Default route arguments in Slim

A friend of mine recently asked how to do default route arguments and route specific configuration in Slim, so I thought I'd write up how to do it. Consider a simple Hello route: $app->get("/hello[/{name}]", function ($request, $response, $args) { $name = $request->getAttribute('name'); return $response->write("Hello $name"); }) This will display "Hello " for the URL /hello and "Hello Rob" for the URL /hello/Rob. If we wanted a default of "World", we can set an argument on… continue reading.

Posted on 14 June 2017 in Slim Framework, Slim Framework 3

Slim's route cache file

When you have a lot of routes, that have parameters, consider using the router's cache file to speed up performance. To do this, you set the routerCacheFile setting to a valid file name. The next time the app is run, then the file is created which contains an associative array with data that means that the router doesn't need to recompile the regular expressions that it uses. For example: $config = [ 'settings' => [… continue reading.

Posted on 31 May 2017 in PHP, Slim Framework, Slim Framework 3

Inserting binary data into SQL Server with ZF1 & PHP 7

If you want to insert binary data into SQL Server in Zend Framework 1 then you probably used the trick of setting an array as the parameter's value with the info required by the sqlsrv driver as noted in Some notes on SQL Server blobs with sqlsrv. Essentially you do this; $data['filename'] = 'test.gif'; $data["file_contents"] = array( $binaryData, SQLSRV_PARAM_IN, SQLSRV_PHPTYPE_STREAM(SQLSRV_ENC_BINARY), SQLSRV_SQLTYPE_VARBINARY('max') ); $db->insert($data); Where $db is an instance of Zend_Db_Adapter_Sqlsrv. If you use SQL Server… continue reading.

Posted on 22 May 2017 in PHP, Zend Framework 1

Autocomplete Composer script names on the command line

As I add more and more of my own script targets to my composer.json files, I find that it would be helpful to have tab autocomplete in bash. I asked on Twitter and didn't get an immediate solution and as I had already done something similar for Phing, I rolled up my sleeves and wrote my own. Start by creating a new bash completion file called composer in the bash_completion.d directory. This file needs executable… continue reading.

Posted on 15 May 2017 in Computing, PHP

Switching OpenWhisk environments

When developing with OpenWhisk, it's useful to use separate environments for working locally or on the cloud for development, staging and production of your application. In OpenWhisk terms, this means setting the host and the API key for your wsk command line application. $ wsk property set –apihost $host –auth $key (Of course, for live and staging, ideally, you will be using a build server!) For a Vagrant install of OpenWhisk, the host is 192.168.33.13… continue reading.

Posted on 19 April 2017 in Bluemix, OpenWhisk

POSTing data using KituraNet

I had a need to send a POST request with a JSON body from Swift and as I had KituraNet and SwiftyJSON already around, it proved to reasonably easy. To send a POST request using KituraNet, I wrote this code: let url = "http://httpbin.org/post". // Change to the actual URL let dataToSend = ["foo": ["bar": "baz"]] // Change to the actual data // body needs to be of type Data, use SwiftyJSON to convert let… continue reading.

Posted on 10 April 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

Using CircleCI for a PHP project

For a new client project, I've decided to use CircleCI to run my tests every time I push to GitHub. This turned out to be quite easy; this is how I did it. I started by creating a config file, .circleci/config.yml containing the following: version: 2 jobs: build: working_directory: /var/www/html docker: – image: php:7.1-apache environment: APP_ENV: test steps: – run: name: Install system packages command: apt-get update && apt-get -y install git – run: name:… continue reading.

Posted on 3 April 2017 in PHP

Automatically converting PDF to Keynote

I use rst2pdf to create presentations which provides me with a PDF file. When it comes to presenting on stage, on Linux there are tools such as pdfpc and on Mac there's Keynote. Keynote doesn't read PDF files by default, so we have to convert them and the tool I use for this is Melissa O'Neill's PDF to Keynote. This is a GUI tool, so I manually create the Keynote file when I need it… continue reading.

Posted on 30 March 2017 in Computing, rst2pdf

Detecting OpenWhisk web actions

I've already written about OpenWhisk web actions and how they allow you to send a status code and HTTP headers to the client by returning a dictionary with the keys status, headers and body from your main() method: func main(args: [String:Any]) -> [String:Any] { return [ "body": "Hello world", "statusCode": 200, "headers": [ "Content-Type": "text/xml", ], ] } If this test action is in the default namespace, then we create it with wsk action update… continue reading.

Posted on 27 March 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

Calling an OpenWhisk action in Swift

As OpenWhisk is a Functions as a Service system, it makes sense to create actions that do one thing and call other actions when they want other work done. As an example, in DrinksChooser, the choose action calls the incrementDrinkCount action which increments the count of the recommended drink in Redis. This way, choose doesn't have to know anything about Redis as that's not its job. In OpenWhisk's Swift environment, there's the Whisk.invoke() method to… continue reading.

Posted on 23 March 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

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