Freek.dev

Mohammed Said, Laravel employee number #1, recently announced that he published a new site where he shares stuff he learned while researching the Laravel code base. The site is called "Diving Laravel", which is kinda nice knowing that Mohammed is an incredible diver himself.

In this website I’m going to share notes on the internals of Laravel core, packages, as well as the technologies behind the different components. My goal is to help people understand how things work under the hood and also to be a reminder for me for when I need to look into something that I’ve already studied before.

https://divinglaravel.com/

Read more

In an amazing article on SitePoint, Christopher Pitt demonstrates how to create an async PHP server that can requests a fingerprint scan on the client side. He uses React Native, WebSocket, an async PHP server, PHP preprocessing, ... Really amazing stuff.

I’m going to describe the process of building custom multi-factor authentication for all transactions. I don’t want to do the usual (and boring on its own) SMS or push notification one-time-password stuff. I want to build a fingerprint scanner right into my phone.

In this tutorial, we’re going to look at how to set up a simple iOS app using React Native. We will also set up an asynchronous HTTP server, with a web socket connection to the app.

We will follow this up by adding fingerprint scanning capabilities to the app, and asking for these fingerprint scans from the HTTP server. Then we will build an endpoint through which GET requests can request a fingerprint scan and wait for one to occur.

https://www.sitepoint.com/scan-fingerprints-async-php-react-native/

Read more

In a recent interview published on the Cloudways blog Taylor Otwell shares his thoughts on the similarities differences between Laravel and Symfony.

Both Laravel and Symfony are more rapid than building an entire PHP application from scratch. So, in that sense, they both allow rapid application development. However, Laravel does make strong efforts to have a very clean and productive working environment for building applications of all sizes. I think Symfony has also made efforts in this direction over the last few years with their “DX” initiatives and some of the more opinionated things they are doing with Symfony Flex.

https://www.cloudways.com/blog/taylor-otwell-interview/

Read more

On the stitcher.io blog a new post appeared that explains the benefits of generics with a practical example. Generics aren't supported in PHP, but there is an RFC.

In today's blog post we'll explore some common problems with arrays in PHP. All the problems and issues listed could be solved with a pending RFC which adds generics to PHP. We won't explore in too much detail what generics are. But at the end of this read you should have a good idea as to why they are useful, and why we really want them in PHP. So without further ado, lets dive into the subject.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/php-generics-and-why-we-need-them

Read more

Michael Dyrynda, co-host of both the excellent North Meets South podcast and Laravel News podcast, wrote a short article on how he pragmatically manages forms in a Laravel app.

I personally feel that I'm not gaining anything by bringing in another package just to handle generating HTML on my behalf when it's just as fast to use the tools available to me in my editor. It also means there's no implied knowledge of a now non-standard external package, should a new developer be brought on to the projects that I've worked on. HTML is HTML, after all.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/elegant-form-handling-in-laravel

Read more

I ❤️ Laravel's tinker command and use it everyday. Caleb Porzio, an engineer at Tighten Co, wrote a good post on the that command, containing lots of cool stuff I didn't knew tinker could do.

Although some of the value Tinker provides is clear at first glance, it also has loads of hidden and exciting features available out-of-the-box. Let’s walk through and take a look at some ways you can super-charge your Tinker workflow.

https://blog.tighten.co/supercharge-your-laravel-tinker-workflow

Read more

Matthias Noback explains the value of singleton objects: when used properly they can make your code more developer friendly.

I'm not advocating the use of façades and helper functions per se. I assume they may have good use in specific parts of your application (just as the Laravel documentation states, by the way). My point is that, as long as you build into your libraries both options, you can offer a great developer experience, providing an out-of-the-box working solution of a useful service, which can still be used in a project that uses dependency injection everywhere.

https://php-and-symfony.matthiasnoback.nl/2017/05/the-case-for-singleton-objects-facades-and-helper-functions/

Read more

Tinker is probably one of my most used Artisan commands. A minor annoyance is that it can be quite bothersome having to type the fully qualified classname to do something simple.

Today we release a new package called laravel-tinker-tools. When fully installed let's you use the short class names in a tinker session:

This magic does not only work with models but with every class in your Laravel app.

Installing the package

There are a few non standard steps you need to take in order to install the package.

First, pull in the package like you normally would:

composer require spatie/laravel-tinker-tools

Next, create a file named .psysh.php in the root of your Laravel app with this content:

<?php

\Spatie\TinkerTools\ShortClassNames::register();

Finally, dump the optimized version of the autoloader so autoload_classmap.php gets created.

composer dump-autoload -o

And with that all out of the way you can use short class names in your tinker session.

A peek behind the curtains

When you use a class that hasn't been loaded in yet, PHP will call the registered autoloader functions. Such autoloader functions are responsible for loading up the requested class. In a typical project Composer will register an autoloader function that can include the file where the class is stored in.

Composer has a few ways to locate the right files. In most cases it will convert the fully qualified class name to a path. For example, when using a class App\Models\NewsItem Composer will load the file in app/Models/NewsItem.php. It's a bit more complicated behind the scenes but that's the gist of it. To make the process of finding a class fast, Composer caches all the fully qualified classnames and their paths in the generated autoload_classmap.php, which can be found in vendor/composer.

Now, to make this package work, \Spatie\TinkerTools\ShortClassNames will read Composer's autoload_classmap.php and convert the fully qualified class names to short class names. The result is a collection that's being kept in the $classes property

Our class will also register an autoloader. When you use NewsItem in your code. PHP will first call Composer's autoloader. But of course that autoloader can't find the class. So the autoloader from this package comes next. Our autoloader will use the aforementioned $classes collection to find to fully qualified class name. It will then use class_alias to alias NewsItem to App\Models\NewsItem.

What happens if there are multiple classes with same name?

Now you might wonder what'll happen it there are more classes with the same name in different namespaces? E.g. App\Models\NewsItem, Vendor\PackageName\NewsItem. Well, autoload_classmap.php is sorted alphabetically on the fully qualified namespace. So App\Models\NewsItem will be used and not Vendor\PackageName\NewsItem.

Because App starts with an "A" there's a high chance that, in case of a collision, a class inside your application will get picked. Currently there are no ways to alter this. I'd accept PRs that make this behaviour customizable.

Need more tinker magic?

There are a lot of other options that can be set in tinker.config.php. Learn all the options by reading the official psysh configuration documentation. Caleb Porzio's excellent blogpost "Supercharge Your Laravel Tinker Workflow" is an excellent read as well. This package was inspired by that blogpost

Maybe you don't need tinker...

If you want to run a single line of code tinker can be a bit of overkill. You must start up tinker, type the code, press enter, and quit tinker. Our laravel-artisan-dd package contains an Artisan command that can dump anything from the commandline. No need to start and quit tinker anymore.

We've updated the package so you can make use of short class names too. Here's how you can dump a model using a minimal amount of keystrokes:

In closing

laravel-tinker-tools and laravel-artisan-dd aren't the only packages we've made that make developing Laravel apps easier.

Be sure to take a look at these ones at well:

• laravel-tail
• laravel-migrate-fresh
• laravel-db-snapshots
• laravel-mailable-test
• laravel-demo-mode

Need even more stuff? The open source section on our company website lists everything we've released previously: https://spatie.be/en/opensource

Read more

Sebastian De Deyne wrote a cool blogpost on array destructuring in PHP. Yet another reason to stay up to date with the latest and greatest PHP version.

PHP 7.1 introduced a new syntax for the list() function. I've never really seen too much list() calls in the wild, but it enables you to write some pretty neat stuff.

This post is a primer of list() and it's PHP 7.1 short notation, and an overview of some use cases I've been applying them to.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/the-list-function-and-practical-uses-of-array-destructuring-in-php

Read more

In a new post on his blog Taylor Otwell gives a nice example on how real time facades can make code more testable.

Recently, I worked on some code that surfaced my most common use-case for Laravel 5.4’s “real-time” facades. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it allows you to use any of your application’s classes as a Laravel “facade” on-demand by prefixingFacades to the namespace when importing the class. This is not a feature that is littered throughout my code, but I find it occasionally provides a clean, testable approach to writing expressive object APIs.

https://medium.com/@taylorotwell/expressive-code-real-time-facades-41c442914291

Read more

Jordi Boggiano, co-creator of Composer / Packages, published some new stats on the usage of PHP versions. Great to see that PHP 7 overall now represents over 50%.

A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. I look in the packagist.org logs of the last month for Composer installs done by someone. Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with.

https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2017-1-edition

Read more

Mohammed Said, Laravel employee #1 and diver, explains how you can avoid pushing unnecessary jobs to a queue.

How many customers will reach the 10K purchase milestone? does it make sense to push a Job to queue for every single purchase while there's a huge chance that this job will just do nothing at all? IMHO this is a waste of resources, you might end up filling your queue with thousands of unnecessary jobs.

It might be a good thing if we can check for that condition before queueing the listener.

http://themsaid.com/conditionally-queue-listeners-laravel-20170505/

Read more

Paul Redmond explains how you can use Guzzle 6' middleware to add a HMAC authorization header.

I prefer to keep my dependencies as up-to-date as possible so I decided to learn Guzzle 6 and become more familiar with the middleware. The concepts are pretty straightforward and I have a few patterns that I like to use when building out middleware within my Laravel applications.

https://medium.com/@paulredmond/using-guzzle-6-middleware-in-a-laravel-application-7fbd6d966235

Read more

A few week ago we released a new major version of laravel-permission. This package makes it easy to store permission and roles in the database. Our package plays nice with Laravel's Gate and has support for multiple guards.

In a new post on his blog Saqueib Ansari shows how you can create an interface to assign permissions and roles to a user using our package.

Laravel comes with Authentication and Authorization out of the box, I have implemented many role and permissions based system in the past, using laravel, it’s peace of cake. In this post, we are going to implement a fully working and extensible roles and permissions on laravel 5.4. When we finish we will have a starter kit which we can use for our any future project which needs roles and permissions based access control.

http://www.qcode.in/easy-roles-and-permissions-in-laravel-5-4

Read more

Danny Van Kooten did an interesting experiment. He completely rewrote an Laravel app to a version in Go. In a post on his blog he shares some details about his project along with some benchmarks.

Earlier this year, I made an arguably bad business decision. I decided to rewrite the Laravel application powering Boxzilla in Go.

No regrets though.

Just a few weeks later I was deploying the Go application. Building it was the most fun I had in months, I learned a ton and the end result is a huge improvement over the old application. Better performance, easier deployments and higher test coverage.

https://dannyvankooten.com/laravel-to-golang/

Read more

I don't think that less lines of code automatically means code is more readable, but I'm a big fan of ES6' arrow functions. In this article Eric Elliott dives deep into them.

I also supect that your team would become significantly more productive if you learned to embrace and favor more of the concise syntax available in ES6. While it’s true that sometimes things are easier to understand if they’re made explicit, it’s also true that as a general rule, less code is better. If less code can accomplish the same thing and communicate more, without sacrificing any meaning, it’s objectively better.

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/familiarity-bias-is-holding-you-back-its-time-to-embrace-arrow-functions-3d37e1a9bb75

Let's hope we'll soon have array functions in PHP too.

The future of #php (hopefully) - 2 RFCs in discussion right now: "Arrow Functions" and "Pipe Operator" pic.twitter.com/LVPiIHwGrZ

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) April 19, 2017

Read more

While working a little bit on laravel-sitemap I decided to refactor the tests to make use of our own snapshot assertions package. The snapshot package enables you to generate snapshots with the output of your tests. On subsequent runs of those tests it can assert if the output still matches the contents of the snapshot.

In this video I demonstrate how the refactor of the tests of laravel-sitemap was done. (double-click on it to view it full-screen)

If you want to know more about snapshot testing, then read this blog post written by my colleague Sebastian. The refactor of the tests can be viewed in this commit on GitHub.

(Little note on the video itself: this is my first tutorial video I ever made. After recording it I noticed that I used a wrong ratio resulting in those black bars on the side. Ah well, you live you learn. Next time it will be better. For those interested, I used a Blue Yeti Pro mic to record my voice and ScreenFlow to record and edit the video.)

Read more

Simon Yousoufov argues that PHP is going the way of the dodo.

It’s well known that PHP is a dead programming language and that its 22-year-old ecosystem is effectively useless now that we have Node and its fancy new asynchronous frameworks. Node’s superiority is evident because everyone knows that single-threaded, asynchronous, programs are better by default. Faster. Stronger, even.

https://medium.com/fuzz/php-a0d0b1d365d8

Read more