This a video of a great lecture Bob Martin gave a couple of years ago. Even if you know the solid principles it's great to hear him talk about the origin of Objective C, what makes object orientation (not) special and so much 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
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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
Ivan Sieder offers a nice tip on how to write better v-for loops in VueJS component templates.
There is really nothing wrong with the above code, but there is a small aspect, which really bugs me. As you can see, we are repeating the product identifier inside the output twice ({{ product.name }} and {{ product.price }}).We are modern web developers (at least I hope so) and therefore we are going to use modern ES6 functionality. The feature we are going to use is called destructuring assignment. Basically, what the destructuring assignment allows us to do, is to pull a specific property off of an object and store it in a variable.
https://simedia.tech/blog/vue-js-destructuring-assignment-for-loops/
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.
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.
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
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.
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
On the madewithlove blog Frederick Vanbrabant wrote a post on how he and colleague improved the PWA score of their company site.
So the first thing you should know about PWA (or progressive web apps) is that it’s an adaptation of your current site or web app. This means that if you want to have all the features of a progressive web app, you are going to need to change your current site/application. The good news here is that they are all changes you would want to have anyway.
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 && $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/
Sebastian De Deyne, author of many Spatie packages, posted a new blog article on how to generate SEO Friendly Urls in Laravel.
When admins create or update an news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it's title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. On the other hand, if we wouldn't regenerate the url on updates, titles that were edited later on would still have an old slug in the url, which isn't an ideal situation either.
https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/non-breaking-seo-friendly-urls-in-laravel
David Gilbertson tells you all about polyfills.
Faced with the reality that you can’t write modern code and expect it to work for all users, you have exactly two choices:
- Only use language features available in all the browsers you support
- Write modern code, then do something to make it work in older browsers
If you have decided on option one then I respectfully suggest that you are bonkers, and insist that you state your case in the comments. I believe that developers who are able to explore all the new stuff and use it in their day-to-day jobs stay happy, and being happy is important.
https://hackernoon.com/polyfills-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-or-maybe-a-bit-less-7c8de164e423
Scott Arciszewski debunks the commonly given advice on securing your PHP installation by setting some php.ini values.
There have been countless examples posted in various places (Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook, Slashdot, and even LinkedIn group discussions), and while a handful occasionally contain one or two tips that might be beneficial towards securing your PHP applications, almost all of the advice they contain is either wrong, a huge waste of time, downright silly, or all of above.As part of a team that specializes in application security (in particular: securing PHP applications), I feel it's high time someone cleared the air about this advice.
https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/01/configuration-driven-php-security-advice-considered-harmful
Apart from our open source work, we do client work at Spatie as well. Over the years we've learned that one of the most critical moments of a project is when it is going live. No matter how you confident you are about the correctness of the code base there are so many big and little things that…
In a mail sent to all subscribers on the testdrivenlaravel.com-mailinglist Adam Wathan mentioned a talk Sandi Metz gave a couple of years ago at Rails Conf. It's a really good talk that explains in a clear way when and what you should test.
Tests are supposed to save us money. How is it, then, that many times they become millstones around our necks, gradually morphing into fragile, breakable things that raise the cost of change? We write too many tests and we test the wrong kinds of things. This talk strips away the veil and offers simple, practical guidelines for choosing what to test and how to test it. Finding the right testing balance isn't magic, it's a magic trick; come and learn the secret of writing stable tests that protect your application at the lowest possible cost.
Freek Lijten, a developer at Schiphol, makes the case for just setting a sane default value instead of throwing an exception when invalid input entered the application.
I didn't think much of this, but I've seen a major drawback lately while working on a site that is a bit bigger than I was used to. With over half a million visitors a week and lots of scrapers, bots and other stuff visiting, these exceptions and fatal errors clog up logging quite a bit. Not to the point that we can't handle the volume, but it generates false positives in monitoring channels and it is something we do not want to act upon anyway.
http://www.freeklijten.nl/2017/01/04/Sane-defaults-over-Exceptions
Mohamed Said explains the not so well known sometimes validation rule in Laravel.
Laravel's validation library is very powerful and easy to use, using a few keystrokes you can build a strong defence around your application, preventing invalid user input from corrupting the application flow and potentially introducing bugs....
In this post I'd like to highlight a trick related to conditionally adding validation rules.
http://themsaid.com/laravel-advanced-validation-conditionally-adding-rules-20170110/
To learn more read the relevant section in the Laravel docs.
Jeff Geerling, currently working as a technical architect at Aquina, wrote a good post on when and why he closes PRs to the packages he's maintaining. This paragraph resonated with me.
I don't cater to everyone. I usually cater to myself. And for 98% of my OSS projects, I'm actually using them, live, in production (often for dozens or hundreds of projects). So I'm generally happy with them as they are. I will not add something that increases my maintenance burden unless it's very compelling functionality or an obvious bugfix. I can't maintain a system I don't fully understand, so I like keeping things lighter and cutting off edge cases rather than adding technical debt I don't have time to pay off.
http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/why-i-close-prs-oss-project-maintainer-notes
David Gilbertson made a lighting fast site and wrote a fantastic article about it.
Writing a fast website is like raising a puppy, it requires constancy and consistency (both over time and from everyone involved). You can do a great job keeping everything lean and mean, but if you get sloppy and use an 11 KB library to format a date and let the puppy shit in the bed just one time, you’ve undone a lot of hard work and have some cleaning up to do.
https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7
Starting from tomorrow PHP 5.6. will not be actively supported anymore. Sebastian Bergmann, author of PHPUnit explains how PHP's release process works, and what the ending of active support means for you. Spoiler: you should upgrade asap.
It is high time to think about upgrading your PHP stack to PHP 7, ideally to PHP 7.1. This should be a short-term goal for you.Upgrading the version of PHP you use must not be a rare event you are afraid of. You must not think of upgrading your PHP stack as a "special project". You need to make upgrading the PHP version you use part of your normal operational procedure and align the upgrade cycle of your PHP stack with the release cycle of the PHP project. This should be a long-term goal for you.
https://thephp.cc/news/2016/12/php-5-active-support-ends-now-what
