Adventures in IT

Image: Pixabay SOLID is a mnemonic acronym for five object-oriented design principals that are intended to make software designs more understandable (see Wikipedia ). They were promoted by a chap called Robert C Martin who has been programming since before I was born and is an authority on writing clean code.  Laravel is a PHP framework that implements the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern. A lot of people think that their responsibility for OOP design ends with adopting a framework, but actually Laravel is relatively un-opinionated on your OOP design and you still need to think about writing code that is testable and maintainable.  The reason that SOLID principals matter becomes apparent when you work on a single project for a long time. If you're writing throwaway applications for clients that you never expect to work on again (presumably because the client won't hire you again) then the quality of your code doesn't matter. But if you're the guy stuck ...

Image: pexels.com I'm busy with the self assessment questionnaire for PCI compliance.  Part of the database requirements are that cardholder data are encrypted at rest as well as in transit. I host with Amazon RDS and use Laravel so my life is made pretty easy. Amazon RDS natively supports encrypted connections and also lets you create a database that is stored on an encrypted backing instance.  If you've enabled this option then all that you need to do is make sure that you connect to the database using an encrypted connection. I'm not getting paid anything for saying that I really enjoy using RDS, but today is another occasion when I'm really happy that I didn't have to sit and install certificates and fiddle with a cluster configuration to enable SSL connections.  The "zero config" that comes with RDS saves time and money. Laravel was really easy to configure to use SSL.  All that you need to do is download the RDS certificate chain from  ht...

I'm very much a fan of the clean implementation of Laravel but really dislike the fact that if there is something wrong with the .env file it refuses to give any meaningful information. Laravel uses the vlucas/phpdotenv package to manage its environment. It's pretty well known that if you have a space on either side the = sign in a key value pair then the .env file is invalid, but I had checked for this (and checked again). Laravel will try to use its standard logging methods before they have actually had a chance to be booted up with the result that you're left with a "reflection error" exception message on the CLI rather than the actual cause of the problem in the dotenv package. Debugging this is not trivial and I resorted to using strace to try and determine exactly what was going on.  Don't do this at home kids!  The easier solution is at the end of the article. I used the following command to generate a trace of the system calls being made by ...

Image: Pixabay If integration tests take too long to run then we stop running them because they're just an annoyance.  This is obviously not ideal and so getting my tests to run quickly is important. I'm busy writing a test suite for Laravel and wanted more flexibility than the built-in options that Laravel offers for working with databases between tests. Using the DataMigrations trait meant that my seed data would be lost after every test.  Migrating and seeding my entire database for every test in my suite is very time consuming. Even when using an in-memory sqlite database doing a complete migration and seed was taking several seconds on my dev box. If I used the DataTransactions trait then my migrations and seeds would never run and so my tests would fail because the fixture data is missing. My solution was to use a static variable in the base TestCase class that Laravel supplies.  It has to be static so that it retains its values between tests by the wa...

I'm busy writing an application which is heavily dependent on personalized URLs.  Each visitor to the site will have a PURL which I need to communicate to the frontend so that my analytics tags can be associated with the user. Before I go any further I should note that I'm using  Piwik  as my analytics package, and it respects "Do Not Track" requests.  We're not using this to track people, but we are tying it to our clients existing database of their user interests. I want the process of identifying the user to be as magical as possible so that my controllers can stay nice and skinny.  Nobody likes a fat controller right? I decided to use middleware to trap all my web requests to assign a "responder" to the request.  Then I'll use a view composer to make sure that all of the output views have this information readily available. The only snag in this plan was that the Laravel documentation was a little sketchy on how to get the value of the ...

I am coding a queue worker that is handling some pretty large (2gig+) datasets and so wanted some details in my logs that Vanilla laravel didn't offer. Reading the documentation at  http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/errors wasn't much help until I twigged that I could manipulate the log object returned by  Log :: getMonolog ( ) ; . Here is an example of adding memory usage to Laravel logs. In app/start/global.php make the following changes Log::useFiles(storage_path().'/logs/laravel.log'); $log = Log::getMonolog(); $log->pushProcessor(new Monolog\Processor\MemoryUsageProcessor); You'll find the Monolog documentation on the repo

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted.  This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel.  A thorough comparison of the patterns is available  here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework.  It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database.  Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its ...

PHP Framework popularity as at 2013 - Sitepoint After having a very good experience with using Varnish to cache a Wordpress site we decided to look at caching Laravel. Laravel always generates cookies regardless of whether a person is logged in or not.  This interferes with Varnish which by default will pass all requests with a cookie to the backend and skip the cache. In our particular case our site supported the ability for users to login and would then present them with custom content.  This means that cookies are not restricted to a particular path so we can't discard cookies based on the request as we did for Wordpress when discarding everything except /wp-admin/* requests. My solution was to use a package called session-monster ( Packagist  ) which sets a response header if the data in the Laravel session can be ignored.  Varnish can detect this header and prevent the cookie from being set since we don't really need it.  This together with t...