best practices

Capture and Report JavaScript Errors with window.onerror

“Capture and Report JavaScript Errors with window.onerror” tutorial shows an easy way to capture, log and troubleshoot client-side errors:

onerror is a special browser event that fires whenever an uncaught JavaScript errorhas been thrown. It’s one of the easiest ways to log client-side errors and report them to your servers. It’s also one of the major mechanisms by which Sentry’s client JavaScript integration (raven-js) works.

window.onerror = function(msg, url, lineNo, columnNo, error) {
  // ... handle error ...
  return false;
}

HTTP : The headers we want

“The headers we want” is a very simple, straight to the point blog post on the Fastly blog. Unlike many other more generic articles on the subject, it doesn’t try to explain the meaning of every HTTP header out there, and it doesn’t go into deep theory or the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Instead it tells you plain and clear which headers should be emitted by your website or web application. And these cover everything from the usual Content-Type and Content-Length, all the way down to the CORS and Server-Timing.

Once the basic functionality of your website or web application is done and out of the way, this blog post comes in handy with the specific best practices to make your site more secure and much faster.

For more on the same subject, have a look at “The headers we don’t want” in the same blog.

Shell Style Guide from Google

For all of you out there writing millions and millions of shell scripts to glue the world together, here’s a useful Shell Style Guide from Google. It is very Bash-centric and covers all the usual bits and pieces: comments, formatting, naming conventions, allowed features and recommended best practices.

When and where to determine the ID of an entity

It always amazes me when I randomly come across an article or a blog post precisely on the subject that I’m mulling over in my head – all without searching specifically for the solution or even researching the problem domain. It’s almost like the universe knows what I’m thinking and sends help my way.

“When and where to determine the ID of an entity” is an example of exactly that. Lately, I’ve been working with events in CakePHP a lot. And for one particular scenario, I was considering the beforeSave() event in the model layer, which would trigger some functionality that modifies data in other models. So, having a reference of the current ID would be useful for debugging and logging purposes. But since the current entity hasn’t been saved it, the ID is not there. And that’s where I started thinking about this whole thing and considering where is the right place to generate the ID.

One thing that kind of bothered me on top of the theoretical discussion, was the practical implementation, especially in different frameworks. If I remember correctly, the earlier version of CakePHP framwork, used the presence or absense of the ID in the entity to differentiate between insert and update operations. It might still be true now, but at least there is a way to work around it, as CakePHP now has isNew() method to check if the entity needs to be inserted or updated.

PhpMetrics – static analysis tool for PHP

PhpMetrics is yet another tool in the ever growing list of the static code analyzers for PHP. Compared to the rest, I think this one is the easiest to install and run. And it produces the most eye candy reports ever. The generated report is in the HTML format, with fancy charts and graphs, and makes it really easy to spot and fix the issues.