A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.
VivaGraphJS is a graph drawing library for JavaScript. It’s a lot prettier than the results of GraphViz dot. Or at least, it’s easier to get fancy things out of it. It also ties a lot easier into the web development in general and your DOM document in particular.
CMS Scanner is a security tool from Open Security crew that you can host locally and use for security scans of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and vBulletin websites. I think that having an automated tool like that is way better and more productive than a thousand blog posts on how to secure your installation of a particular software.
PHP 7.3 is scheduled to be released on December 6th, 2018. As always, it’ll bring a few changes and new features (read more about it here or here). But it’ll also bring a significant performance improvement. Here are the results of a few benchmarks. Long story short:
PHP 7.3 is just shy of 10% faster than PHP 7.2 in the popular PHPBench. PHP 7.3 is 31% faster than PHP 7.0 or nearly 3x the speed of PHP5.
Bring it on, I say!
I’ve been working with REST/RESTful APIs for a while now. They are usually a lot better than the SOAP or XML-RPC stuff we had before. But they are also not perfect. Error handling and reporting is a common area between many implementations that needs more attention and consistency. Turns out, there is, I’ve just somehow never heard of it – RFC7807 defines “Problem Details for HTTP APIs”.
I’ll need to look more into this and see if and how it is better than a variety of things I’m using now. Gladly, there is even a PHP library to help with that – Crell/ApiProblem:
This library provides a simple and straightforward implementation of the IETF Problem Details for HTTP APIs, RFC 7807.
RFC 7807 is a simple specification for formatting error responses from RESTful APIs on the web. This library provides a simple and convenient way to interact with that specification. It supports generating and parsing RFC 7807 messages, in both JSON and XML variants.
sr.ht – pronounced “sir hat” – is a new competitor in the world of GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab. Much like all of these, you can either self-hosted it or use a managed service. It might not yet be as fancy, polished, and cool (I think they need a better name and the domain) as its competitors, but there are a couple of reasons that might make a difference when making a choice: