Pragmatism in the real world
Two conferences are coming up that I'm speaking at: The Dutch PHP Conference takes place in Amsterdam and this year is between June 26th and 28. I'm giving a tutorial with Matthew Weier O'Phinney on Apigility which will provide you with a full day's teaching on creating web APIs with Apigility. I'm also giving a talk called Creating Models discussing the options available when creating the model layer of a typical MVC PHP application. DPC… continue reading.
One project that I'm currently working on is an internal business application that's using stock Bootstrap 3. I needed a searchable select box and Chosen fitted the bill, so I'm using that. However, the default styles for the Chosen select box differ slightly from Bootstrap. The most noticeable being the height of the control.
I'm currently writing a project in Perl for a client and have discovered that the default Perl syntax highlighting in Sublime Text is terrible. Fortunately, the community has stepped up and Blaise Roth has created the ModerlPerl package. Install via Package Control. To get all Perl files to open with the new syntax highlighter, use View > Syntax > Open all with current extension as… and select ModernPerl from the sub-menu.
When starting working with Zend Framework 2, it's common to copy the skeleton and put your controller definitions in module.config.php like this: 'controllers' => array( 'invokables' => array( 'Application\Controller\Index' => 'Application\Controller\IndexController', 'Application\Controller\Blog' => 'Application\Controller\BlogController', ), ), The controllers keyword is picked up by the ControllerManager which is an instance of the ServiceManager which means that it creates the controller instance for you when the dispatcher needs it.
When moving a project into Vagrant, I realised that I needed the vagrant guest to share my OS X's VPN. I'm using a separate IP address within a private network like this: config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.101.101" So, after some Googling, I added this provider configuration setting: config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb| vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "–natdnshostresolver1", "on"] end and now my VM is sending data over the VPN. Note that this will not work when using the… continue reading.
I've been playing with Vagrant over the last few days, using Ansible to provision it. These are some notes to remind myself for next time and are very disjointed! Configuring Vagrant to provision using Ansible is easy enough: config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible| ansible.playbook = "provisioning/playbook.yml" end
I had a problem writing to the cache directory in my vagrant project due to file permissions. Fortunately Jeremy Kendall has already solved this problem in his Vagrant Synced Folders Permissions article.
I've been thinking recently about using immutable objects for some of my model-layer entities. That is, an object that cannot be changed once it is created. Immutable objects have a number of benefits including the fact that they are much easier to understand, simple to use and very easy to test. The main motivation for me is that an immutable object is very predictable as it's state doesn't change. This means that any calculated properties… continue reading.
I was having a discussion on IRC about use statements and whether they improved code readability or not. The choices Consider this hypothetical code: $cache = new \User\Service\Cache(); $mapper = new \User\Mapper\User($cache) $form = new \User\Form\Registration($mapper); $form->process($request->getPost()); vs use User\Service\Cache; use User\Mapper\User; use User\Form\Registration; // other code $cache = new Cache(); $db = new User($cache) $form = new Registration($mapper); $form->process($request->getPost()); The first snippet is completely unambiguous at the expense of verbosity. Those longer class names… continue reading.
On the 26th January, I fell off a skateboard, dislocating & fracturing my left elbow. A trip to A&E that Sunday resulted in hospital admittance on Monday and surgery on Tuesday. This was the first time I've been admitted to hospital for an overnight stay and I found the whole process fascinating, but not something I ever want to repeat. I also can't say enough good things about the staff at Worcester Royal Hospital. Everyone… continue reading.
