Month: August 2017

CakePHP Events System

Events are a great way to separate the business logic of your application and make things simpler and, often, faster.  CakePHP framework introduced an events system in version 2.1, and since then it got much better.  The official documentation covers current implementation pretty well.  But in this post I wanted to link to a few articles that provide more of a historical perspective.

First, goes this blog post by Martin Bean from back in 2013.  It shows how things were initially.  Even with all the improvements in version 3, the first implementation was still pretty useful.

Second, comes this review of the CakePHP events system (still in version 2), and some profiling of this new functionality.  These guys looked at all the details and eventually suggested some improvements.

Their effort didn’t go unnoticed.  Mark Story, one of the lead developers of CakePHP framework, wrote this blog post, explaining the upcoming (at the time) changes to the events system in CakePHP version 3.

As a result CakePHP 3 event system is a much simpler and cleaner implementation.  Have a look at this guide for a quick introduction.

I’m sure this is not the end of the road, as no software is ever perfect.  But it’s a good place to be.

MATE + i3wm = Happy, happy, happy!

I finally freed up a few minutes to try this solution for combined MATE desktop environment with i3 window manager.  And I have to say it works perfectly!

I now have the best of both worlds – MATE’s out of the way desktop, with good multi-monitor support, and i3wm’s tiling windows and keyboard navigation.

pre-commit – a framework for managingmulti-language git pre-commit hooks

From the pre-commit homepage:

Git hook scripts are useful for identifying simple issues before submission to code review. We run our hooks on every commit to automatically point out issues in code such as missing semicolons, trailing whitespace, and debug statements. By pointing these issues out before code review, this allows a code reviewer to focus on the architecture of a change while not wasting time with trivial style nitpicks.

As we created more libraries and projects we recognized that sharing our pre-commit hooks across projects is painful. We copied and pasted unwieldy bash scripts from project to project and had to manually change the hooks to work for different project structures.

[…]

We built pre-commit to solve our hook issues. It is a multi-language package manager for pre-commit hooks. You specify a list of hooks you want and pre-commit manages the installation and execution of any hook written in any language before every commit. pre-commit is specifically designed to not require root access.

Have a look at the list of all supported hooks. There’s plenty!

Secure Headers – a PHP library for easier management of browser security features

Modern browsers offer a variety of security mechanisms for web developers.  Unfortunately, some of these aren’t so easy to manage.  One needs a deep understanding of the functionality as well as theory behind.  Secure Headers is a library that makes all that work a lot easier for PHP developers.  Here are some of the features:

  • Add/remove and manage headers easily
  • Build a Content Security Policy, or combine multiple together
  • Content Security Policy analysis
  • Easy integeration with arbitrary frameworks (take a look at the HttpAdapter)
  • Protect incorrectly set cookies
  • Strict mode
  • Safe mode prevents accidental long-term self-DOS when using HSTS, or HPKP
  • Receive warnings about missing, or misconfigured security headers