Pragmatism in the real world
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.
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.
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… continue reading.
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 Our handler is… continue reading.
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.
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) {… continue reading.
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:
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.
When creating new OpenWhisk actions in PHP, It's likely that you'll want to take advantage of the rich ecosystem of Composer packages on Packagist.org. The OpenWhisk PHP runtime has you covered with some pre-installed Composer packages and also the ability to upload your own using a zip file. Pre-installed Composer packages The PHP runtime ships with two Composer packages by default: Guzzle and ramsey/uuid. This is handy as if you need to make an API… continue reading.
Another year has passed which gives me an excuse to to reflect on what's happened. As usual, I look at the photos that I've taken and frame my thoughts around them. January I started the year with one of my favourite pictures of the kids. I also spoke at CodeMash in Ohio. This was a new conference to me and I knew no-one there. Fortunately, I was introduced to Mo, so had at least one… continue reading.
