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Site News:
Popular Posts for the Week of 02.27.2015
by Chris Cornutt February 27, 2015 @ 07:01:59
Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:
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SitePoint PHP Blog:
Exploring the Cache API in Drupal 8
by Chris Cornutt February 26, 2015 @ 11:41:45

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new tutorial (by Daniel Sipos) talking about the Drupal 8 cache and showing how to use it in an example, caching the latest post data pulled from the Drupal content.

Drupal 8 comes with many improvements over its predecessor we have grown to both love and hate. Next to prominent systems such as Views in core, configuration management or a useful translation service, there are also less known changes but that are equally important to know and use. One such improvement has been the cache API that solves many performance problems we have in Drupal 7.

They start with a basic introduction to the new cache handing and how the caches are separated out into different "bins" rather than all stored in one place. He includes sample code showing how to: save data to the cache, getting information back out and invalidating the cache to be handled by garbage collection. He also covers the cache tags, a feature that allows you to "tag" items across multiple caches and remove/invalidate them all at the same time. He wraps up the post getting into the more practical example showing the caching at work in a controller caching the contents of the posts to the Drupal site.

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drupal cache drupal8 tutorial introduction improvement

Link: http://www.sitepoint.com/exploring-cache-api-drupal-8/

Benjamin Eberlei:
Integrate Symfony and Webpack
by Chris Cornutt February 26, 2015 @ 10:21:40

In his latest entry Benjamin Eberlei shows how he integrated Symfony and Webpack, a tool that makes it simpler to package up multiple assets (like Javascript or CSS files) and reduce them down to combined files, reducing the overhead on page loads.

Asset Management in Symfony2 is handled with the PHP based library Assetic by default, however I have never really connected to this library and at least for me it usually wastes more time than it saves. [...] While researching about React.JS I came across a tool called Webpack which you could compare to Symfony's Assetic. It is primarily focussing on bundling Javascript modules, but you can also ship CSS assets with it.

He talks about some of the main benefits to using the Webpack tool including a built-in web server to serve up the assets and a "hot reload" plugin that refreshes when assets change. He then gets into a more practical example, showing how the tool works with a typical asset structure in a Symfony application. He shows how it uses the internal server to prevent the need for a complete rebuild each time. He also shows how to install and configure it through Symfony and loading the Javascript file in your Twig template. Finally he shows how to run a build, the resulting output and the integration he mentioned with React.js.

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symfony asset webpack tool tutorial introduction configuration install

Link: http://www.whitewashing.de/2015/02/26/integrate_symfony_and_webpack.html

Stephan Hochdörfer:
Running PHPUnit via Phing on HHVM
by Chris Cornutt February 26, 2015 @ 09:16:58

Stephan Hochdörfer has a quick post showing how he has PHPunit up and working on an HHVM instance. His problem was that the tests were actually executing using the "php" binary, not the HHVM one.

For quite some time we run the unit tests for our libs and tools against PHP and HHVM, at least that is what I thought up to now. As it turns out I missed a minor detail. [...] What happens now is that Phing is executed via HHVM but PHPUnit will still be executed via the PHP binary because the PHPUnit shell script will look for the php binary in the PATH configuration. Since we run HHVM side-by-side with PHP on our Jenkins build nodes I was not able to point /usr/bin/php to /usr/bin/hhvm - which would be the easiest and cleanest solution. I

He shares the workaround he created, creating a symbolic link between the hhvm and php binaries and then executing the Phing task to run the tests. This is being run via Jenkins and uses it's "WORKSPACE" as a container so the main "php" binary isn't overwritten.

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hhvm phpunit test unittest execute binary path jenkins phing task

Link: https://blog.bitexpert.de/blog/running-phpunit-via-phing-on-hhvm/

Community News:
Packagist Latest Releases for 02.26.2015
by Chris Cornutt February 26, 2015 @ 08:03:11
Recent releases from the Packagist:

Site News:
Blast from the Past - One Year Ago in PHP
by Chris Cornutt February 26, 2015 @ 07:04:37
Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:
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Zend Blog:
Developing a Z-Ray Extension
by Chris Cornutt February 25, 2015 @ 11:54:41

Zend recently introduced their Z-Ray inspection tool that allows you to see inside your application and know what's happening in your code, your database and has support for major PHP projects. In this new post to their blog they show you how to develop a custom extension for the Z-Ray system.

One of the coolest features in Z-Ray is the ability to plug in your own extensions. Meaning, you can customize existing Z-Ray panels or add your own personalized Z-Ray panel for displaying information you think is important for developing your specific application. This short tutorial will describe how to write a basic extension for Z-Ray. More specifically, we'll be writing a Z-Ray extension for WordPress that extracts and displays a list of loaded WordPress plugins.

They give you a list of things you'll need to set up before you can get started including a simple WordPress installation on a Zend Server instance. With these in place they help you create the "zray.php" file to define the extension, how to enable it and setting up a "trace" on a function to hook it into the execution. They then dump the WP plugin information and reformat it a bit to show only the list of names and versions in the output panel. As a last touch, they add a logo to the panel to show in the bottom menubar with the WordPress logo.

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zray zend extension custom wordpress tutorial plugin

Link: http://blog.zend.com/2015/02/25/developing-z-ray-extension

Evert Pot:
The problem with password_hash()
by Chris Cornutt February 25, 2015 @ 10:51:04

Evert Pot has shared some of his thoughts about why he has a problem with password_hash (and friends). His thoughts are initially about this particular feature but they're actually wider than that.

The initial introduction and rfc for these functions made me uneasy, and I felt like a lone voice against many in that I thought something bad was happening. I felt that they should not be added to the PHP engine. I think that we should not extend the PHP engine, when it's possible to write the same API in userland, or there are significant benefits to do it in PHP, such as performance. Since the heavy lifting of the password functions is done by underlying libraries that are already exposed to userland-PHP, it didn't make sense to me to expose it as well in the core.

He includes a list of things he sees as drawbacks for new C-based functionality in PHP including the fact that it extends the "PHP specification" and forces other projects to implement it (like HHVM). He does include a few positives, though, such as the increased visibility and legitimacy, but still thinks they don't outweigh the negatives.

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password hash core language c implementation opinion userland

Link: http://evertpot.com/password-hash-ew/

Joshua Thijssen:
Advanced user switching
by Chris Cornutt February 25, 2015 @ 09:12:05

Joshua Thijssen has a new post today with a "neat trick" that the Symfony Security component allows - switching (impersonating) another user programatically.

This allows you to login as another user, without supplying their password. Suppose a client of your application has a problem at a certain page which you want to investigate. Sometimes this is not possible under your own account, as you don't have the same data as the user, so the issue might not even occur in your account. Instead of asking the password from the user itself, which is cumbersome, and not a very safe thing to begin with, you can use the switch-user feature.

He talks about how to enable it, how to use it to switch to another user and, most important, how to restrict its use. He points out that there's no way to define who a user can switch to built-in, so he's come up with a custom "switch listener" to help add in this protection. His "SwitchUserListener" class replicates some of the code in the original handling (well, the whole class) and updates the "attemptSwitchUser" method to check the user they're trying to switch to and see if they have the right role. Finally he shows how to add it to the services configuration and how it overrides the default listener.

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user switching advanced tutorial custom listener role access validate

Link: https://www.adayinthelifeof.nl/2015/02/24/advanced-user-switching/

Community News:
Packagist Latest Releases for 02.25.2015
by Chris Cornutt February 25, 2015 @ 08:05:08
Recent releases from the Packagist:


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