Freek.dev

Nicolas Widart, author of Asgard CMS, created a new package called laravel-modules that can help splitting up a large Laravel app in modules.

On his blog he published an introductory post.

Just imagine having a medium sized application where everything is in the `app/ù folder, worse, every model is in the root of the app folder! At some point you will spend a lot of time looking for things because everything is bunched together.

This is what being modular is trying to resolve. You split of the business logic into different parts, which belongs together. If you're into Domain Driven Design, you can consider a module an aggregate.

Every module has its own routes/controllers/models/views/business logic/etc. Meaning every module contains a group of classes that all are related to each other in some way.

https://nicolaswidart.com/blog/writing-modular-applications-with-laravel-modules

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Jerome Dalbert on his blog:

Splitting your Rails controllers when they have a very specific scope, too much logic, or too many mixed concerns can have a lot of good side effects in your code.

It doesn’t mean that you never abstract. It just comes later down the road. At some point some logic needs to be shared by several controllers. Sometimes even a splitted controller with only one public method gets too big. Et cetera. This is where concerns, model methods, possibly background jobs, and even sometimes service objects (hopefully not too many) come into play.

The more your app grows, the more time you will need to spend to understand it, no matter how clean the code is. But splitting your controllers makes things easier.

http://jeromedalbert.com/how-dhh-organizes-his-rails-controllers/

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Phil Sturgeon provides a good explanation on the why and how of middlewares in PHP.

Recently there has been a lot of buzz about HTTP middleware in PHP. Since PSR-7 was accepted, everyone and their friend Sherly has been knocking out middleware implementations, some of them stunning, some of them half-arsed, and some of them rolled into existing frameworks. HTTP Middleware is a wonderful thing, but the PHP-FIG is working on a specific standard for middleware, which will standardise this mess of implementations, but some folks don't seem to think that would be useful.

Let's look into middleware a little closer, to show you why it's something to smile about.

https://philsturgeon.uk/2016/05/31/why-care-about-php-middleware/

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Organizing code is a core skill for software developers and as with all skills the most effective way to improve is to reflect on your previous choices and the fallout from them. There are a wide array of different strategies for organizing code and learning to recognize both the useful and the dangerous ones is very important.

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Tony Messias on the madewithlove-blog:

The other day I was listening to the FullStackRadio episode 34 which is about dealing with dependencies in Active Record models. This is a very interesting topic and they suggest a few solutions for it. I liked the suggestions and I tried to implement it differently (first try and second try).

After that, I decided to talk to my colleagues about the design implementations. And they asked “why not implementing it as a command?”. At first sight I was a bit reluctant, because I’m starting to think applications are getting more complex then it really needs. Then I decided to implement it and the end result was the best one to us. Let’s discuss it a bit.

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Matthias Noback continues his highly interesting series of posts with programming guidelines. Part four is about messages.

Besides having a type and a particular value, messages can also be categorized:

• A command message is a request for change. One object wants to make the other object do something.
• A query message is a request for information. One object wants to get something from the other object.
• A document message is the response from the other object, based on the query that was sent to it.

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Most outlets of technical information (whether high profile developers, companies, etc…) focus on architectural patterns and there’s never any talk about organizational patterns. In other words, does the architectural pattern that you choose fit your organizational pattern?

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Flux is both one of the most popular and one of the least understood topics in current web development. This guide is an attempt to explain it in a way everyone can understand.

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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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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?

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... 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.

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I believe that the true value of what Eric Evans wrote years ago lies in the fact that virtually anybody can use some of the things he proposed. They don’t require any special tools, money, approval or reorganization. Those are simple things that you can start doing from next Monday (or tomorrow).

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