', function ($key, $filters) {
    return collect($filters)->reduce(function ($filtered, $filter) {
        return $filter($filtered);
    }, $this->input($key));
});

https://gist.github.com/adamwathan/610a9818382900daac6d6ecdf75a109b

If you want to hear Adam talk some more about troubles with requests (generated by webforms) and possible solutions, listen to this episode of the Full Stack Radio Podcast.

Read more

No Time for a Taxicab

Gary Hockin posted a video with his attempt in solving the Day 1 challenge of http://adventofcode.com/. The video not only shows how he solved the problem codewise but also demonstrates some nice features of PHPStorm.

Mistakes and all, I attempt to code day 1 part 1 of the Advent of Code challenges you can find at http://adventofcode.com.

I deliberately didn't overly edit, or over complicate the video as I'm trying to get them done as fast as possible, if you like this I'll do some more!

I know some people will say "Waaa you should have done it like this!", or "Why didn't you use library $x", well I didn't so get over it. I'm also worried this gives away far too much about my coding quality and how lazy I am, but such is life.

Read more

How I refactor to collections

Christopher Rumpel posted some good practical examples on how to refactor common loops to collections.

Refactoring to Collections is a great book by Adam Wathan where he demonstrates, how you can avoid loops by using collections. It sounds great from the beginning, but you need to practice it, in order to be able to use it in your own projects. This is why I refactored some of my older projects. I want to share these examples today with you.

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2016/11/How-I-refactor-to-collections/

Read more

Clean up your Vue modules with ES6 Arrow Functions

On the .dev blog Jacob Bennett shared some nice refactorings using arrow functions.

Recently when refactoring a Vue 1.0 application, I utilized ES6 arrow functions to clean up the code and make things a bit more consistent before updating to Vue 2.0. Along the way I made a few mistakes and wanted to share the lessons I learned as well as offer a few conventions that I will be using in my Vue applications moving forward.

https://dotdev.co/clean-up-your-vue-modules-with-es6-arrow-functions-2ef65e348d41

Read more

What's new in PHP 7.1

With PHP 7.1 scheduled to be released next week, it's probably a good idea to go over the new features is offers.

The newest version of PHP – 7.1.0 – is already at RC6 (Release Candidate 6) status, which means it will be out soon. After a huge update that took PHP from 5.6 straight to 7.0 increasing speeds considerably, PHP is now focusing on core language features that will help all of us write better code. In this article I’ll take a look at the major additions and features of PHP 7.1.0 which is just around the bend.

https://kinsta.com/blog/php-7-1-0/

Read more

murze.be is two years old original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

I'm happy to share that this blog now celebrates its second anniversary. Two years ago I started murze.be to share my bookmarks and interesting links I found with other developers. Along the way I started to write some articles of my own, mainly introductory posts to the now 100+ packages my team…

Read more

An uptime and ssl certificate monitor written in PHP original

by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

Today we released our newest package: spatie/laravel-uptime-monitor. It's a powerful, easy to configure uptime monitor. It's written in PHP and distributed as a Laravel package. It will notify you when your site is down (and when it comes back up). You can also be notified a few days before an SSL…

Read more

PHP 7 is gaining ground fast

Jordi Boggiano shared some new stats on PHP version usage he collects via Packagist.

A few observations: 5.3 and 5.4 at this point are gone as far as I am concerned! 5.5 still has a good presence but lost 12% in 6 months which is awesome. 5.6 basically stayed stable as I suspect people jumped from 5.5 to 7 directly probably when upgrading Ubuntu LTS. 7.0 gained 15% and is now close to being the most deployed version, 1 year after release! That should definitely encourage more libraries to require it IMO, and I hope it is good encouragement to PHP internals folks as well to see that people actually upgrade these days :)

It's very cool that PHP 7 is being adopted so quickly. I suspected that it would go down this way. Unfortunately the majority of package creators are still targeting PHP 5. Jordi has this to say on that.

As I wrote in the last update: I would like to encourage everyone to be a bit more aggressive in bumping PHP requirements when tagging new major releases of their libs. Don't forget that the old code does not go away, it's still there to be used by people using legacy PHP versions.

Amen!

Read Jordi's blogpost here: https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2016-2-edition

Read more

An unofficial Forge API

You might not know this but Forge already has an API, it's just not a documented and feature complete one. Open up your dev tools and inspect the web requests being sent while you do various stuff on Forge.

Marcel Pociot published a new package called Blacksmith (great name Marcel) that can make calls to that API. Here are a few code examples taken from the readme:

$activeServers = $blacksmith->getActiveServers();

$server = $blacksmith->getServer(1);

$sites = $server->getSites();

$newSite = $server->addSite($site_name, $project_type = 'php', $directory = '/public', $wildcards = false);

$jobs = $server->getScheduledJobs();

$newJob = $server->addScheduledJob($command, $user = 'forge', $frequency = 'minutely');

Very cool stuff. Because the Forge API doesn't include a method to login, the package will under the hood just submit a filled in login form.

An official API for Forge has been on my wishlist for quite some time. Because Forge's code base already includes an API my guess is that it wouldn't be too work to grow it in to a full, publicly available one. Though I surely cannot read Taylors mind, I think that if there were some more indications that a Forge API would be used by enough people, there's a higher chance that an official API would be built. I think the only reason why the API hasn't been built yet is because not enough people are asking for it. It makes sense for Taylor to only work on things that would actually be used. So if you are using Forge and do want an official API go ahead and star the BlackSmith package on GitHub and make some noise about it.

Read more

A full web request may be faster than a SPA

At this years Chrome Dev Summit Jake Archibald gave an excellent talk on some new features that are coming to the service worker. In case you don't know, a service worker is a piece of JavaScript that sits between the network request sent by the JavaScript in your browser and the browser itself. A common use case for a service is to display a custom page when there is no internet connection available instead of showing the default error message in your browser. And of course you can use a service worker to have a high degree of control on how things are cached.

I really like Jake's presentation style in general. He always injects a lot of humour. This time he's presenting in a tuxedo, with no shoes on and he uses a Wii Controller to control his slides. Go Jake!

A very interesting part of the talk is when he touches on the time needed to display a page. Turns out a full web request can be a faster than a fancy single page application. Watch that segment on YouTube by clicking here.

Or you can choose to just watch the whole presentation in the video below.

Read more

Let’s talk about phone numbers on mobile sites

Wes Bos shares a quick tip to make phone numbers on websites tappable.

I’m talking about when phone numbers on a website aren’t tapable. Often the HTML is so that mobile operating systems cannot select the phone number alone and you are forced to remember/recite or write down the actual number.

So, when you put a phone number on a website, don’t just use any old element, use a link with the tel protocol.

http://wesbos.com/lets-talk-about-phone-numbers-on-mobile-sites/

Read more