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.

RoadRunner – high-performance PHP application server, load-balancer and process manager

RoadRunner is a high-performance PHP application server, load-balancer and process manager, written in Goland.  It sounds like an excellent replacement for the built-in PHP server, and even more than that – it’s production-ready.  And it works on Windows too.

RoadRunner is an open source (MIT licensed) high-performance PHP application server, load balancer and process manager. It supports running as a service with the ability to extend its functionality on a per-project basis.

RoadRunner includes PSR-7/PSR-17 compatible HTTP and HTTP/2 server and can be used to replace classic Nginx+FPM setup with much greater performance and flexibility.

VivaGraphJS – Graph drawing library for JavaScript

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: Scan WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, vBulletin websites for Security issues

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.

Crell/ApiProblem – a simple implementation of the api-problem specification

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 (“sir hat”) – open source software suite for managing your software development projects

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:

  1. Open Source.  From a quick look, sr.ht is distributed under the GNU Afero GPL.
  2. Modular.  The suite consists of the following components:
    1. git – git repository hosting service
    2. build – continuous integration service
    3. lists – mailing lists service
    4. todo – ticketing system / bug tracker
    5. dispatch – task dispatcher and integration service
    6. man – markdown and git-based wiki service
    7. meta – account management service