Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
Windows has always been somewhat of an oddball when it comes to PHP development. In the past years it has lost out on developer mindshare to UNIX-like Operating Systems like Linux and macOS.
With the release of Windows 10 Anniversary Update in August 2016 Microsoft now offers an interesting option for PHP development in the Windows environment: The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
GraphQL is a technology which is a modern and uniform alternative to the wealth of different RESTful interfaces. REST was introduced back in 2000 and is only an architectural style, not a specification. In REST any self-respecting developer is used to versioning, but in GraphQL there is no concept of versioning in the same sense.
Most projects created with the Symfony framework nowadays also include quite a bit of logic done on the client side. There is a large number of options on the market and this can lead to trouble choosing between the options. The JavaScript scene is full of camps and cutting through the buzz is quite a bit of work.
TypeScript is a programming language that builds on top of JavaScript. It's not a complete language, but rather a layer that adds new features to JavaScript. The foremost of these is obviously strong typing, where the name is derived from.
Late in 2015 the Symfony project as a whole celebrated it's tenth anniversary. Another significant milestone is reached in July 2016 as Symfony2, the second major iteration celebrates it's fifth anniversary. Five years is a long time in IT, but even more so in web development.
A generic vulnerability in web services using CGI has surfaced. Branded as "httpoxy" the vulnerability is at the HTTP layer level and can be exploited when using libraries that make outbound requests from the server where a request is made.
Software Patents and Open Source are like oil and water. They just don't mix easily. One of the recent cases where the pair has been discussed is the BSD + Patent Clause licensing that Facebook uses for React.js and other Open Source software it has released.
By text definition a workflow is a sequence of connected steps tied to objects of some sorts. In each step a set of validations and actions are be applied. Most web developers are familiar with these type of flows and have likely implemented a workflow in one form or another.
The year 2015 was pretty tiring in the JavaScript world. This was widely acknowledged and read to JavaScript Fatigue being “a thing" and there were memes on how hard it was to make a hello world in JavaScript.
I also chimed in about not learning any JavaScript, just because learning modern PHP seemed like more stable investment for my time.
It's been said that there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. It seems that this statement from Phil Karlton continues to be true. Naming things is as close as code can be to poetry, so I'll leave that for the philosophers to discuss.
Invalidating items from cache is much more clear-cut problem to define. The more efficient and easy the solution, the better. Symfony3 already has some improvements for that, with more coming in the near future.
The latest versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL support a JSON data type. While completely separate NoSQL stores like MongoDB and Redis can be very tempting, but using the JSON capabilities of your main RBDMS in environments in a hybrid mode might be a good choice.
The technology world is filled with hype spiced up with jargon. Each passing day there is a new technology that supercedes the previous one. For the last few years RESTful APIs have been the hottest thing.
But today many vow to the name of GraphQL and dance on the graves of REST APIs. But what exactly is GraphQL and how is it different from REST APIs?
JSON Web Tokens are a relatively new method for authentication. JWT for short is an open standard for passing claims between parties in web application environments. Instead of relying on a cookie, applications can rely on passing forward JSON Web Tokens.
The HTTP server H2O recently hit major milestone with version 2.0.0. The new release comes with new features and performance enhancements.
Angular is a household name in JavaScript frameworks. Like Symfony2 in it's time, the second major iteration of Angular is a revolution. In this article we'll take a look at the key concepts of Angular 2 and how they compare to ones in the Symfony Full Stack Framework.
GraphQL is an interesting technology open sourced by Facebook. Thanks to the PHP and Symfony communities, there is already a lot of work done for devs to use GraphQL in Symfony applications.
In systems with very dynamic data models, such as Content Management Systems, transferring data models and changes to them between environments can be very challenging. eZ Platform and the previous generation eZ Publish CMS products are such systems.
The Sylius Flow Bundle is a way of chaining together a series of actions to form custom eCommerce checkout processes or installation wizards commonly used for installing CMSes, for example.
Open Source Software is often heralded as a friendly community all working happily together for a common good. In reality many successful projects start as a such a labour of love, but as they grow in popularity things can quickly get out of hand while other people build businesses upon your voluntary work.