Pragmatism in the real world
To test a website that you're developing on your local computer on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet use ngrok. This is the way to do it: Start up ngrok: $ ngrok http my-dev-site.local:80 This will start up ngrok and give you a "Forwarding" URL such as http://24f55bf5.ngrok.io. In this case, it will direct all traffic to that URL to http://my-dev-site.local. If you run your website on a different port, such as… continue reading.
The first way that you learn to call your OpenWhisk action over HTTP is a POST request that is authenticated using your API key. This key allows all sorts of write access to your account, so you never release it. If you want to access the action over HTTP without the API key, you have two choices: Web Actions or API Gateway. This article discusses how to use Web Actions as they are very useful… continue reading.
I'm interested in serverless computing and as I write Swift, the OpenWhisk platform comes up high when you Google. This turns out to be a really good choice as OpenWhisk is Open Source so I can read the source code (and have done!). In principle, I can also run my own instance of it if I need to to for regulatory reasons, or just to avoid vendor lock-in. Commercially, the whole point of Serverless (aka… continue reading.
I like to use Finder in Column mode (⌘+3). i.e. this view: One feature of this view is that you can resize all the columns to fit by alt+double clicking on the move handle between each column. There doesn't appear to be a keyboard shortcut for this operation though, so I created one using Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro can move the mouse around the screen and click with it which is exactly what I need.… continue reading.
Any data that you receive needs to be checked and validated. There are number of ways to do this including PHP's filter_var, but I prefer Zend-InputFilter. This is how to use it as a stand-alone component. Installation Firstly, we install it using Composer: $ composer require zendframework/zend-inputfilter $ composer require zendframework/zend-servicemanager You don't have to have ServiceManager, but it makes working with InputFilter much easier, so it's worth installing. Create the InputFilter The easiest way… continue reading.
As I've already noted, in the project I'm currently building, I'm rendering errors in my Slim Framework API using RFC 7807: Problem Details for HTTP APIs via Larry Garfield's ApiProblem component and rka-content-type-renderer. One place where we need to integrate this approach into Slim is in the error handlers. Let's look at NotFound. To ensure that we return a response in the right format, we need to implement our own NotFound handler: src/App/Handler/NotFound.php: <?php namespace… continue reading.
In the API I'm currently building, I'm rendering errors using RFC 7807: Problem Details for HTTP APIs. As this is a Slim Framework project, it uses PSR-7, so I updated rka-content-type-renderer to support problem. RFC 7807 defines a standard for sending details of an error in an HTTP response message. It supports both XML and JSON formats. From the RFC, an example response is: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden Content-Type: application/problem+json Content-Language: en { "type": "https://example.com/probs/out-of-credit", "title":… continue reading.
I've written before about how I tend to use my Mac via the keyboard as much as possible to minimise pain in my arm. Possibly the best application on macOS to facilitate this is Shortcat which enables me to point and click at any UI element in any native Mac app. I rely on it a lot and it makes nearly every app I use accessible to me. Recently, Slack updated their desktop app so… continue reading.
A question came up recently wondering why Slim Framework was around 5 times slower than plain PHP. All frameworks are by definition slower than no-code as there's more going on. i.e. an index.php of: <?php header('Content-Type: application/json'); echo json_encode(['result' => 1]); is going to be much faster than a Slim application with this code: use \Slim\App; include 'vendor/autoload.php'; $config = include 'Config/Container.php'; $app = new App($config); $app->get('/do-it', function($request, $response){ return $response->withJson(['result' => 1]); }); $app->run();… continue reading.
I wanted a drop-dead simple way to try and replicate a problem someone was having on the Slim forums. I couldn't reproduce with php -S which is my go-to for this sort of thing, so I thought I'd try Homestead. I had recently listend to a Voices of the Elephpant episode with Taylor Otwell & Joe Ferguson where Joe mentioned that Homestead worked on a per-project basis too. I didn't know this, so tried it… continue reading.
