CakePHP with NightwatchJS on Travis CI

My colleague Andrey Vystavkin has been setting up a testing environment for our CakePHP projects recently.  We had one before, of course, using PHPUnit.  But this time we wanted to add Google Chrome headless browser with some form of JavaScript test suite, so that we could cover functional tests and a bit of front-end.  Andrey described the configuration of NightwatchJS on TravisCI in this blog post.  If you are more of a “show me the code on GitHub” person, have a look at this Pull Request (still work in progress) on our project-template-cakephp project.

Once we are happy with the TravisCI configuration, we’ll be bringing this setup to our BitBucket Pipelines environment as well.

The setup is also based around CakePHP framework, but it’s easy enough to adopt it to any other framework, PHP or not.

The end of CSRF?

“The end of CSRF?” blog post talks about the new feature coming to browsers – SameSite cookie enforcement, which will help in getting rid of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.  Too bad this is currently only supported by Google Chrome (both desktop and mobile), and Opera.  But I’m sure it’s coming soon to the rest of the browsers.

Update:  It looks like the above blog post is almost a copy of this blog post, which has a number of useful comments.  Including this one, which links to a variety of projects and programming languages bug trackers requesting the support of the SameSite cookie feature.  Also, it looks like SameSite cookie is superseded by the Cookie Prefix solution, proposed by Google.

UI Museum: Norton Commander 5.0

Norton Commander

Ilya Birman has a massive blog post “UI Museum: Norton Commander 5.0” with almost 60 screenshots (!!!) and user interface feature descriptions of Norton Commander – an icon tool that was used by a whole generation of PC users in the DOS and early Windows era.

Norton Commander was so popular that is spawned a number of other projects that brought similar functionality to other operating systems (Midnight Commander for Linux), later versions of Windows (Far, Total Commander), and even other file management tools (FileZilla, CutFTP) and more.

Good old times…

Clean Code SOLID principles applied to PHP

clean-code-php is an excellent set of examples for the SOLID principles as applied to PHP programming:

Software engineering principles, from Robert C. Martin’s book Clean Code, adapted for PHP. This is not a style guide. It’s a guide to producing readable, reusable, and refactorable software in PHP.

Not every principle herein has to be strictly followed, and even fewer will be universally agreed upon. These are guidelines and nothing more, but they are ones codified over many years of collective experience by the authors of Clean Code.

Inspired from clean-code-javascript