Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Addict – Active Directory REST API in 30 seconds

Addict is a drop-in REST API microservice for Active Directory implementations. Just like that.

I’m leaving it here for the next time that I’ll have to deal with the Active Directory.  Or, hopefully, never.

Browser screenshots with PHP and Google Chrome 59+

The release of Google Chrome 59 brought some really cool features.  One of them in particular was all over the technology news – headless mode.  Being able to run the browser engine without the graphical interface, and having control from the command line and API has many benefits.

One of the benefits is being able to take web page screenshots.  “Easily convert webpages to images using PHP” is one of the many blogs and articles that explain how to do it, using your preferred programming language (or mine in this case).  Browsershot is a very simple PHP library, which you can install with Composer and start using straight away.

I’ve tried it out and it works pretty well.  The screenshot above has been taken by the following script:

<?php 
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Spatie\Browsershot\Browsershot;

Browsershot::url('https://mamchenkov.net')
  ->windowSize(1600,900)
  ->save('screenshot.png');

Improving the output of PHPUnit

Via “Improving the output of PHPUnit” I’ve learned about PHPUnit Emoji Result Printer.  Obviously, this sounds like fun, but I’m also sure there is some really smart way of using this.

Too bad I couldn’t try it on one of our work projects just yet, as this requires PHPUnit 6+, while we are still on PHPUnit 5.7.  But we’ll get there.

Public JSON APIs

Public APIs is a collective list of free JSON APIs for use in web development.  You can find there web services for all kind of data – anything from weather and currency exchange, through government database, to random snippets like GIF images, Lorem Ipsum text, and quotes.

Rest APIs are REST-in-Peace APIs. Long Live GraphQL.

“Rest APIs are REST-in-Peace APIs. Long Live GraphQL.” is yet another look at REST vs. GraphQL for the API implementation.

I’m involved with developing quite a bit of REST APIs at work, but for now we are just trying to buy us some time.  I want to take a really long and good look at GraphQL, but I don’t think this will happen this year.  In the meantime, if you have any good GraphQL resources, please do send them my way.