Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

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Phoenix LiveView: Interactive, Real-Time Apps. No Need to Write JavaScript.

Link – Jan 14th 2019 – dockyard.com

Chris McCord, author of the Phoenix Framework, will soon release a new feature called LiveView: a way of making interactive apps without JavaScript. It's powered by WebSockets, morphdom

Phoenix LiveView is an exciting new library which enables rich, real-time user experiences with server-rendered HTML. LiveView powered applications are stateful on the server with bidrectional communication via WebSockets, offering a vastly simplified programming model compared to JavaScript alternatives. While modern JavaScript tooling enables sophisticated client applications, it often comes at an extreme cost in complexity and maintainability

Tips to Speed up Your Phpunit Tests

Link – Jan 10th 2019 – laravel-news.com

On the Laravel News blog, Tim MacDonald wrote a nice collection of tips on how to make PHPUnit tests run faster.

Having a fast test suite can be just as important as having a fast application. As a developer, getting feedback quickly about the state of your code allows for a much quicker development turnaround. Here we are going to run through some tips you can implement today to make your tests run faster.

New in PHP 7.4

Link – Jan 9th 2019 – stitcher.io

PHP 7.4, which will be released around December 2019, will bring a couple of nice features such as typed properties, preloading, improved type variance, ... In a new post on his blog my colleague Brent gives a nice overview of what to expect

The Laracon Online 2018 videos have been released

Link – Jan 9th 2019 – laracon.net

Laracon Online 2018 was held last year in February. It featured cool talks by Chris Fidao, Wes Bos and of course Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. In tandem with the start of the ticketsales of the 2019 edition, the videos of the 2018 edition have been released.

Watch them all here:

A middleware to allow long requests

Tweet – Jan 9th 2019 – twitter.com

One of the smallest pieces of middleware I've written, but feels a lot cleaner to abstract it instead of having these implementation details in a controller pic.twitter.com/AR3vOMKMM9
— Sebastian De Deyne (@sebdedeyne) January 8, 2019

Using GraphQL with Laravel and Vue

Link – Jan 9th 2019

In this video tutorial Andre Madarang gives a clear intro in how to use GraphQL in a Laravel app. The packages he uses are Lighthouse and vue-appolo.

laravel-backup v6 has been released

Original – Jan 8th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

laravel-backup is a Laravel package that can backup your application. It can create a zip containing a dump of your database together with other files that you can select. Using the power of Laravel's filesystem abstraction this zip can than be uploaded to one or more remote filesystems. The package…

Preventing spam submitted through forms

Original – Jan 7th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

When adding a form to a public site, there's a risk that spam bots will try to submit it with fake values. We recently released a new package, called laravel-honeypot, that can detect these spammy requests. How honeypots work The majority of spam bots are pretty dumb. You can thwart most of them by…

Swapping variables using array destructuring

Tweet – Jan 5th 2019 – twitter.com

? You can use array destructuring to swap values between variables pic.twitter.com/dxdIipgE1M
— Brandon Dail (@aweary) December 28, 2018

React Hooks: Array Destructuring Fundamentals

Link – Jan 3rd 2019

Kent C. Dodds wrote a cool post how an upcoming React feature, called Hooks, works on the hood.

React’s upcoming useState hook relies on array destructuring, let’s dive in and see how that feature works.

https://blog.kentcdodds.com/react-hooks-array-destructuring-fundamentals-952fbfd57ea

Laravel Core Adventures

Link – Jan 3rd 2019

Christopher Rumpel launched a new video series on how Laravel works on the hood.

Laravel Core Adventures is a video series which explains how Laravel works under the hood. You will get several videos on different difficulty levels to learn about each topic. The first videos below are about the Laravel request lifecycle. Expect more to come when the full site is released in early 2019.

https://laravelcoreadventures.com/

Get the exit code in a series of pipes in Bash

Tweet – Jan 3rd 2019 – twitter.com

TIL: $PIPESTATUS lets you access the exit code of a command used in a series of pipes in Bash pic.twitter.com/eRVrPQwnve
— Mattias Geniar (@mattiasgeniar) January 2, 2019

Presentation skills for programmers

Link – Jan 3rd 2019

In this fantastic talk given at the uncon of Laracon EU 2018, Chris Brown gives many actionable tips for aspiring and experienced speakers.

A recap of 2018

Original – Dec 29th 2018 by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

Now that 2018 is coming to a close, a lot of awesome people have written a recap post. Here's mine! The most significant change on a personal level is that my girlfriend an I bought a house in Ghent. Together with our two kids, we moved this summer, and we now live in an awesome house that's very…

Our GitLab CI pipeline for Laravel applications

Link – Dec 12th 2018 – ohdear.app

Over at the Oh Dear! blog, my buddy Mattias described how we use Gitlab CI to test our app.

That's why we're releasing our Gitlab CI pipeline that is optimized for Laravel applications. It contains all the elements you'd expect: building (composer, yarn & webpack), database seeding, PHPUnit & copy/paste (mess) detectors & some basic security auditing of our 3rd party dependencies.

Handcrafting mocks

Original – Dec 12th 2018 by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

In an application I was working on I wanted to implement automated tweets. Of course, this logic should also be tested. In this blogpost I'd like to show you how you can easily handcraft your own mocks. Setting things up Let's first take a look at how you can tweet something in PHP. We're going to…

How To Install PHP 7.3

Link – Dec 10th 2018

Want to upgrade to the PHP release? Here are some instructions written down by Colin O' Dell.

PHP 7.3 has been released, bringing some great new features to the language such as trailing commas in function calls, throwing errors when JSON parsing fails, array_key_first() / array_key_last() functions, and much more! Here's a brief guide on how to install PHP 7.3 on Linux, Windows, and OS X:

https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201812/how-install-php-73

Implementing the change-password-url spec in Laravel

Tweet – Dec 7th 2018 – twitter.com

Implementing the change-password-url spec in Laravel (aka: it's really dead simple) https://t.co/ow1PNMqecy pic.twitter.com/kTJK6Jq5rn
— /dev/eloper (@mattiasgeniar) December 7, 2018

Global Application Settings in Laravel

Link – Dec 7th 2018 – laravel-news.com

In a post on Laravel News, Tim MacDonald shares how you can use our valuestore package to power a settings function.

I really like the simplicity this package introduces to enable you to store some loose values. I’ve always felt storing this kind of data in the database with some sort of key / value pair setup was never quite right.

How to backup your app and database to Google Drive

Link – Dec 6th 2018 – medium.com

Dennis Smink wrote a nice post on how you can use our backup package to backup your application to Google Drive. He includes all steps necessary to authenticate with Google Drive.

Backups are important, period. You will be needing these once your server or server provider suddenly dies. In this tutorial I will cover how to setup Google Drive backup, with Spatie’s backup package, Googles Flysystem and Laravel.