When facing a challenging problem, you want a flexible codebase that adapts quickly. Object-oriented programming facilitates it by giving you the power through inheritance, encapsulating code in reusable objects, and generally making them work for your application as you see fit. However, we can find flexibility in other programming approaches.

Last month, we looked at HTTP requests and how a user agent asks for a specific resource. How do we provide an answer? Web servers send it back in an HTTP response. Let’s look at the parts of a response, how to indicate success or failure, and how to build the response body.

One of the things that drew me to PHP during my formative programming years was the quick turnaround time for trying something. You type something into an editor, save the file, and refresh your browser. Through the power of the web, your browser presents you with an error saying you mistyped a function name. Welcome […]

Previously, we discussed unit testing and why it can be useful. Unit testing can help make sure the public-facing APIs for your classes are easier to understand. It helps map out the dependencies of your classes, and—more importantly—it helps ensure behavior does not change from release to release. Functional, or integration, testing allows you to […]

Recently, we’ve discussed principles for writing clean code in your php applications. Testing is a valuable technique to help you produce and maintain a codebase, but it can be daunting to learn. In this article, we’ll start with unit testing. Let’s look at how tests help during the design phase and in maintenance, what unit tests are, and how to use PHPUnit for your test suite.

Last month, I talked about the basic idea of what dependency injection is and its importance. Now that we’re more familiar with it, we’ll look at examples of using dependency injection for managing object coupling, moving object creation externally, and keeping your classes concise.

Design patterns provide useful approaches for solving common problems in application design. Dependency injection is a powerful one, but it is also challenging to understand and apply. In this article, we’ll cover what it does and how to use it properly.

Composer is one of the most influential tools to have come out of the PHP ecosystem. Not only did it help revolutionize the PHP package ecosystem by making it easy to autoload code, find packages, and keep track of dependencies, it also stands as one of the best package managers from any language, hands-down. Python’s […]

This month, let’s talk about Integrated Development Environments or IDEs. Thankfully we have a plethora of options to chose from, and we can find what works the best for us.

It seems like programmers love their acronyms almost as much as the military does. When someone is just getting started in programming, they can be bombarded with an endless list of acronyms that people throw out as best practices and things to follow. Too often, this advice comes with little direction on why or what they are. Why should we follow SOLID principles if someone does not tell us what they are?