Freek Van der Herten's blog on Laravel, PHP and AI

Running Symfony2 on PHP7

Feb 12th 2015

This chart shows the number of requests per second that were performed (more is better). You can see that PHP 7 can do a lot more in comparison with the other versions. Response times drop from 0.2269 to 0.0865 seconds in the production environment.

http://www.intracto.com/nl/blog/running-symfony2-on-php7

Nice benchmark-work by Tom Van Looy. It is clear that you'll benefit from impressive speed bumps when upgrading to the next major version of PHP. Tom also provides instructions on how to setup PHP7 so you can perform your own tests.

certificatechain.io: an online tool to download intermediate ssl certificates

Feb 11th 2015

When installing an SSL certificate on your server you should install all intermediate certificates as well. If you fail to do so, some browsers will reported “untrusted” warnings for your site like this one.

Searching and downloading those intermediate certificates can be a hassle.

Today my colleagues at Spatie and I launched certificatechain.io. This online tool helps you download all intermediate certificates. Just paste or upload your certificate and you'll get a file containing the entire trust chain that you can install on your server.

The site is built with Laravel 5 and uses the SSL certificate chain resolver we made last month.

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HTTP/2 explained

Feb 11th 2015

This is a "living document" in the sense that I keep posting updates, and I care about and value feedback, questions and comments I get about it. This document improves over time thanks to a joint effort.

http://daniel.haxx.se/http2/

The programming languages used in GitHub-repo's

Feb 11th 2015

GitHut is an attempt to visualize and explore the complexity of the universe of programming languages used across the repositories hosted on GitHub.

http://githut.info/

The missing tail command for Laravel 5 original

Feb 10th 2015 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Last week Laravel 5 was released. Unfortunately that handy command for tailing the logs that you know and love from Laravel 4 was not included. The laravel-tail package brings it back. You can install it via composer: composer require spatie/laravel-tail After that you'll have to register the…

How much difference does HTTP/2's server side push make?

Feb 9th 2015

The DOM and all additional resources don't need to be parsed, the client can already begin the download of the `screen.css` resource, without "wasting time" processing the DOM and all external resources, only to make a new request to the server to begin fetching them.
When you add this all up for all resources on a page, this can easily save 100-200ms of the total page load/paint of a website. Those are numbers that should really have you consider implementing HTTP/2.

http://ma.ttias.be/service-side-push-http2-nghttp2/

Reprogramming Super Mario World

Feb 9th 2015

This guy beats Super Mario World in 6 minutes. He uses the credits warp glitch to reprogram the game while playing it.

The exploit works by transferring control to sprite X-position table via the chuck eating glitch so that the game executes the X-position of sprites as if it were code. Using koopa shells, the X-position table can be filled with values which switches the game from mode 0x14 (normal level execution) to 0x1C (midway through the credits).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14wqBA5Q1yc#t=24

EDIT: Today Carlsagan42 finished the game under 2 minutes.

Goodbye SPDY

Feb 9th 2015

Chrome has supported SPDY since Chrome 6, but since most of the benefits are present in HTTP/2, it’s time to say goodbye. We plan to remove support for SPDY in early 2016, and to also remove support for the TLS extension named NPN in favor of ALPN in Chrome at the same time. Server developers are strongly encouraged to move to HTTP/2 and ALPN.

http://blog.chromium.org/2015/02/hello-http2-goodbye-spdy-http-is_9.html

Trees vs facets vs tags

Feb 9th 2015

... any CMS managing any sizeable amount of data needs to support trees. Anything else will lead to an unmanageable mess. However, systems with smaller sets of content, especially with a smaller group of authors, can get away with tagging as well. Facetting only really works well with a system that stores content that is highly structured at least on a per node type basis.

http://www.sitepoint.com/cms-content-organization-structures-trees-vs-facets-vs-tags/

Behind the scenes of maintaining an open source project

Feb 9th 2015

The slides of a talk by Jordi Boggiano (of Composer and Monolog fame) on maintaining OSS projects.

http://slides.seld.be/?file=2015-01-27+Behind+the+Scenes+of+Maintaining+an+Open+Source+Project.html#1

In favor of RFC "Scalar Type Hints"

Feb 9th 2015

PHP has been supporting type-hints on complex types for quite some time already: PHP 5.0 for objects, 5.1 for array and 5.4 for callable. The question of extending this support to scalar types (integer, float, boolean and string) as been discussed several times those last years, each time with a bit more support.

http://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/in-favor-of-rfc-scalar-type-hints.html

An activity logger for Laravel 5 original

Feb 5th 2015 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

The activitylog-package provides a very easy way to log activities of the users of your app. Today I took the time to make it compatible with Laravel 5. Logging some activity couldn't be easier: [code] /* The log-function takes two parameters: - $text: the activity you wish to log. - $user: optional…

Dependency injection in legacy projects

Feb 5th 2015

PHP-DI is an easy to integrate IoC container that you can use in legacy projects or in apps without a framework.

I regularly have to use Zend Framework 1 for some legacy apps. If you're used to having an IoC container to inject dependencies then not having one is a big pain. Here's a guide on how to integrate it in ZF1:

http://php-di.org/doc/frameworks/zf1.html

Dependecy injection in Laravel

Feb 5th 2015

A great talk by John Arstingstall about dependency injection, aka the ioC Container.

http://vimeo.com/88888213

Laravel 5

Feb 4th 2015

Laravel 5 has just been released!

http://laravel.com/

Easy id obfuscation with Laravel 5

Feb 3rd 2015

Obfuscating ids in urls is a great way of hiding your application's internals from your visitors. It reduces the chance for malicious users to guess urls and prevents everyone from knowing how many user accounts or articles your website has.

Jens Segers introduces the hashids library and proposes a very nice way on how to use it in Laravel 5.

http://jenssegers.be/blog/64/easy-id-obfuscation-with-laravel-5

Does php run faster without warnings?

Feb 3rd 2015

Yep.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1868874/does-php-run-faster-without-warnings/1869185#1869185

Five reasons why the shut-op operator should be avoided

Feb 3rd 2015

An old, but still relevant, blogpost by Derick Rethans (of Xdebug fame) about why the @-operator should be avoided.

http://derickrethans.nl/five-reasons-why-the-shutop-operator-should-be-avoided.html

A smart way of seeding tables in Laravel

Feb 3rd 2015

Seeding as it is currently done in Laravel is intended only for dev builds, but what if you want to seed a production database with different data from what you use in development? What if you want to seed a table you've added to a database that is currently in production with new data?

https://github.com/slampenny/SmartSeeder

This package allows you to use Laravel seeders in the same way you're using migrations.

A realtime web log analyser

Feb 2nd 2015

GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems. It provides fast and valuable HTTP statistics for system administrators that require a visual server report on the fly.

http://goaccess.io