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Patchwork is a PHP library that allows you to change user defined functions at runtime. This can be incredibly handy when testing. I'm by no means a Ruby expert but I heard that in the Ruby world they do this kind of stuff all the time during testing.

Here's a simple example of what Patchwork can do:

function myCounter($array)
{
    return count($array);
}

myCounter([1, 2]); // returns '2';

//now let's change the function
Patchwork\redefine('myCounter', function($array)
{
    return count($array) ? 'a lot of items' : 'empty';
});

myCounter([1, 2]); // returns 'a lot of items";

Read the implementation docs to learn how this works behind the scenes.

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Lorna Jane Mitchell explains on her blog which options you have when you see "lock file out of date" warning.

The `composer.lock` also includes a hash of the current `composer.json` when it updates, so you can always tell if you've added a requirement to the `composer.json` file and forgotten to install it.

In that case, you'll see an error message like:

Warning: The lock file is not up to date with the latest changes in composer.json. You may be getting outdated dependencies. Run update to update them.

You now have three options: upgrade everything, figure it out, or do nothing.

http://www.lornajane.net/posts/2016/handling-composer-lock-file-out-of-date-warning

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Matthias Noback continues his highly interesting series of posts with programming guidelines. Part four is about messages.

Besides having a type and a particular value, messages can also be categorized:

• A command message is a request for change. One object wants to make the other object do something.
• A query message is a request for information. One object wants to get something from the other object.
• A document message is the response from the other object, based on the query that was sent to it.

https://www.ibuildings.nl/blog/2016/02/programming-guidelines-part-4-messages

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Michael Dyrynda wrote up a follow up on my homestead tips blog post:

Now that you've setup `dnsmasq`, you can resolve `*.dev` to your Homestead machine easily, but you still need that manual step of either configuring a new domain in your `Homestead.yaml` file or using the `serve`command within the virtual machine itself.

Whilst neither of these methods take a particularly long time to complete, it's still a few seconds of repetition that can be avoided with some tweaking of your default nginx configuration using wildcard hosts.

What we'll be doing, is telling nginx to listen for anything sent to it that isn't explicitly configured and look for the domain name in your (default) /home/vagrant/Code directory.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/dead-simple-domain-mapping-in-laravel-homestead

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Derick Bailey on his blog:

JavaScript practically requires callback functions to do anything asynchronous. Unless you’re talking about generators, you really can’t get away from them. Callbacks are everywhere.

...

I do use different names for the callback parameter, depending on the circumstance. I believe naming is important as it provides a set of expectations. If your code breaks the expectations of the name, people will be confused and it will cause problems.

http://derickbailey.com/2016/02/15/what-do-you-name-the-callback-function/

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Tim Bezhashvyly recently wrote an article in which he explains an interesting approach to make sure all items in array are of a certain type. It leverages variadic functions which were introduced in PHP 5.6

Consider this piece of code (borrowed from Tim's post):

function foo (Product ...$products )
{
/* ... */
}

In PHP 7 you can even using the scalar types, such as string and int, to make sure all elements are of that type.

Read Tim's full article here: https://thephp.cc/news/2016/02/typed-arrays-in-php

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Thys Feryn, one of the organisers of the PHPBenelux conference, wrote a lengthy article about what it takes to organize a big conference.

The PHPBenelux Conference edition 2016 took place last week in Antwerpen (Belgium). As an organizer, I’m really happy with the end result. I like to think that our attendees, speakers and sponsors also enjoyed it. It’s the 7th time we organize the PHPBenelux Conference and every year we try to introduce something new. Although the 7 years of experience and the well-organized crew have made it a lot easier to organize, it’s still a lot of work.

This post gives you a behind the scenes look at what it takes to organize the PHPBenelux Conference. It will reflect our passion, our strengths and our weaknesses.

https://blog.feryn.eu/making-the-phpbenelux-conference-happen/

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Matthias Noback posted the third part of his "programming guidelines series".

In this article we'll zoom out a bit and look at how to properly organize the lifecycle of our objects, from creating them to changing them, letting them pass away and bringing them back from the dead.

https://www.ibuildings.nl/blog/2016/02/programming-guidelines-part-3-the-life-and-death-objects

 

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Philip Brown on his blog:

Almost every type of application will require scheduled jobs in one form or another. This could be automated emails, generated reports, or periodic notifications to your users.

Cron Jobs are a simple way to trigger these types of processes on a given schedule. But setting up Cron Jobs in a world of ephemeral servers is not so straight forward.

In today’s tutorial we’re going to be looking at setting up Cron jobs on AWS’ Elastic Beanstalk.

http://culttt.com/2016/02/08/setting-up-and-using-cron-jobs-with-laravel-and-aws-elastic-beanstalk/

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For various reasons we recently switched from using Laravel Elixir to Webpack. My colleague Sebastian was in charge of this migration. He shares his experiences in the very first post on his new blog.

Over the past few weeks I've been migrating our asset pipeline at Spatie from Laravel Elixir (a gulp wrapper) to webpack. Between having endless possibilities, the occasional incomplete section in the docs, and the fact that everyone has slightly different needs for their asset pipeline (which makes examples hard), it has surely been an adventure. I'm going to do a quick summary of my goals, and how I achieved them with webpack. Hopefully there will be some useful snippets in here for when you're setting up your own webpack configuration.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2016/adventure-time-with-webpack

If want to read a more introductory article on the subject check out this post by Samantha Geitz.

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A few days ago Toon Verwerft gave an uncon talk at PHP Benelux Conference about a new code quality checking tool he has been developing. It's called GrumPHP. It can automatically perform various code quality checks when you try to commit some code.

Sick and tired of defending code quality over and over again? GrumPHP will do it for you! This composer plugin will register some git hooks in your package repository. When somebody commits changes, GrumPHP will run some tests on the committed code. If the tests fail, you won't be able to commit your changes. This handy tool will not only improve your codebase, it will also teach your co-workers to write better code following the best practices you've determined as a team.

https://github.com/phpro/grumphp

The slides of Toon's talk can be found on speakerdeck.

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At the PHP Benelux conference James Titcumb did a presentation on the BetterReflection library he's working on. You can view the slides of his presentation on SlideShare.

The BetterReflection library has a few advantages over PHP's native reflection capabilities (copied from the docs):

• you can reflect on classes that are not already loaded, without loading them
• ability to reflect on classes directly from a string of PHP code
• better Reflection analyses the DocBlocks (using phpdocumentor/type-resolver)
• reflecting directly on closures

When this pull request will get merged the library even makes it possible to monkey patch classes. Let's take a look how you would do that.

Consider this class:

class MonkeyPatchMe
{
    function getMessage() : string
    {
        return 'hello everybody';
    }
}

The body of the getMessage-function can be replaced using this code:

$classInfo = ReflectionClass::createFromName('MonkeyPatchMe');

$methodInfo = $classInfo->getMethod('getMessage');

$methodInfo->setBody(function() {
   return 'bye everybody';
});

$monkeyPatchedClass = new MonkeyPatchMe();
$monkeyPatchedClass->getMessage() // returns 'bye everybody'

Behind the scenes this voodoo works by copying the original class to another file, doing a replacement of the function body there and loading up that class.

I'll be keeping my eye on how the BetterReflection library evolves. You can read all about it's current functionality in the docs on GitHub.

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Matthias Noback published the second article in his programming guidelines series. This time he explains why using null in a function isn't a good idea. In my opinion it's great advice that most devs can immediately apply in their projects.

It's certainly a good idea to get rid of the uncertainty and vagueness that null brings to your code. Besides, most of the time when you encounter an actual null value in your program, you probably weren't expecting it. You just call a method on it, thinking that it is an object and PHP will rightfully let your program crash.

...

Every particular null situation requires a different solution, but at least I'll list several common solutions for you.

https://www.ibuildings.nl/blog/2016/01/programming-guidelines-php-developers-part-2-getting-rid-null

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Yesterday our local user group, PHP Antwerp, held it's third meetup. There were two excellent speakers and a bunch of familiar faces.

First up was Gabriel Somoza who talked about his project Baleen. It's goal is to provide an intuitive framework to migrate almost anything. You can view his slides on Speakerdeck.

The second speaker was Marco Pivetta, better known on the interwebs as Ocramius. He is a member of the Doctrine core team. His talk was about best practices when using Doctrine. His slides can be found on GitHub. Here's the video of the talk:

https://youtu.be/j4nS_dGxxs8?t=6m44s

Spatie, of which I'm a partner, sponsored the meetup. Before Marco's talk I got the opportunity to talk a bit myself about why my company is sponsoring the local user group. My short talk can be viewed on YouTube.

The organisers announced that the next meetup will be held at the end of March. If you're living in the vicinity of Antwerp, you should definitely attend.

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Jack McDade, who designed the laravel.com and laracasts.com sites, shares some tips on how to make composer and npm much faster.

Whenever I run `composer install` or `npm install` I feel like an old man yelling at young punks to get off my lawn. Especially ever since `npm3`. I’ll save you the bitter diatribe and just get to the solution. But first, the problem.

Creating, distributing, maintaining, and consuming third-party dependencies was supposed to make us more productive and our lives easier. Instead, I feel like I spend more time waiting than coding.

So I dug and dug until I found solutions, as one does, and now I’m sharing them with you.

http://jackmcdade.com/blog/tired-of-waiting

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This Friday the PHP Benelux Conference will kick off. It has an excellent line up and I'll probably blog about the sessions I will see there.

Last year the keynote of the conference was given by Yitzchok Willroth aka Coderabbi. He emphasizes on the power of the community. It was a great talk, I even dare to use the word "inspirational". In the weeks and months after his talk numerous PHP user groups were formed in my home country, Belgium. I believe this was no coincidence.

A few days ago a video of this talk (given at another conference) was published. You can watch it below.

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Adam Wathan posted another excellent article on testing on his blog. This time he talks about creating test doubles. Adam demonstrates that creating your own fake can result in a much more readable test than using mocks or spies.

You'll learn to create an InMemoryMailer like this:

public function test_new_users_are_sent_a_welcome_email()
{
    $mailer = new InMemoryMailer;
    Mail::swap($mailer);

    $this->post('register', [
        'name' => 'John Doe',
        'email' => 'john@example.com',
        'password' => 'secret',
    ]);

    $this->assertTrue($mailer->hasMessageFor('john@example.com'));
    $this->assertTrue($mailer->hasMessageWithSubject('Welcome to my app!'));
}

That seems like a pretty readable test to me. Read (or view) the whole tutorial here: http://adamwathan.me/2016/01/25/writing-your-own-test-doubles/

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I know what you’re thinking. WAT?! Didn’t Gulp just kill Grunt? Why can’t we just be content for a few minutes here in JavaScript land? I hear ya, but… I’ve found Gulp and Grunt to be unnecessary abstractions. npm scripts are plenty powerful and often easier to live with.

https://medium.com/@housecor/why-i-left-gulp-and-grunt-for-npm-scripts-3d6853dd22b8

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