Freek.dev

When working on projects I found myself, over time, needing the same string functions over and over again. Things like how to shorten a string but still let it end on entire word, replace the last occurrence of string in a string, ...

Instead of keeping these functions in a helper file locally in the project, I made a package out of it. It was a good opportunity to spice it up with bit of OO to make them chainable. An example:

[code] // outputs "MIDDLE" echo string('StartMiddleEnd')->between('Start', 'End')->toUpper();

In addition to it's own methods, the package provides <a href="https://github.com/spatie/string#integration-with-underscorephp">an integration</a> with <a href="https://github.com/Anahkiasen/underscore-php">Maxime Fabre's underscore package</a>.

You are very welcome to submit pull requests to add functions that you feel are missing. Be sure to include some unit tests to ensure everything working as intended.

Granted,  it isn't the most sexy package in the world, but it sure is handy.

<a href="https://github.com/spatie/string">https://github.com/spatie/string</a>

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Laravel offers a nice way to add pagination. As far as your routes are concerned you don't have to do a thing. It just works out of the box. Unfortunately the generated url's are pretty ugly: http://example.com/news?page=2 What we want are url's that look like this: http://example.com/news/page/2…

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Interfaces are more susceptible to BC breaks than concrete classes. Once an interface is published as “stable”, I don’t see how it can be changed at all per the rules of SemVer (that is, unless you bump the major version). The only thing you can do to maintain BC is add an entirely new interface to the package while leaving the old one in place, perhaps even extending the old one if needed.

http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6136

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There was much discussion on Twitter about the concepts of using “final” and “private” in objects, and what exactly the best practices are. The conversation seemed to boil down to three distinct questions:

• Should an object be open for extension, and expose its internals for that purpose?
• Does exposure of those internals create a de facto contract with children for their behavior?
• Should software only be used as intended by its designers, or should it be modified, extended and changed by the end user to fit certain, specific goals?

http://www.brandonsavage.net/what-about-final-and-private/

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Active support for PHP 5.4 ended on September 14, 2014 and active support for PHP 5.5 will end on June 20, 2015. The active support for PHP 5.3 already ended on July 11, 2013. By the time PHPUnit 4.8 will be released, the only actively supported version of PHP will be PHP 5.6.

The next version after PHPUnit 4.8 will not support PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4, and PHP 5.5 anymore. As PHPUnit follows Semantic Versioning the major version number must be incremented when the minimum required version of PHP is increased.

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/wiki/Release-Announcement-for-PHPUnit-4.7.0#phpunit-50

Nice!

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Satis allows you to require private php packages in your projects. One of it's authors is Jordi Boggiano of composer/packagist fame. Over at the excellent Laravelista blog Mario Bašić explains how to install and use it.

I was working on three projects at the same time and I've found myself copying code from one project to another and then making small changes. And then I recognized a pattern. ...

I created a package and as soon as it was ready for GitHub I remembered: "I can't open source this...". The package contained few paid html templates, company logo's, slogans, specific company text etc. ...

This post will explain what Satis is, when to use it and how to set it up on your server.

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Nearly all greenfield projects at Spatie are built with Laravel. A few months ago I made laravel-analytics, a package to fetch data from Google Analytics.

Spatie exists for more than ten years so there are quite a few legacy projects as well. In those projects there is also a need to display some analytics data in the admin-section. Recently Google retired some of their older API's. Unfortunately our old solution to fetch GA data stopped working.

To resolve this problem my colleague Sebastian created a framework agnostic version of laravel-analytics that works with PHP 5.3. If you also have a legacy project that needs some data from Analytics, you can install the package via composer.

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The past few months, I've been trying out some podcasts. Listening to them is an easy way to learn about and stay in touch with the sprawling range of topics that could interest a developer. These are my favourites:

The Laravel Podcast

The Laravel podcast focusses on Laravel (of course) and the latests trends in the PHP world. The podcast is hosted by Matt Stauffer. Jeffrey Way and Taylor Otwell are regular guests. Recently the format of the show was changed: episodes are now around 30 minutes in length, which I think is great.

Listen in iTunes Follow on Twitter

Full Stack Radio

This podcast isn't narrowly focused on one subject. In each episode Adam Watham interviews one guest. Topics range from product design to system administration and everything in between. To give you an idea: the last episodes saw Adam Culp talking about conferences, Kent Beck about application architecture and Konstantin Kudryashov about BDD and TDD.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

Dev Discussions

In this podcast Shawn McCool talks with other webapplication dev's mainly about programming concepts. Past episodes touched functional programming, event sourcing, ActiveRecord and Datamapper. Shawn recently recorded a talk with Mathias Verraes and Ross Tuck. Let's hope it gets published soon.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

PHP Roundtable

The roundtable was created by Sammy Kaye Powers. On each episode several developers discuss various topics concerning PHP and it's ecosystem.

Listen on iTunes Follow on Twitter

I'm sure there are many other great podcasts out there. If you know one, please let me (and the other readers of this blog) know in the comments below.

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Q: What is the difference between these four promises?

doSomething().then(function () {
  return doSomethingElse();
});
doSomething().then(function () {
doSomethingElse();
});
doSomething().then(doSomethingElse());
doSomething().then(doSomethingElse);

</div>
If you know the answer, then congratulations: you're a promises ninja. You have my permission to stop reading this blog post.</blockquote>
<a href="http://pouchdb.com/2015/05/18/we-have-a-problem-with-promises.html">http://pouchdb.com/2015/05/18/we-have-a-problem-with-promises.html</a>


                    

                                    
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