Freek.dev

Earlier this month Glide joined The League of Extraordinary Packages. This package provides an easy way to generate image manipulations on the fly. Within a couple of hours I had integrated this wonderful package into both my company's legacy and current CMS.

The current CMS is based on Laravel. The Glide-integration is now available as a package on github: freekmurze/laravel-glide.

Installation

Nothing too fancy, you’ll have to:

• use composer to pull in the package
• install a service provider
• install a facade
• publish a config file

Read the specifics on Github.

Usage

Assuming you've got an image named `kayaks.jpg` in `app/storage/images` (this directory can be customized in the config file) you can use this code in a blade view:

<img src=&quot;{{ GlideImage::setImagePath('kayaks.jpg')->setConversionParameters(['w'=> 50, 'filt'=>'greyscale']) }}&quot; />

The function will output an URL to a greyscale version of kayaks.jpg that has a width of 50 pixels. As soon as the URL gets hit by your browser, the image will be generated on the fly. The generated image will be saved in app/storage/glide-cache (= the cache directory specified in the input file).

The generated URL will also be signed to prevent jerks from generating unwanted manipulations.

The setConversionParameters-function accepts an array with conversion options. You can take a look at the image API of Glide to see which options are available.

It's also possible to generate an image directly on the server:

GlideImage::setImagePath('kayaks.jpg')
    ->setConversionParameters(['w'=> 50, 'filt'=>'greyscale'])
    ->save($fileWhereImageManipulationMustBeSaved);

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Zend Framework 3 will be an evolution from ZF2, concentrating on simplicity, reusability, and performance.

http://framework.zend.com/blog/announcing-the-zend-framework-3-roadmap.html

Optimizing for PHP7, and supporting PHP 5.5 seems like a good idea.

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This is a spaceship operator: "<=> ". It's still being discussed but there's a big chance you'll get to use it in PHP7.

The operator returns 0 if both operands are equal, 1 if the left is greater, and -1 if the right is greater.

Instead of this

function order_func($a, $b) {
    return ($a < $b) ? -1 : (($a > $b) ? 1 : 0);
}

you can do

function order_func($a, $b) {
    return $a <=> $b;
}

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Today the maintainers of PHP voted on whether they should add return type declarations in PHP7. And guess what, it passed!

So in PHP7 you can declare this function that guaranties that an array will be returned.

function foo(): array {
    return [];
}

You will be able to add a return type for closures, function, generators and class methods. Code which does not declare a return type will continue to work exactly as it currently does.

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Because the properties for the object are predefined PHP no longer has to store the data in a hashtable, but instead can say that `$foo` is property 0, `$bar` is property 1, `$baz` is property 2 and then just store the properties in a three-element C array.

This means that PHP only needs one hashtable in the class that does the property-name to offset mapping and uses a memory-efficient C-array in the individual objects. Arrays on the other hand need the hashtable for every array.

https://gist.github.com/nikic/5015323

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Bye bye sleep.

http://php-books.com/

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Glide is a wonderfully easy on-demand image manipulation library written in PHP. It’s straightforward API is exposed via HTTP, similar to cloud image processing services like Imgix and Cloudinary. Glide leverages powerful libraries like Intervention Image (for image handling and manipulation) and Flysystem (for file system abstraction).

http://glide.thephpleague.com/

It comes with the ability to secure image URL's using a private signing key. I'm a bit worried about flooding the server but the owner of the package states that

... the cache filesystem + caching in league/flystem (with Redis/Memcache) should (at least this is the case in my testing) result in a speedy response...

There's also a risk that over time your cache will become gigantic. The maintainers of the package are already discussing possible solutions.

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Capistrano is a server automation and deployment tool. It makes a whole bunch of servers simultaneously perform actions. This could be deploying our application, or clearing their cache.

Capistrano tells each of our servers to pull the latest branch from Git, perform any necessary build steps, and deploy the application on itself. Setting up this process is what we'll be detailing.

https://www.airpair.com/laravel/posts/automating-laravel-deployments-using-capistrano

If you want to use something simpler, take a look at Deployer.

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Got to love Illuminate\Support\Collection.

http://vimeo.com/115719437

 

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Here's a big list of things to be aware of when switching an http site over to https. Ignore the bit about social buttons, just don't use them.

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A perceptual hash is a fingerprint of a multimedia file derived from various features from its content. Unlike cryptographic hash functions which rely on the avalanche effect of small changes in input leading to drastic changes in the output, perceptual hashes are "close" to one another if the features are similar.

The code: https://github.com/jenssegers/php-imagehash

The blogpost: http://jenssegers.be/blog/61/perceptual-image-hashes

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PHPCI is a free and open source continuous integration tool specifically designed for PHP. Built with simplicity in mind and featuring integrations with all of your favourite testing tools, we've created the very best platform for testing your PHP projects.

https://www.phptesting.org/

Over at Sitepoint Peter Nijssen wrote a good overview of the offered functionality.

I've been playing around with the self-hosted version. It comes with a bunch of plugins that are installed by default.

I can recommended it if you, like me, are starting out with CI.

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Let's talk a bit about deployments.

All the new projects I work on are hosted on servers that are provisioned by Forge. Forge has a quick deploy feature that allows you to pull the lastest master-commit onto the server, install composer dependencies, run migrations and so on.

It has two main drawbacks:

• you can't see any output of the deployment script in your terminal
• you can't do some stuff locally on your computer

To solve these points I'm switching from Forge's quick deploy feature to Deployer.

Deployer is a deployment tool written in PHP, it's simple and functional. Deploy your code to all servers you want, it supports deploy via copy, or via VCS (like git), or via rsync. Run your tasks on all your servers, or use our recipes of common tasks for Symfony, Laravel, Zend Framework and Yii.

You can install Deployer via composer. To use Deployer a deploy.php file must be added to your project. This file describes your deployment process. No worries, you can write it in php using a very clean and readable syntax. The documention on how to write the deploy.php-file is a bit vague at this point, but you'll get a good idea of how things work by taking a look at my deploy.php-file.

To run deployer you'll use this command:

[code lang="bash"] dep

I've made a bash alias that uses the name of the git branch you're currently on:

[code lang="bash"]
alias deploy='dep deploy $(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)'

Now deploying a branch is as easy as just typing "deploy" when standing on a git repo in your terminal. This is a much nicer way to handle deployments. What I really like is that, now a deploy.php stored in the git repo, the deployment process is also versioned.

If you find Deployer doesn't meet your needs, Rocketeer, Phing and Capistrano are some more advanced alternatives. Envoy is nice too, but I haven't found a way to run stuff locally.

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This package ensures that your application doesn't have installed dependencies with known security vulnerabilities.

...

The checks are only executed when adding a new dependency via composer require or when running composer update: deploying an application with a valid composer.lock and via composer install won't trigger any security versions checking.

https://github.com/Roave/SecurityAdvisories

Awesome idea! It works by leveraging the "conflict"-property in the composer.json-file of the package.

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A command bus helps separating business logic from all the stuff that needs to be done to communicate over the web.

Shawn McCool wrote up a good overview about the subject.

Think of a typical controller. Inside, you might find interactions with the model, form validation, and response generation; which includes view template rendering or redirect header generation. Some of these actions are related directly to the web, some of them directly to the core of your application.

http://shawnmc.cool/command-bus

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https://github.com/thephpleague/commonmark

This Markdown parser is released by the League of Extraordinary Packages, a group of developers who have banded together to build solid, well tested PHP packages using modern coding standards.

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The VarDumper component provides mechanisms for walking through any arbitrary PHP variable. Built on top, it provides a better dump() function that you can use instead of var_dump.

http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/var_dumper/introduction.html

Bruno Skvorc wrote a nice article about it on Sitepoint.com.

Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, announced VarDumper will be included by default in Laravel 5.

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CodeIgniter 3.0 will support PHP 5.2. Anthony Ferrara wrote an interesting article on his blog why that's a very bad thing.

http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/on-php-version-requirements.html

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Sitemap is a package built specifically for Laravel 4/5 that will help you generate XML sitemaps for Google. Based on laravel-sitemap this package operates in a slightly different way to better fit the needs of our project. A facade is used to access the sitemap class and we have added the ability to produce sitemap indexes as well as sitemaps. Furthermore, it's tested.

https://github.com/dwightwatson/sitemap

Using this on polkadots.be.

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