Developing software in the Real World
Azure App Service is a way to host your web application in a container without having to think about the server. It's the same PaaS concept as AWS Elastic Beanstalk and supports all the main web programming languages. It also supports Windows and Linux OS containers. I have a client that is moving an on-premises PHP application to App Service and so have been looking at what I needed to do to deploy it there.… continue reading.
Part two of my article on using Serverless PHP using Bref has been published! In part one, I introduced Bref as we wrote a simple "Hello World" application. Part follows this up exploring a more complete serverless application, my Project365 website. This S3 hosted static website is build using a serverless PHP function that connects to the Flickr API to retrieve my my one-photo-per-day images and present them on a single page per year. In… continue reading.
In order to use Bref efficiently, I've developed a Makefile so that I don't have to remember all the various commands required. In particular, looking up the correct parameters to sam package & sam deploy is a pain and it's much easier to type make deploy and it all works as I expect. It looks like this:
I've written a two-part series on Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda using Matthieu Napoli's Bref for php[architect]. Part one has been published in the May 2019 issue and if you're not already a subscriber, you should be! If you just want to learn about Bref though, then my introduction to Bref is available for free, just for you!
There's not much wrong with Slim 3; lots of people are using it very successfully producing APIs and websites of all kinds. For Slim 4 the main goals have been to support PSR-15, make it easier to use your own PSR-7 implementation, improve error handling and remove assumptions that look magical if you don't know they are there. The latter one is the most important to me, personally! Secondarily, Pierre has concentrated on making Slim's… continue reading.
This interesting tweet by Clare Liguori came to my attention last week: This new img2lambda tool will take the layers of a Docker container and convert them to AWS layers for use in Lambda. I poked around with Clare's example and updated my lambda-php project in order to understand how it works. I also rewrote my runtime's bootstrap to make it clearer. The clever thing from my point of view is that you can build… continue reading.
Like, Simon Wardley, I think that serverless computing is an interesting space because the billing is granular (pay only when your code executes) and you don't need to worry about maintaining and provisioning servers or containers. So much so, that I maintain the Open Source PHP Runtime for Apache OpenWhisk which is available commercially as IBM Cloud Functions There are other serverless providers, and AWS Lambda is the market leader, but until recently PHP support… continue reading.
A friend emailed me recently asking about route specific configuration in Slim. He wants to be able to set properties when creating the route that he can pick up when the route is matched. The way to do this is using route arguments. I've written about route arguments before in the context of setting default values for a route parameter, but you can also use them to set new data for use later. In this… continue reading.
I've recently been updating a website that was written a long time ago that has not been touched in a meaningful way in many years. In addition to the actual work I was asked to do, I took the opportunity to update the password hashing routines. This site is so old that the passwords are stored using MD5 hashes and that's not really good enough today, so I included updating to bcrypt hashing with password_hash()… continue reading.
Recently I needed to test part of Slim that uses the built-in PHP functions header() and headers_sent(). To do this, I took advantage of PHP's namespace resolution rules where it will find a function within the same namespace first before finding one with the same name in the global namespace. The idea of how to do this came courtesy of Matthew Weier O'Phinney where this approach is used for similar testing in Zend-Diactoros. This is… continue reading.
Rob Allen is a PHP and Zend Framework expert based in Worcester, UK. He runs Nineteen Feet, is the author of Zend Framework in Action.
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