Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Handling private composer packages with Satis

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.

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Get data from Google Analytics on legacy sites

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.

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Learn by listening to these podcasts

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:

The Laravel Podcast

The Laravel podcast focusses on Laravel (of course) and the latests trends in the PHP world. The podcast is hosted by Matt Stauffer. Jeffrey Way and Taylor Otwell are regular guests. Recently the format of the show was changed: episodes are now around 30 minutes in length, which I think is great.

Listen in iTunes Follow on Twitter

Full Stack Radio

This podcast isn't narrowly focused on one subject. In each episode Adam Watham interviews one guest. Topics range from product design to system administration and everything in between. To give you an idea: the last episodes saw Adam Culp talking about conferences, Kent Beck about application architecture and Konstantin Kudryashov about BDD and TDD.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

Dev Discussions

In this podcast Shawn McCool talks with other webapplication dev's mainly about programming concepts. Past episodes touched functional programming, event sourcing, ActiveRecord and Datamapper. Shawn recently recorded a talk with Mathias Verraes and Ross Tuck. Let's hope it gets published soon.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

PHP Roundtable

The roundtable was created by Sammy Kaye Powers. On each episode several developers discuss various topics concerning PHP and it's ecosystem.

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.

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We have a problem with promises

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>



                            

                                            
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Rendering ReactJS templates server-side

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.

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 looking forward to Frank's future posts.

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Tilde and caret version constraints in Composer

There are also some syntactic sugar operators like `~` (tilde) and `^` (caret).
  • `~4.1.3` means `>=4.1.3,<4.2.0`,
  • `~4.1` means `>=4.1.0,<5.0.0` (most used),
  • `~0.4` means `>=0.4.0,<1.0.0`,
  • `~4` means `>=4.0.0,<5.0.0`.
The caret sign is slightly different:
  • `^4.1.3` (most used) means `>=4.1.3,<5.0.0`,
  • `^4.1` means `>=4.1.0,<5.0.0`, same as `~4.1` but:
  • `^0.4` means `>=0.4.0,<0.5.0`, this is different from `~0.4` and is more useful for defining backwards compatible version ranges.
  • `^4` means `>=4.0.0,<5.0.0` which is the same as `~4` and `4.*`.
 
http://blog.madewithlove.be/post/tilde-and-caret-constraints/

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Creating packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

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…

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Fetch: the new AJAX API

One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, `XMLHttpRequest`, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for. We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better. Our effort to do better is the `fetch` API. Let's have a basic look at the new `window.fetch` method, available now in Firefox and Chrome Canary.
http://davidwalsh.name/fetch

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The benefits of creating packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In the last few months various little parts of our custom built CMS were made available as composer installable packages. Though creating a package takes some time, there are many benefits: my colleagues and my future self can benefit from the same documentation that is written for the consumers of…

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Manage newsletters in Laravel 5 original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

A few hours ago I tagged version 1.0.0 of a my new package: laravel-newsletter. It provides a very easy way to interact with email marketing services. Or maybe I should simply say MailChimp, as it is currently the only supported supported service. After you install the package (un)subscribing an…

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MailChimp API v3 is officially launched

V2.0 of the API was a weird hybrid of RESTful and RPC practices, which required everyone to learn our own special style of API design. With a few minor exceptions, API v3.0 is fully RESTful. This allows us to express in a couple dozen resources what it took the last version 120 distinct endpoints to accomplish.
http://devs.mailchimp.com/blog/api-v3-0-officially-launched/

Consuming this API doesn't seem to be that hard but I hope they'll release a PHP wrapper soon.

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