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

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… continue reading.

Posted on 13 June 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP, Serverless Framework

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 Our handler is… continue reading.

Posted on 6 June 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP, Serverless Framework

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

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) {… continue reading.

Posted on 14 March 2018 in JS, OpenWhisk

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

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

Using Composer packages with OpenWhisk

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.

Posted on 3 January 2018 in OpenWhisk, PHP

2017 in pictures

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.

Posted on 31 December 2017 in Me

Run the UniFi Controller headless on Mac

I'm running a UniFi network here with wireless access points, the Security Gateway and a PoE switch. It seems to be a robust system and is almost certainly overkill, but reliability is high on my lists after bad experiences with a NetGear WiFi router. The UniFi system software is called the Controller and runs on a various operating systems. As I have a Mac mini here, I decided to run it on there. Weirdly, however… continue reading.

Posted on 20 December 2017 in Software