In the darker days of web application development, we essentially had two options for working with dependencies. The first is that we could put all the dependencies in a directory of our application and use them from there. This worked but could cause our application to balloon in size. The other option was to rely […]

Broadly speaking, autoloading is a mechanism for the loading code into your program on demand. If you look at a single request in your application, chances are it needs a different set of classes than another request. Where a “Login” action may use a controller, database class, and an authentication layer, a “Logout” action may […]

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 […]

Over the past two months we’ve been building PHP Easy Math a purposely simple example library to demonstrate how to build a reusable package for the PHP ecosystem. We’re going to cover triaging and managing issues users may open as well as pull requests to your library.

Last month we started building PHP Easy Math, a small library which can be included in PHP projects to provide simple methods to do basic addition and subtraction. We’re using this as an example library to focus on what makes a library “good” we are less worried about the practical need for and usage of […]

PHP developers can now easily share their code for others to use. You can also easily bundle your application’s domain logic into a package to share between multiple projects. This month we are diving into creating PHP packages and ensuring our packages are held to a high standard of having tests, license information, and other […]

In this issue: State machines, workflows, parsing text, MySQL without SQL, Continuous Integration, self-hosted git, CakePHP, Password Authentication, Issue Tracking, Algorithms, and more.

Using events and command buses, self-hosted git, design workflows, parsing text, a look at CakePHP, Composer security, and more

Package managers like Composer make it quick and easy to add third-party libraries to an application. Unfortunately, they can also make it easy to import code that’s not meant to run in production—and might intentionally expose certain vulnerabilities—if your development team isn’t careful.

Most people are aware of how the Composer revolution came about, and the goal of getting everyone to play nicely together. For the most part, it seems to have worked, and more and more developers are coming on board with avoiding “Not Invented Here” and embracing the more than 1.2 million versions of packages available […]