I would posit that nearly every application that we as developers build is designed around data access. When it comes to web applications, we spend a lot of time looking up things in databases or files to display to users. We write backend workers to read, manipulate, and store data in various ways. We build […]

While I am a large proponent of open source software and that it is the best option for software and the longevity of computing, I also understand that running Linux is not for everyone. There are many times where it seems like just using Firefox in a growing Chrome-based world is harder and harder. To […]

By Chris Tankersley I have been programming for nearly twenty years at this point, and I have worked in various languages. At many of my previous jobs, as well as my current one, I have had the pleasure of working with PHP as the core language of my job. Since the first time I started […]

I have been programming for nearly twenty years at this point, and I have worked in various languages. At many of my previous jobs, as well as my current one, I have had the pleasure of working with PHP as the core language of my job. Since the first time I started working with PHP, […]

One of the most requested features in PHP for a very long time was a concept known as Annotations. Annotations allow developers to add additional context and, most importantly, functionality to code without using a procedural approach. Many articles like to say it “adds metadata” to code, but I do not think that tells the whole story.

Programming languages are vastly different when it comes to syntax. Some may look so similar that they create an entire family of languages, just like real-world languages. PHP belongs to what is known as the C-style family, which constitutes languages that use curly brackets for flow control and ignore whitespace. Python does not belong to […]

The last few months have been a whirlwind of API work. If you’ve been following along, you have a solid grasp of the history of APIs, tools to help design your APIs, and a good lump of tips on how to turn that API design into reality. But, for the sake of space, I left […]

Over the last few months, I have been slowly building toward something. As you have come along this text journey with me—which thankfully has no Grues—I have been putting into place all the knowledge that you need to start building a web API, and most importantly, to understand what that code will be doing. We […]

APIs are a matter of life on the modern web. Modern web applications are no longer tasked with just rendering a web page. Our applications need to support various native client applications, or our applications may need to expose data to users. Developers face an increasing need to supply APIs as part of applications. As […]

The modern web is quite literally built on APIs. I do not mean this in a philosophical sense or to point toward an idea like “API First” design. However, the fundamental way that data is passed back and forth on the web is structured around the concept of an API. As the internet and web […]