Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Git from the inside out

This essay explains how Git works. It assumes you understand Git well enough to use it to version control your projects.

The essay focuses on the graph structure that underpins Git and the way the properties of this graph dictate Git’s behavior. Looking at fundamentals, you build your mental model on the truth rather than on hypotheses constructed from evidence gathered while experimenting with the API. This truer model gives you a better understanding of what Git has done, what it is doing, and what it will do.

https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/two/git-from-the-inside-out

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Extract till your drop

Watch a very instructive live coding session with Matthias Verraes.

Under the pressure of deadlines and endless change requests, under the weight of years of legacy, code becomes unmaintainable. With the right tools, techniques, and mindset, any codebase can be brought under test, and be refactored towards a better architecture. Let's skip the theory and dive straight into the spaghetti code. In a live coding session, I will demonstrate how you can start refactoring your way out of a mess today.

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Recursion and Generators

Christopher Pitt experimented a bit with generators and wrote down the thought process on his blog.

Generators are awesome. If they’re new to you then take some time to read where they come from and what they do. If you’ve come from a particular programming language background, they may be difficult for you to understand.

They were, and continue to be, tricky for me to grasp. So I’ve spent loads of time trying to understand them, and what they can do for my code.

https://medium.com/@assertchris/recursion-and-generators-d56f513ea6ab

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The case for maintainable code

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.

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.

http://www.brandonsavage.net/the-case-for-maintainable-code/

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Aspect Oriented PHP And The Interceptor Pattern

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.

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.

http://www.edzynda.com/aspect-oriented-php-and-the-interceptor-pattern/

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A trait to optionally abort a Laravel app original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

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…

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Optional Value Control-flows in PHP using Traits and Magic-methods

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>

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Common string functions

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>

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A Laravel package to easily add paginated routes original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

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…

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Semantic versioning and public interfaces

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Interfaces 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.

http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6136

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What about "final" and "private"?

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:
  • 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?
http://www.brandonsavage.net/what-about-final-and-private/

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PHPUnit 5.0 will only support PHP5.6 and above

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.

The 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.

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/wiki/Release-Announcement-for-PHPUnit-4.7.0#phpunit-50

Nice!

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