PHP 7 has been slated for release in November of this year (2015). It comes with a number of new features, changes, and backwards compatibility breakages that are outlined below.https://github.com/tpunt/PHP7-Reference
Developers and their employers are often at odds over matters like clean or beautiful code and with good reason: neither ships a product or increases sales. Most end users don’t care what the code looks like, as long as the product works and meets their needs. That means that beautiful code goes out the window when the rubber meets the road and crunch time sets in.http://www.brandonsavage.net/the-case-for-maintainable-code/The fact of the matter is that framing code discussions in terms of beauty or attractiveness doesn’t help the case for getting code that’s clean. But there’s another way to frame the discussion that makes more sense, and achieves both the goal of writing clean code and meets the needs of most businesses: the concept of maintainable code.
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There are many ways to modify the behavior of existing code with actually changing the core logic. Some patterns you might be familiar with are the decorator pattern or the observer pattern. Both allow you to take another object and modify the behavior by wrapping your modifications around the original code. One pattern you might not be familiar with though, is the interceptor pattern.http://www.edzynda.com/aspect-oriented-php-and-the-interceptor-pattern/The interceptor pattern is a core concept of what is called aspect oriented programming (AOP). AOP aims to improve the modularity of your code by allowing you to separate cross-cutting concerns from the rest of your code.
Alan Klein created a Laravel 5.1 package that leverages Nginx HTTP Pushstream module to broadcast events. The commenting platform Disqus uses that Nginx module to handle comments in realtime.
You can find Alan's package on GitHub: https://github.com/cmosguy/laravel-http-pushstream-broadcaster
Inspired by Edd Man's post on optional value control-flows I made a small Laravel package to optionally abort your application. The package provides a Spatie\OrAbort\OrAbort-trait that can be used on any class you want. All the methods of the class will gain orAbort-variant. When the original…
Edd Mann demonstrates a nice trait to add OrElse functionality to a class via a trait. With it you can do things like:
[code]
$cart = $repository->findByIdOrElse(1, new ShoppingCart); $cart = $repository->findByIdOrElse(1, function () { return new ShoppingCart; });
<a href="http://tech.mybuilder.com/optional-value-control-flows-in-php-using-traits-and-magic-methods/">http://tech.mybuilder.com/optional-value-control-flows-in-php-using-traits-and-magic-methods/</a>
When working on projects I found myself, over time, needing the same string functions over and over again. Things like how to shorten a string but still let it end on entire word, replace the last occurrence of string in a string, ...
Instead of keeping these functions in a helper file locally in the project, I made a package out of it. It was a good opportunity to spice it up with bit of OO to make them chainable. An example:
[code] // outputs "MIDDLE" echo string('StartMiddleEnd')->between('Start', 'End')->toUpper();
In addition to it's own methods, the package provides <a href="https://github.com/spatie/string#integration-with-underscorephp">an integration</a> with <a href="https://github.com/Anahkiasen/underscore-php">Maxime Fabre's underscore package</a>.
You are very welcome to submit pull requests to add functions that you feel are missing. Be sure to include some unit tests to ensure everything working as intended.
Granted, it isn't the most sexy package in the world, but it sure is handy.
<a href="https://github.com/spatie/string">https://github.com/spatie/string</a>
Laravel offers a nice way to add pagination. As far as your routes are concerned you don't have to do a thing. It just works out of the box. Unfortunately the generated url's are pretty ugly: http://example.com/news?page=2 What we want are url's that look like this: http://example.com/news/page/2…
...http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6136Interfaces are more susceptible to BC breaks than concrete classes. Once an interface is published as “stable”, I don’t see how it can be changed at all per the rules of SemVer (that is, unless you bump the major version). The only thing you can do to maintain BC is add an entirely new interface to the package while leaving the old one in place, perhaps even extending the old one if needed.
There was much discussion on Twitter about the concepts of using “final” and “private” in objects, and what exactly the best practices are. The conversation seemed to boil down to three distinct questions:http://www.brandonsavage.net/what-about-final-and-private/
- Should an object be open for extension, and expose its internals for that purpose?
- Does exposure of those internals create a de facto contract with children for their behavior?
- Should software only be used as intended by its designers, or should it be modified, extended and changed by the end user to fit certain, specific goals?
Active support for PHP 5.4 ended on September 14, 2014 and active support for PHP 5.5 will end on June 20, 2015. The active support for PHP 5.3 already ended on July 11, 2013. By the time PHPUnit 4.8 will be released, the only actively supported version of PHP will be PHP 5.6.https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/wiki/Release-Announcement-for-PHPUnit-4.7.0#phpunit-50The next version after PHPUnit 4.8 will not support PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4, and PHP 5.5 anymore. As PHPUnit follows Semantic Versioning the major version number must be incremented when the minimum required version of PHP is increased.
Nice!
Satis allows you to require private php packages in your projects. One of it's authors is Jordi Boggiano of composer/packagist fame. Over at the excellent Laravelista blog Mario Bašić explains how to install and use it.
I was working on three projects at the same time and I've found myself copying code from one project to another and then making small changes. And then I recognized a pattern. ...I created a package and as soon as it was ready for GitHub I remembered: "I can't open source this...". The package contained few paid html templates, company logo's, slogans, specific company text etc. ...
This post will explain what Satis is, when to use it and how to set it up on your server.
Nearly all greenfield projects at Spatie are built with Laravel. A few months ago I made laravel-analytics, a package to fetch data from Google Analytics.
Spatie exists for more than ten years so there are quite a few legacy projects as well. In those projects there is also a need to display some analytics data in the admin-section. Recently Google retired some of their older API's. Unfortunately our old solution to fetch GA data stopped working.
To resolve this problem my colleague Sebastian created a framework agnostic version of laravel-analytics that works with PHP 5.3. If you also have a legacy project that needs some data from Analytics, you can install the package via composer.
The past few months, I've been trying out some podcasts. Listening to them is an easy way to learn about and stay in touch with the sprawling range of topics that could interest a developer. These are my favourites:
Listen in iTunes Follow on Twitter
Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter
Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter
Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter
I'm sure there are many other great podcasts out there. If you know one, please let me (and the other readers of this blog) know in the comments below.
Q: What is the difference between these four promises?doSomething().then(function () { return doSomethingElse(); });doSomething().then(function () { doSomethingElse(); });
doSomething().then(doSomethingElse());
doSomething().then(doSomethingElse);
</div> If you know the answer, then congratulations: you're a promises ninja. You have my permission to stop reading this blog post.</blockquote> <a href="http://pouchdb.com/2015/05/18/we-have-a-problem-with-promises.html">http://pouchdb.com/2015/05/18/we-have-a-problem-with-promises.html</a>
Some unknown guy (ok, he is famous for writing the fantastic Flysystem) has written an insightful post on his new blog on how and why to render ReactJS templates on the server.
Rendering your templates server-side has some obvious benefits. Since the contents of the page is there in the initial response, there's less page build-up. This will give your application a more snappy feel to it. It also ensures your pages can be correctly indexed by search engines. An additional bonus is presented in the way that React handles your pre-rendered page.I'm looking forward to Frank's future posts.When React templates are rendered server side, a checksum is added. This hash is checked by the front-end ensuring the UI is in the correct state, and if so, that representation of the DOM is accepted, preventing any further rendering on the client. This, once again, creates a smoother experience in terms of performance.
I’m not saying that all talks should be highly technical, or that soft talks do not carry value. Instead what I’m concerned about is whether talks in certain topics are covered too soft or abstract, or perhaps are a bit shallow to allow more broad coverage, and do not carrying their weight on a conference schedule.http://www.geekyboy.com/archives/1076
There are also some syntactic sugar operators like `~` (tilde) and `^` (caret). The caret sign is slightly different:http://blog.madewithlove.be/post/tilde-and-caret-constraints/
When I first made my transition from front-end development into back-end development in ~2002, I had two things to learn: a server-side language and how to talk to a database (SQL)http://alexking.org/blog/2015/05/14/web-development-now-complicated
Times have changed.
Prosper Otemuyiwa recently wrote an article on how to create Laravel 5 packages on his blog. Although his approach is entirely valid and may suit you well, I work a little differently when creating a new package. First, I create a new GitHub repository where the package will live. In that repo I…
