Christian Kolb

php

PHP Must watch

Once in a while you stuble upon a good video about PHP. If many people stuble upon many videos, they start collecting it. If that happens in a Github time, they create it on a Github repository. The repository in question is called PHP must watch [https://github.com/phptodayorg/

php

Check json in php

When getting in JSON for a request you first going to need to check whether the incoming content is actually valid JSON. Unfortunately there is no PHP function for that. Here is a little utility function for it: /** * Is valid JSON * * @param string $jsonString JSON string * * @return bool */ function isValidJson(

learning

Learning with Team Treehouse

There are a lot of systems which offer video courses about development, design and other IT specific topics. A good German based for example is called Video2Brain. When searching for a good introduction into Swift (other than the Apple developer documentation [https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/

symfony

Get data from json request with Symfony

When working with Symfony actions you can get request parameters with $request->get('parameter-name'). When working with JSON requests, you don't have this kind of convenience methods. You're going to need to convert the request into parameters first. This could be done the

symfony

Symfony route to annotation

When setting up routes with yml, xml or php you always define a name for a route. This name can be used to generate a url. With annotations this name is not required and not set in the documentation examples. The following is a example how a normal annotation comment

best-practices

Great PHP Clean Code presentations

There are a lot of articles, blog posts and videos about clean code development. Most of them put an emphasis on how to do specific things, rather then why you should or what the consequences are if you don't. But I found two really great ones that show

apache

htaccess domain.tld to www.domain.tld redirect

I like to redirect my users from liplex.de to www.liplex.de. Of course there are many solutions for this on the application side. But if you're using apache to host your website, there is also a very easy solution using mod_rewrite. Just add the following

php

A better mock object builder for PHPUnit

When working with mocks for unit tests, you're going to write a lot of code for the mocks. There are a lot of functions you're going to need to call every single time. To get around this you can use the following utility function[1]: /** * Get

javascript

Cypress.io

Most javascript unit tests run on node js (or equivalent). There is a new service which run's unit and integration tests directly in the browser. It's currently in its beta phase and looks very promising. It's free while it's in beta (there

javascript

Cookies across paths and subdomains

When setting a cookie, it gets the current domain and path as default parameter. The problem there is, that the cookie won't be available in a subdomain. To be able to access it on the subdomain, you need to set the domain and path explicitly: document.cookie = "

javascript

Moment.js - a javascript date library

Date manupulation is still one of the most complex problems while developing and it's a really nerve wracking work when developing in javascript. There is a very lightweight and nice framework for that called Moment.js [http://momentjs.com]. They offer functions to parse, validate, manipulate and display

link

Quine relay

> A quine is a non-empty computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. [1] Some pretty smart people on github build something called a Quine relay [https://github.com/mame/quine-relay] which is - as they put it

uberspace

Migrate to google mail with imapsync

Recently I moved one of my email adresses from a hosting package on uberspace to google mail. Normaly there is a migration tool which does the migration for you. Unfortunately it requires a login without encryption or SSL. Uberspace only supports encrypted logins (which is a very good idea) but

ide

Navigate back in PHPStorm

Do you know the case where you search for something within a PHPStorm project and want to jump back where you where before? Or that you jumped to a declaration of a function or to a usage of it? Fortunately there is way to navigate back through your, lets call

php

Switch with instanceof in PHP

There are situations where you need to check what class an object is. The easiest thing is just checking that with instanceof and a simple if statement. But that doesn't look that good if you've got many cases: if($objectToTest instanceOf TreeRequest) { echo "tree request&

git

Git show parent branch

When using multiple git branches it can happen, that you loose track of which branch tracks which other. Or maybe even whether branches track any branch. Here [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4950725/how-do-i-get-git-to-show-me-which-branches-are-tracking-what] is a nice little script to show the ones that track another remote branch and which: git

console

Show lines before and after with grep

Little neat parameter for grep to show lines before and after the found line. -A number of lines to show after, -B number of lines to show before and -C numbers of lines to show before and after (with default of 2). $ grep -C 5 "My error message"

security

Problems with open source security

There are many problems in the news regarding open source components when used for security. Most of the time it's about that everyone can read the code and find security holes easier. The more pressing issue in my opionion is that those projects (which power a huge part

phpunit

Show PHPUnit details with TAP

TAP or Test Anything Protocol [http://testanything.org] (a simple text-based interface between testing modules) is also available for PHPUnit. You can use it to show details with the flag --tap: $ phpunit --tap Which will result in an output like the following: TAP version 13 ok 1 - newArrayIsEmptyTest(ArrayTest)

javascript

Display code with highlight.js on Ghost

Until recently I used prism.js [http://prismjs.com/] to display my code snippets in this ghost blog. It is way better that the default code in a <pre> block. But now I stumbled over highlight.js [https://highlightjs.org]. It does the same thing, but offers way

php

Testing an abstract class

With normal mocks it's possible to test functions with many dependencies. But in PHPUnit and mocks there is also a way to test abstract classes. We can use the PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase::getMockForAbstractClass() method for this: class FancyThing extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { public function testAbstractThing() { $abstractThing = $this->

console

Git autocorrect

Did you know that there is an autocorrect feature within git? It automatically correct (and execute) things like git stats to git status. By default this feature is disabled. To enable it enter the following command: $ git config --global help.autocorrect -1 From the documentation: > Automatically correct and execute

mac

Export a VMWare Fusion virtual machine

Recently I had to reinstall my Mac. One of the things I wanted to save was my virtual machine. Turns out VMWare Fusion doesn't have any kind of export functionality directly within the application. What I found though was a command line tool with which you can export

php

Improve system performance with blackfire.io (example Contao)

Contao is a content management system (CMS) which is mostly used in the DACH area [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-speaking_Europe#D-A-CH]. One of the developers there profiled the system with blackfire.io [https://blackfire.io/] (a profiler from the guys that brought us Symfony [http://sensiolabs.com/]). Long

best-practices

Use reflection in PHP to get a list of constants

PHP lacks a good way of creating enumerations. The best practice is to create constants and use those as possible values. The downside is that you normaly write them hard coded multiple times. For example you've got the following status options: class Person { const STATUS_PENDING = "pending&