Freek.dev

Matt Stauffer wrote another excellent article on Laravel. This time he gives a tour of Laravel Spark.

In case you're still having a bit of trouble understanding what Spark is really about, Spark is a tool designed to make it quicker for you to spin up SaaS applications, and it handles user authentications, plans and payments and coupons, and team logic.

Most SaaSes have these same components: user accounts, Stripe-based payments, and different payment plans. And many have payment coupons and team payment options.

Rather than re-creating this functionality with every new Laravel app you create, just use Spark, and you'll get all that and a free SaaS landing page to boot.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/introducing-laravel-spark-a-deep-dive

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In plain old JavaScript you can get the data attributes of

[code language="html"]

```

like this

[code language="javascript"] document.getElementById('test').getAttribute('data-news-item-id');

But did you know there's a alternative way of doing this by reading an element's dataset property?

[code language="javascript"]
document.getElementById('test').dataset.newsItemId;

Notice that the values can be accessed by camelcasing the name of the data attribute. You can also write to datasets to change values of data attributes. Read the informative helpful article on MDN to know more.

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If you're going to read one article on ActiveRecord vs Data Mapper let it be this one by Matthew Machuga.

The next time you come across the ActiveRecord vs. Data Mapper argument, or ones like it, be critical of what is being said. If it impacts your work in some way, do some research to find out if what is being said is true or if it has been something lost in translation. Don't feel bad for using a pattern that has spread across multiple languages and ecosystems successfully, and is probably the reason we have most of the web frameworks we do today. While the ActiveRecord existed well before Rails, it was Rails that gave it a beautiful API and made other frameworks like CodeIgniter, Laravel, .NET, Fuel, Django, etc want to have something comparable.

If you use Eloquent, ActiveRecord for Rails, or any other AR ORM, make sure you know that you are not alone. You are in good company of many, many developers who use it successfully day-to-day. However, if one day you choose to use a Data Mapper implementation or something else, then you will still be in good company, and still deserve respect regardless of which side of the fence you fall.

http://matthewmachuga.com/blog/2015/activerecord-and-the-beauty-lost-in-translation.html

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When we built Facebook's mobile applications, we needed a data-fetching API powerful enough to describe all of Facebook, yet simple enough to be easy to learn and use by our product developers. We developed GraphQL three years ago to fill this need. Today it powers hundreds of billions of API calls a day. This year we've begun the process of open-sourcing GraphQL by drafting a specification, releasing a reference implementation, and forming a community around it at graphql.org.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1691455094417024/graphql-a-data-query-language/

There's already a package to use GraphQL with Laravel.

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Jens Segers explains how to use PHP League's shiny new version of Container. The usage of ContainerInterface seems interesting:

League's container now implements the `ContainerInterface`, which is defined by the Container Interoperability group. This is really great as there are a few projects and frameworks which support this interface. For example, the Slim 3 micro framework already allows you to choose your own container flavour, as long as it implements the interface.

Read the full article at Jens' blog.

The League's Container seems like a nice alternative to PHP DI that I have been using.

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I have met hundreds of developers. The best ones always have a side project or two that they hack away on at night. As an employer I encourage that, but I have heard that a lot of workplaces ban personal projects.

So let's talk about why I think that side projects is a good thing, how I use them to get better and what you have to look out for.

http://david.elbe.me/development/2014/09/26/side-projects.html

 

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Often, when I’m able to slip into a state of flow while coding, I will produce more in a single afternoon than I could in several days of non-flow. Yet this is often an elusive state to obtain. Luckily, research dedicated to this topic in recent decades offers some help. Here we’ll look into both the stages of flow and how to obtain the prerequisites for flow, making it possible in the first place.

https://medium.com/brigade-engineering/hacking-the-flow-state-b2451d0bf7ba

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Q: What does this code return? date('Y-m-d',strtotime('00-00-00'));

A: 1999-11-30 B: 0001-01-01 C: 2001-01-01

The correct answer is A: 1999-11-30.

You'll find the reasoning behind this result as a comment on this bug report.

There is no bug here, 00-00-00 means 2000-00-00, which is 1999-12-00, which is 1999-11-30. No bug, perfectly normal.

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Garrett St. John wrote a clear example on how to use UUIDs in Eloquent models. This kind of logic could go in a trait so it can be reused across multiple models.

By default, Eloquent uses an auto-incrementing integer as the primary key for its tables. While most of the time this is totally acceptable, sometimes there is a need for primary keys to be less predictable.

http://garrettstjohn.com/entry/using-uuids-laravel-eloquent-orm/

EDIT: Kirk Bushell has made a trait for this functionality. Take a look at his Eloquence package on GitHub.

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The Retry library by Igor Wiedler has only 19 lines of code. Line 17 is a goto statement. In this issue on GitHub a user asks why Igor chose to use goto instead of resorting to recursion. Igor took the time to write out the reasoning behind that decision. It's a very interesting read on the PHP compiler and opcodes.

Why hello! Thank you for asking this most excellent question!

I have indeed considered alternatives to the goto. I have evaluated them to a great extent, and I am happy to present the results to you here.

https://github.com/igorw/retry/issues/3

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React is a UI library developed at Facebook to facilitate the creation of interactive, stateful & reusable UI components. It is used at Facebook in production, and Instagram.com is written entirely in React.

https://scotch.io/tutorials/learning-react-getting-started-and-concepts

The application I'm currently working will need an advanced search feature that is backed by Algolia. Searches shouldn't hit the application server but use Algolia's JavaScript client. I'm in the process of learning React to build this. The link above was very helpful get started with this new technology.

I'm not ready to blog about my application just yet, but you'll hear more about it as soon as it goes live.

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Jake Archibald, a developer advocate for Google Chrome, wrote an excellent article on how modern browsers can handle responsive images.

https://jakearchibald.com/2015/anatomy-of-responsive-images/

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After giving excellent talks at both Laracons, contributing to Laravel's new ACL, putting out an interesting Full Stack Radio episode with Wes Bos, Adam Wathan today published a new screencast. He is now officially on a roll.

After my presentation at Laracon this year, a lot of people asked me how I'd take that same polymorphic approach when the objects would have to be retrieved from the database.

This screencast covers how I'd approach implementing the same idea in a real Laravel application with Eloquent, by using polymorphic relationships and delegation to accomplish the same thing without having to resort to any nasty conditionals.

http://adamwathan.me/2015/09/03/pushing-polymorphism-to-the-database

 

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Every webdeveloper has probably at some point wondered which technologies a particular site is using. Sure, you could browse the source of a page to find any hints on for instance what cms is being used. Or you could inspect the response headers to see what version of php is used.

Instead of hunting down those clues yourself, you could use the Wappalyzer plugin. Once installed it shows an extra icon in your browser. It indicates what sort of framework or cms is used. Clicking on the icon reveals even more info such as which JavaScript libraries are embedded on the site. It's a great tool.

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Publishing a JavaScript library for public use requires some extra steps. You need to think about how people will use the library. From end users, to contributors your library now has a variety of people outside of yourself potentially making use of the code that you've released into the wild.

From Github and npm, to releasing beta versions, semantic versioning, code coverage, continuous integration, and providing your library with a solid set of unit tests, there are a ton of things to learn.

https://egghead.io/series/how-to-write-an-open-source-javascript-library

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When I first learned to program, I made many objects that were mutable. I made lots of getters and lots of setters. I could create objects using a constructor and mutate and morph the heck out of that object in all kinds of ways. Unfortunately, this led to many problems. My code was harder to test, it was harder to reason about, and my classes became chock full of checks to ensure that it was in a consistent state anytime anything changed.

...

Now, I favor creating immutable objects.

http://blog.joefallon.net/2015/08/immutable-objects-in-php/

The post clearly explains the benefits of using immutable objects and a nice example.

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