Rob Allen's DevNotes – Developing software in the Real World

Using .vimrc for project specific settings

I'm more of a spaces person than a tabs person when it comes to source code and in Vim, I like to see the tab characters, so I have this setting:

set listchars=tab:\⇥\ ,trail:·,extends:>,precedes:<,nbsp:+

1	set listchars=tab:\⇥\ ,trail:·,extends:>,precedes:<,nbsp:+

This places a handy ⇥ character so that I can see the tabs: I'm currently working on a codebase where the coding style is to use tabs, so I need to change my settings. One option is to use EditorConfig, for the formatting… continue reading.

Posted on 25 July 2018 in Software Leave a comment

Notes for working on the OpenWhisk PHP Runtime

These are some notes for working on the OpenWhisk PHP Runtime, but are probably applicable to the other runtimes too. Setting up I have a clone of the runtimes I'm interested in and core side-by-side in a directory. You then need various tools for development, which are documented here for macOS & Ubuntu in the Prerequites section. Build the container The PHP runtime creates two containers, one for PHP 7.1 and one for PHP 7.2.… continue reading.

Posted on 4 July 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP One comment so far

Using Fractal as your OpenWhisk API's view layer

When writing an API, it's common to produce an output that conforms to a known media type such as JSON API or HAL, etc. I'm a strong believer that even though I'm writing an API, my application has a view layer. It's not the same as building an HTML page, but you still need to separate out the code that creates the structured output from your model layer. For a couple of APIs that I've… continue reading.

Posted on 27 June 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP One comment so far

Dependency Injection with OpenWhisk PHP

Any non-trivial PHP applications use various components to do its work, from PDO though to classes from Packagist. It's fairly common in a standard PHP application to use Dependency Injection to configure and load these classes when necessary. How do we do this in a serverless environment such as OpenWhisk? This question comes up because we do not have a single entry point into our application, instead we have one entry point per action. If… continue reading.

Posted on 20 June 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP, Serverless Framework Leave a comment

Using API Gateway with Serverless & OpenWhisk

As with all serverless offerings OpenWhisk offers an API Gateway to provide HTTP routing to your serverless actions. This provides a number of advantages over web actions, the most significant of which are routing based on HTTP method, authentication and custom domains (in IBM Cloud). Creating routes with the wsk CLI To route to an action using API Gateway, you first need to make your action a web action first:

$ wsk action update todo-backend/listTodos listTodos.php --web raw

1	$ wsk action update todo-backend/listTodos listTodos.php --web raw

(You can also use… continue reading.

Posted on 13 June 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP, Serverless Framework One comment so far

Using Composer with Serverless & OpenWhisk

Every PHP project I write has dependencies on components from Packagist and my Serverless OpenWhisk PHP projects are no different. It turns out that adding Composer dependencies is trivial. Let's create a simple action that converts a number to it's string form. e.g. 123 becomes one hundred and twenty three. We'll start with our simple ow-php-hello project from my earlier article and add a new function to serverless.yml:

functions:
  n2w:
    handler: n2w.main

1

2

3

functions:

n2w:

handler: n2w.main

Our handler is n2w.main, so we… continue reading.

Posted on 6 June 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP, Serverless Framework Leave a comment

Using Serverless Framework with OpenWhisk PHP

Serverless Framework is a toolkit to help you mange and deploy a serverless application. (Personally, I'm not a fan of the name as the word "Serverless" already has a meaning in the same space!) It's a useful tool and supports all the major providers, though AWS Lambda seems to be first-among-equals. The OpenWhisk plugin for Serverless is maintained by the rather excellent James Thomas, so if you have any questions, ping him! As I build… continue reading.

Posted on 31 May 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP, Serverless Framework Leave a comment

Invoking many OpenWhisk actions from another one

I have a project where I need to store a number of items into a data store. I have an OpenWhisk action that stores the items so I wrote an action that takes advantage of the OpenWhisk JS client library to do invoke my store action once for each item in an array that this action receives. This is the JavaScript code that I used:

"use strict";

const openwhisk = require('openwhisk');

async function main(params) {
    if (!params.items) {
        return {error: "No items"}
    }

    const action = "my_api/store")
    const ow = openwhisk();

    console.log(params.items.length + " items to be invoked")
    let actions = params.items.map(function (item) {
        return ow.actions.invoke({actionName: action, params: {item: item}});
    });

    try {
        const responses = await Promise.all(actions);
    } catch (err) {
        console.error('Error invoking actions', err)
        return Promise.reject({error: err});
    }
    console.log(actions.length + " actions invoked")
    return {number_stored: actions.length}
 }


exports.main = main;

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

"use strict";

const openwhisk = require('openwhisk');

async function main(params) {

if (!params.items) {

return {error: "No items"}

}

const action = "my_api/store")

const ow = openwhisk();

console.log(params.items.length + " items to be invoked")

let actions = params.items.map(function (item) {

return ow.actions.invoke({actionName: action, params: {item: item}});

});

try {

const responses = await Promise.all(actions);

} catch (err) {

console.error('Error invoking actions', err)

return Promise.reject({error: err});

}

console.log(actions.length + " actions invoked")

return {number_stored: actions.length}

}

exports.main = main;

This is a NodeJS v8 action (–kind nodejs:8 when… continue reading.

Posted on 14 March 2018 in JS, OpenWhisk Leave a comment

Using async/await in OpenWhisk

I'm currently writing an OpenWhisk action in JavaScript that searches Twitter using their API. To do this, I need to get a bearer token from one API endpoint and then call the search endpoint. Disclaimer: I'm in no way a JavaScript expert, so I would love it if you could constructively suggest improvements in the comments! To do this in OpenWhisk, you need to use Promises like this:

Posted on 7 March 2018 in JS, OpenWhisk One comment so far

Automated Testing for PHP training course

I'm delighted to announce my new venture, PHP Training, with my friend Gary Hockin. As you can probably guess from the name, PHP Training is a training organisation where we provide public training courses on topics related to PHP. These courses will be held in person, initially at various venues in the UK, and are taught by Gary and myself. Both of us are experienced trainers and this is the first time we've offered training… continue reading.

Posted on 17 January 2018 in PHP, PHP Training View all 4 comments