Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Posts tagged with laravel

Goodbye controllers, hello request handlers

Jens Segers, developer at Teamleader and author of the popular Optimus and laravel-mongodb packages, wrote about an alternative to controllers.

Let me introduce you to request handlers. The concept is very simple, yet very unknown to a lot of PHP developers. A request handler is basically a controller, but limited to one single action. This concept is very similar to the Action-Domain-Responder pattern which was proposed by Paul M. Jones, an alternative for the MVC pattern that focuses on a more clear request to response flow for web applications.

https://jenssegers.com/85/goodbye-controllers-hello-request-handlers

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Prepare your website for iPhone X

Last week Apple introduced their new fancy iPhone X. It's screen has a top notch that might cause some problems in landscape mode. Stephen Radford explains how to properly handle it.

The new iPhone X features a beautiful edge-to-edge display. Well, almost. There is the small issue of a notch at the top of the browser which doesn't cause an issue when viewing websites in portrait but by default does cause some issues in landscape.

To accommodate the notch iOS 11 constrains websites within a "safe area" on the screen. On most websites this results in letterboxing on the left and the right.

http://stephenradford.me/removing-the-white-bars-in-safari-on-iphone-x/

We've already implemented the fix in our Laravel application template.

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Who uses PHP (and Laravel) anyway?

Colin DeCarlo, a developer at Vehikl, wrote some thoughts on why PHP has a bad reputation in some circles.

People shitting on PHP isn’t going to go away, it’s a symptom of a few things. PHP has a ridiculously flat learning curve so just about anyone can write code using it, this means a lot of amateurs and ‘get it done’ developers will choose php but won’t really ever level up their skills when it comes to software development.

https://medium.com/@colindecarlo/who-uses-php-anyway-672115ab81de

I agree with Colin on everything he writes in his post. I'm also thinking that the some of the reasons on why people don't like PHP apply to Laravel as well. In my mind Laravel is to PHP frameworks what PHP is to other programming languages. Both Laravel and PHP might not do everything by the "real programming rules", but it sure is easy to use. And when handled properly powerful and maintainable stuff can be built with it.

Because Laravel is an easy framework to get started with, it's a popular choice for newcomers. Even with almost no experience you can build an app. Some of those projects will go to production. If an experienced developer that uses another framework comes by and sees that Laravel app, it might be easy to conclude that the problem lies with Laravel, and not with the inexperience of the junior programmer who just begon his/her journey in coding.

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Extending models in Eloquent

Caleb Porzio, co-presenter of the Twenty Percent Time podcast, published a new article on the Tightenco blog. This time he guides us through a nice use case for extending Eloquent models.

Let’s explore another alternative that can be used as a stand-in for repetitive where statements and local scopes. This technique involves creating new Eloquent models that extend other models. By extending another model, you inherit the full functionality of the parent model, while retaining the ability to add custom methods, scopes, event listeners, etc. This is commonly referred to as “Single Table Inheritance,” but I prefer to just call it “Model Inheritance”.

https://tighten.co/blog/extending-models-in-eloquent

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Build a Facebook Messenger chatbot in Laravel

In a new article on his blog, Christoph Rumpel shows how you can easily set up a Facebook Messenger chatbot using the shiny new v2 of Botman Studio. Very cool stuff.

Although it seems quite easy to setup BotMan Studio and Facebook you still need to be aware of a few concepts regarding Facebook. I hope I could provide them there and this article helps you to setup your next Facebook Messenger chatbots. From here you are ready to build more and more features to your bot your own. So make sure to checkout the BotMan documentation to get a feeling of what is possible and learn new stuff.

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2017/09/build-a-facebook-chatbot-with-laravel-and-botman-studio/

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The dangers of mutable datetime objects

Jeff Madsen wrote down a good piece that explains how mutable Carbon dates can lead to some nasty bugs. I would't mind if Chronos were to be promoted to the default datetime library in Laravel.

If you hang out on any sort of programming forums you have no doubt encountered “The Great Mutable vs. Immutable Debate”. While I’m sure you know what the words mean, if you are new to programming or don’t have a strong Computer Science background it might not be obvious to you whether this is an important concept to be concerned with, or just more “architecture astronaut” purists arguing some obscure fine point.

To help you answer that for yourselves, I’m going to show you the difference between the two using two popular Php DateTime libraries — Carbon and Chronos, and then demonstrate the danger of using the mutable one of those.

https://medium.com/@codebyjeff/whats-all-this-immutable-date-stuff-anyway-72d4130af8ce

If you want to read more cool articles by Jeff, be sure to subscribe to his excellent newsletter.

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A recap of Laracon EU 2017

Devron Baldwin wrote down a few words on the excellent Laracon EU conference, edition 2017.

The awesome talks and the amazing people made Laracon EU 2017 an experience to remember. I’ll split this up into a few sections to talk about the non-technical and the technical talks. I found myself enjoying the non-technical talks slightly more than the technical this year.

https://medium.com/@devron/7-laracon-eu-2017-talks-and-the-people-i-met-381e55ebf898

I can't believe it' already over and am already looking forward to Laracon EU 2018.

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What Laravel 5.5 means for our packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

At Spatie we've released a plethora of Laravel packages. Now that Laravel 5.5 has been released most of our packages will get a new (major) version. In this blogpost I'd like to explain how we handle new releases of the framework and what it means for our packages. Preparing for release Laravel has…

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Theme-based views in Laravel using vendor namespaces

At Spatie, we're building a multi-tenant app. Seb figured out a great way to handle theme based views.

Laravel allows you register a view vendor namespace which points to a specific directory containing Blade files. This feature is intended for package development, but it's a perfect solution to our problem.

By registering a namespace with the current theme's location, we can drop all the dynamic parts of our view names when we're calling them.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/theme-based-views-in-laravel-using-vendor-namespaces

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Open-sourcing our guidelines original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

At Spatie we recently launched a new site: guidelines.spatie.be. It contains articles on how we go about setting things up at Spatie and a collection of styleguides. The source code of the site is available on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like to share why and how we created our guidelines site. Why…

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Use your Laravel named routes in JavaScript

Daniel Coulbourne, an engineer at Tighten Co and co-host of the amazing Twenty Percent Time podcast, recently released Ziggy, a tool to share your Laravel named routes with JavaScript.

Ziggy creates a Blade directive which you can include in your views. This will export a JavaScript object of your application's named routes, keyed by their names (aliases), as well as a global route() helper function which you can use to access your routes in your JavaScript.

https://github.com/tightenco/ziggy

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Laravel/MySQL JSON documents faster lookup using generated columns

In an older post on his blog Mohamed Said demonstrates how you can leverage virtual columns to speed up queries on data stored as JSON.

Laravel 5.3 is shipped with built-in support for updating and querying JSON type database fields, the support currently fully covers MySQL 5.7 JSON type fields updates and lookups,

...

Let's see how we may create a generated column to store users favorite color for later indexing.

https://themsaid.com/laravel-mysql-json-colum-fast-lookup-20160709

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Cruddy by design

At this year's Laracon US Adam Wathan gave a talk titled "Cruddy By Design" on how to structure your controllers better. After the conference he published a new GitHub repo that contains the demo app he refactored on stage. The 4 main tips to improve your code come as PRs on the repo with a full description on why the change is valuable. Very cool stuff.

Using this convention as a "rule" is a good way to force yourself to keep your controllers from becoming bloated, and can often lead to learning interesting new things about your domain.

For the presentation, I put together a demo app called "CastHacker" that showcases podcasts about software development. It's not a "real" app by any means (lots of imaginary features, no tests, etc.); it's just enough code to demonstrate the concepts from the presentation. Feel free to clone it and play with it locally if you like though.

I've written up each refactoring I shared in the presentation as a detailed pull request.

https://github.com/adamwathan/laracon2017

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