Freek.dev

When installing an SSL certificate on your server you should install all intermediate certificates as well. If you fail to do so, some browsers will reported “untrusted” warnings for your site like this one.

Searching and downloading those intermediate certificates can be a hassle.

Today my colleagues at Spatie and I launched certificatechain.io. This online tool helps you download all intermediate certificates. Just paste or upload your certificate and you'll get a file containing the entire trust chain that you can install on your server.

The site is built with Laravel 5 and uses the SSL certificate chain resolver we made last month.

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PHP has been supporting type-hints on complex types for quite some time already: PHP 5.0 for objects, 5.1 for array and 5.4 for callable. The question of extending this support to scalar types (integer, float, boolean and string) as been discussed several times those last years, each time with a bit more support.

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PHP-DI is an easy to integrate IoC container that you can use in legacy projects or in apps without a framework.

I regularly have to use Zend Framework 1 for some legacy apps. If you're used to having an IoC container to inject dependencies then not having one is a big pain. Here's a guide on how to integrate it in ZF1:

http://php-di.org/doc/frameworks/zf1.html

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A great talk by John Arstingstall about dependency injection, aka the ioC Container.

http://vimeo.com/88888213

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Laravel 5 has just been released!

http://laravel.com/

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Obfuscating ids in urls is a great way of hiding your application's internals from your visitors. It reduces the chance for malicious users to guess urls and prevents everyone from knowing how many user accounts or articles your website has.

http://jenssegers.be/blog/64/easy-id-obfuscation-with-laravel-5

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Yep.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1868874/does-php-run-faster-without-warnings/1869185#1869185

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An old, but still relevant, blogpost by Derick Rethans (of Xdebug fame) about why the @-operator should be avoided.

http://derickrethans.nl/five-reasons-why-the-shutop-operator-should-be-avoided.html

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Seeding as it is currently done in Laravel is intended only for dev builds, but what if you want to seed a production database with different data from what you use in development? What if you want to seed a table you've added to a database that is currently in production with new data?

This package allows you to use Laravel seeders in the same way you're using migrations.

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Back in September Taylor Otwell said that Laravel 4.3 would be renamed to Laravel 5 to reflect a directory change and “other interesting initiatives”. Since that announcement the excitement for Laravel 5 has been building and “other interesting initiatives” turned into almost two dozen new features to help developers be more productive.

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One thing frameworks have been providing for many years is HTTP message abstraction. PSR-7 aims to provide a common set of interfaces so that frameworks can use the same set of abstractions. This will enable developers to write re-usable, framework-agnostic web components that frameworks can consume.

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This weekend at the PHPBenelux 2015 conference I went to a session about higher order programming by Mathias Verraes. Higher-order programming is a style of programming that uses functions as values.

During the session Mathias demonstrated his Lamdalicious library. This library brings the principles of LISP to PHP. The talk was very fast paced and everything was live coded. PHP was misused to the fullest: global variables, error suppression, ... and there was lots of recursion going on. Basically he was constructing another language in PHP. During the talk there were lots of ooohhss and aaahhhss in the room, so I suspect I was not the only one enjoying it.

If you are intrigued by this, be sure to read his blog post on the subject. The blog post is essentially the written down version of the talk.

You'll never use any of this code in production, but that's not the goal of the library. Like when doing code katas, the train of thought is much more important than the result.

Here's another wonderful blog post.

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Composer is one of the most important pillars of the PHP renaissance. If you're not using it, you're doing it wrong.

It's main repository Packagist reports that there were 525 773 737 package installs since april 2012.

https://packagist.org/statistics

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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

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

Usage

<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.

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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