Try Socket Programming, Design, or PHP
Hi, I want to become a Drupal developer. My question is: is learning PHP frameworks, like Zend Framework, Symfony etc., necessary for working with Drupal? Should I gain some experience in PHP without any frameworks and directly proceed to Drupal or gain experience with a framework and only then start with Drupal?
Some time ago I read a post by Mathias Verraes about using static methods as named constructors in object oriented PHP. I thought that this technique is very practical, and that it has the potential for making code much more readable. However, it can be also used to make generating Exception messages less repititive.
Is learning Symfony2 vs. Laravel a good thing to do this year? As I mentioned I’m looking to get more opportunities, and I saw that Symfony2 is the right choice for business!
Just like a file, a socket is an ordered stream of data. Do you know what’s also ordered? You’re right, a queue. So the network is essentially a queue. You know any of those fancy job processing systems, like Gearman or RabbitMQ? We can use the network to achieve some of their features, without any infrastructure.
Since 2012 lots of people have read this blog post about socket programming. It’s the most read post on this blog, year after year. It even got translated into two other languages than English. Many people are sending me questions by email.
Now I’m writing a little book, to make a more comprehensive look at socket programming in PHP.
The book will launch in Fall 2014. You can subscribe now to my mailing list to get the entire first chapter for free, get early access to the launch, and a code for a 20% discount.
A long due update to the Heroku PHP buildpack —which adds support for modern PHP development— is now in public beta. Their Devcenter Article has more info.
You know what’s really awesome about it? You can require
heroku/heroku-buildpack-php in your Composer dev requirements and run
your apps locally with a Procfile and Foreman, just like every other
supported language on Heroku.
Congrats David Zülke!
PSA: Once the official PHP buildpack is stable, I plan to no longer support my own PHP buildpack.
Over the past half year I’ve noticed that issues and pull requests start piling up and are taking often even weeks to resolve on the php-build project. Due to this I’ve decided to form the php-build Core Team.
After quite a bit of a pause, I’m starting with some little libs again. First came MustacheJsCompiler and next up is Stack Honeypot.
It’s a port of the excellent Rack::Honeypot Rack middleware and tries to identify and block spam bot requests by inserting a hidden form field with an interesting name.
Little known change of PHP 5.4: you don’t have to
use the call_user_func() function anymore to call generic callables!
Before 5.4 you could only use () to call variables
when the type was a String or Closure, otherwise you would have to use
call_user_func(). Since 5.4 however, you can simply do () on anything which satisfies the callable typehint, as illustrated below:
<?php
class Foo
{
function bar()
{
echo "Hello World\n";
}
}
$cb = array(new Foo, "bar");
$cb();
$cb = "strlen";
var_dump($cb("foo"));
(Try it)
Currently this doesn’t make much difference, but it’s a nice step to improve readability a bit.
Together with Argument Unpacking (currently slated for 5.6) this could make
call_user_func_array() obsolete too.
Yay! We won’t have to use functions to call functions anymore!
Sometimes you want to log to PHP’s error_log in a Symfony 2 app. This
is useful if your app runs in a container (think Docker)
and PHP’s error log is redirected to standard output and you want your
application logs to show up there too.
You need to use at least version 2.4 of the MonologBundle to use the ErrorLogHandler:
{
"require": {
…
"symfony/monolog-bundle": "~2.4"
}
}
Then in your config_prod.yml and config_dev.yml change the type of the Monolog
handlers to error_log and you are all set. For example, the Monolog
config in config_dev.yml would look like this:
monolog:
handlers:
main:
type: error_log
level: debug
I must admit that I’m a serious fan of Go. I spent most of the last company hackdays with it, doing some small projects, like a simple language independent job queue, and some smaller libraries.
When it comes to socket programming with PHP, nearly all articles are about the Socket Extension, despite it’s the unfriendliest and most cumbersome way to work with Sockets in modern PHP. Let me introduce you to something, which apparently is pretty unknown among PHP programmers — Stream Sockets.
Recently I once again came across an article by Jeff Kreeftmeijer in which he explains how to host micro libraries just in one Github Gist. I instantly thought: “Does this work for PHP too?” and yes, thanks to Composer it works! So here is how to do it.
At work we use a lot of Grails plugins. Recently one of our most important Plugins broke functionality in our app in a minor release, does not tag the releases in the repository and doesn’t provide a upgrading document. This brought me to think a bit about how plugins should behave.
Ever worried that your scripts ain’t good Unix citizens? Here are some quick, practial recipes usable for everyday PHP Command Line scripting.
After not being satisfied with Ant, Phing and Pake — I’ve scratched my own itch and made Bob — a simple project automation tool.
or why no corporation will fork your permissively licensed open source project without contributing back upstream.
XML Abuse is everywhere, and I’m sick of it. Everytime I have to use Ant, I’m feeling like I’m in XML Hell.
Warning: This can be ranty at times.
Tilt is a templating library for Ruby. It’s kind of an aggregator for templating engines — and I like it.
Closure Object Binding is one of the features that I’m looking forward to in PHP 5.4. We will take a brief look at the long way it took to be implemented and look into practical examples on how to improve libraries.