Pragmatism in the real world
This is a guide to contributing to an open source project that uses GitHub. It's mostly based on how I've seen Zend Framework, Slim Framework and joind.in operate. However, this is a general guide so check your project's README for specifics. TL;DR Skip to the summary. Step 1: Set up a working copy on your computer Firstly you need a local fork of the the project, so go ahead and press the "fork" button in… continue reading.
There's been a discussion on Twitter this evening about ad-blockers now that Apple has enabled users of iOS to install ad-blocking plugins into their Safari browser. Note that this is not at the OS level and there is no default ad-blocker. The user has to choose to go to the App Store, install an ad-blocker app and then go to Settings->Safari and enable the app. As we all know, Twitter isn't ideal for conversations requiring… continue reading.
Recently, Zend made available a Z-Ray Technology Preview which takes the Z-Ray feature of Zend Server and makes it stand-alone. This is very interesting as it means that I can run it with the PHP 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Vagrant set up that I prefer. I decided to create an Ansible playbook to install Z-Ray into my VM. The Z-Ray instructions are clear enough, so it was simply a case of converting them to… continue reading.
From RC1 of Slim 3, we have improved our error handling. We've always had error handling for HTML so that when an exception occurs, you get a nice error page that looks like this: However, if you're writing an API that sends and expects JSON, then it still sends back HTML: At least we set the right Content-Type and status code! However, this isn't really good enough. We should send back JSON if the client… continue reading.
Last week, I needed some random data and using the power of the PHP manual, came across random_bytes which does exactly what I need. However, it's PHP7 only. As I target both Linux and Windows, I needed to do a bit more work to get it working which was fine, but a minor nuisance given that I know that there's a better way in PHP7. Talking on the #joind.in IRC channel a few days later,… continue reading.
In addition to the core Slim framework, we also ship a number of add-ons that are useful for specific types of problems. One of these is Slim-Csrf which provides CSRF protection. This is middleware that sets a token in the session for every request that you can then set as an hidden input field on a form. When the form is submitted, the middleware checks that the value in the form field matches the value… continue reading.
In my Slim 3 skeleton, I chose to put each action into its own class so that its dependencies are injected into the constructor. We then register each action with the DI Container like this: $container['App\Action\HomeAction'] = function ($c) { return new App\Action\HomeAction($c['view'], $c['logger']); }; In this case, HomeAction requires a view and a logger in order to operate. This is quite clear and easy. However, it requires you manually register each action class with… continue reading.
Recently an issue was reported against Zend\InputFilter where the reporter has discovered a regression where the fallback value wasn't being populated correctly. Matthew investigated, fixed it and asked me to review it. I was fascinated as I didn't realise (or had completely forgotten!) that Zend\Input and Zend\InputFilter supported fallback values so I looked into it and it turns out that it's simple and works exactly as its name implies. For the basic case of using… continue reading.
I'm forever getting confused about how the combination of Zend\Input's required, allow_empty & continue_if_empty interact with an empty value, so I've decided to write it down. These settings define what happens when you try to validate an empty value for a given input. For Zend\Input, empty means exactly equal to null, an empty string or an empty array. Firstly, let's start with the three settings: Setting Default What it does required true When true, the… continue reading.
Most of the projects that I work on follow the PSR-2 coding style guidelines. I prefer to ensure that my PRs pass before Travis or Jenkins tells me, so let's look at how to run PSR-2 checks locally. PHP_CodeSniffer My preferred tool for checking coding styles in PHP is PHP_CodeSniffer. This is command line tool, phpcs, that you can run against any file. PHP_CodeSniffer can test against a number of standards. The default is PEAR,… continue reading.
