Freek.dev

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.)

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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

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PHP Uk Conference is an excellent conference where I had the pleasure of speaking this year. All sessions were recorded. Last week the organizers released all the videos. Here's the entire playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_aPVo2HeGF-_djRi_UVWWLdkVpYQFnFm

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Jarek Tkaczyk demonstrates how you can use a helper relation to eager load specific models.

Have you ever needed to show only single related model from the hasMany relationship on a set of parents?

Being it latest, highest or just random, it’s not very clever to load whole collection using eager loading, just like running query per every parent.

Of course you can do that better, and now let me show you how.

https://softonsofa.com/tweaking-eloquent-relations-how-to-get-latest-related-model/

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My colleague Sebastian recently released a new package called phpunit-snapshot-assertions. In a new post on his blog he tells all about it.

The gist of snapshot testing is asserting that a set of data hasn’t changed compared to a previous version, which is a snapshot of the data, to prevent regressions. The difference between a classic assertEquals and an assertMatchesSnapshot is that you don't write the expectation yourself when snapshot testing. When a snapshot assertion happens for the first time, it creates a snapshot file with the actual output, and marks the test as incomplete. Every subsequent run will compare the output with the existing snapshot file to check for regressions.

https://medium.com/@sebdedeyne/a-package-for-snapshot-testing-in-phpunit-2e4558c07fe3

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You might thing that PHP is not able to automatically perform a type check on items in an array. But using variadic constructor this is possible. Bert Ramakers wrote a blogpost with some good examples on how to do this.

One of the language features announced back in PHP 5.6 was the addition of the “…” token to denote that a function or method accepts a variable length of arguments.

Something I rarely see mentioned is that it’s possible to combine this feature with type hints to essentially create typed arrays.

https://medium.com/2dotstwice-connecting-the-dots/creating-strictly-typed-arrays-and-collections-in-php-37036718c921

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Michael Dyrynda, one of the co-hosts of the Laravel News and the North Meets South podcasts, explains how to easily uptime your models with data coming from requests.

Instead of littering your controller method with multiple request()->has('field') checks, you can employ the request object's intersect method. The intersect method will return a new array containing only the keys that are present in both the specified list and the request itself.

Using intersect allows you to easily handle a PATCH request - one where you partially update a resource's data, rather than all of it as with a PUT - in a much more concise manner.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/partial-model-updates-in-laravel

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There are multiple good ways to pass data from Laravel to Vue. In a new blogpost Jesse Schutt covers all the options.

It has been helpful to think of my application as "layers" or separate sections of code each with varying responsibilities. I like to think of Laravel as the intermediary between the persistent data in the database, and the Vue components comprising the front-end of the app.

Though the boundaries between Laravel and Vue may appear unclear at the outset, the only way one can know about the other's data is if it is explicitly passed. Blade templates implicitly know a lot about the application, but Vue operates on a different layer, so it only knows what we tell it. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to provide Vue with the data it needs.

https://zaengle.com/blog/layers-of-a-laravel-vue-application

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In an article on the Hackster.io site explains in detail how he made a nice visualization of unit test results. Pretty cool what you can do with a raspberry pi, some LEDS and a couple of scripts.

I wanted to create a desktop gadget to visualize the progress of unit tests run via PHPUnit.I've named this project PHPUnicorn (by combining "PHPUnit" with "Unicorn pHAT").

https://www.hackster.io/colinodell/phpunicorn-visualizing-phpunit-tests-896208

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On the JetBrains blog Gary Hockin explains how to easily run a single PHPUnit test.

To run all the tests in a single file, right-click the test in the Project Pane (the left-hand navigation pane), and select Run .

To run all the tests in a single class, right-click the class name in the editor, and select Run .

To run the tests in a single method, right-click the method name, and select Run .

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2017/01/working-with-phpunit-and-phpstorm/

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One of my favourite features that was introduced in Laravel 5.4 are the higher order collection functions. It allows you to rewrite

collect($models)->filter(function(Model $model) {
   $model->passesFilter();
});

to:

collect($models)->filter->passesFilter();

This works with the filter method an a bunch of other collection methods.

In a new post on his blog Nicola Malizia explains how these methods work under the hood.

A new version of Laravel is available from 24 January 2017 and, as usual, it comes with a lot of new features. Among them, there is one that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of PHP. Some out of there will contempt this, but I find it awesome!

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-laravels-highorder-collections-ee4f65a3029e

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On his blog Mark Baker shares some thoughts on how to use closure binding to avoid having import variables with the use keyword.

You'll learn how to rewrite

$filteredArrayData = array_filter(
    $arrayData,
    function($value) use ($minimumPrice, $maximumPrice) {
        return $value->price >= $minimumPrice &amp;&amp; $value->price < $maximumPrice;
    }
);

to

$filteredArrayData = array_filter(
    $bookData,
    $priceFilter->inRange(5.00, 15.00)
);

https://markbakeruk.net/2017/03/12/closure-binding-as-an-alternative-to-use-variables/

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On css-tricks David Khourshid wrote a good introduction to RxJS.

According to ReactiveX.io: "ReactiveX is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences."

That's a lot to digest in a single sentence. In this article, we're going to take a different approach to learning about RxJS (the JavaScript implementation of ReactiveX) and Observables, by creating reactive animations.

https://css-tricks.com/animated-intro-rxjs/

If you want to toy around with the same ideas in PHP check out RxPHP

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Ondřej Mirtes, author of PHPStan lists some great tips to make a side project succesful.

Most developers have side projects. That's how we try out new things or make something that we miss on the market or in our dev stack. But most side projects end up unfinished and never actually see the light of day. And even if a developer builds up the courage to show his work to the public, he quickly finds out that just publishing a repository doesn't actually bring the masses to his doorstep. ... In this article, I'd like to share with you what I did to make sure that the project doesn't end up in the dustbin of history. I will concentrate on open source software, but the following advice may as well apply to any creative endeavour.

https://medium.com/@ondrejmirtes/how-i-got-from-0-to-1-000-stars-on-github-in-three-months-with-my-open-source-side-project-8ffe4725146#.211n6vihd

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On his blog Frank De Jonge explains how he solved a performance problem in one of his projects.

Last week I took a deep dive into Symfony's Routing Component. A project I worked on suffered from a huge performance penalty caused by a routing mistake. This lead me on the path to discovering some interesting performance considerations. Some common practices align nicely with Symfony's optimisations, let's look into those.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/symfony-routing-performance-considerations/

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