January ’15: Top Developer Tools and Services

Now that I'm increasing the amount of blogs that I write I want to start giving credit to stuff that I use every day. These aren't always going to be programming or web related. Many of them are to do with organisation and learning. I may even throw in some fun stuff, too! Mailcatcher First off the bat: Mailcatcher. A Ruby gem for testing emails on your local machine. It works by catching the emails sent through a local SMTP server and comes with a simple-but-awesome GUI for previewing your emails. As a bonus it already comes installed with PuPHPet which I use to set up my PHP stacks. If you don’t use PHP or PuPHPet it’s still a breeze to install. So if you’re a developer that makes applications with emails I really recommend you give it a shot.

Simple Search with Laravel and ElasticSearch

I was recently asked to make a search engine for a client's website. Normally I would go down the MySQL fulltext search route but I was feeling rather adventurous at the time. I had no experience with ElasticSearch, Apache Solr or any other search system prior to this so I decided to pick ElasticSearch and dive in head first. This tutorial is a result of some of the things I picked up while learning it. I aim to show you how to set up the Elasticquent Laravel package and some basic ways to fine tune your search engine.

12 Day Challenge: RubyMotion

I have wanted to expand my skills into mobile development for a long time now. I love developing for the web and I think it's only natural for any web developer to want to take a peak in to the world of mobile app development. Many tools exist already that I could use to build HTML5 websites and convert them into usable apps. Software such as PhoneGap, Cordova or Titanium. The problem is that I don't want to build sluggish HTML apps. Over a year ago I spent some time learning to make Android apps using Java and Android Studio. My experience was okay. Nothing special. It wasn't all easy sailing because I have no previous experience with Java. Add that on to learning a new IDE and I feel like I'm battling with both. I learned a lot in that time but I never really applied the knowledge. And I don't find Java enjoyable enough to push to continue. So right now I am fortunate enough to have 11 days off from my job for our Christmas break. I have decided to dedicate an hour each day to learning RubyMotion (and an extra day because why not?!).

PHP 5.4 Trait Qwerks

Although the title may lead you to think otherwise; I actually really like Traits. I wish I had made the switch to 5.4 sooner! Bundle them with the shorter array syntax and I'm a happy PHP dev. I recently experimented with Traits in a Laravel package. You can find the package here DatController This blog is contains a couple of the not-so-obvious points of traits which I came accross. You can not override trait properties I think this is what I like the least about traits. You can not set a default property and have a class override it. <?php trait NewTrait { public $variable = 'default value'; } class NewClass { use NewTrait; public $variable = 'override value'; } I would love to be able to override trait properties. However, you could argue that it's best to use inheritence for these situations.

Laravel 4.1 one-to-one polymorphic relationships

To use one-to-one polymorphic relationships in Laravel 4.1 use the "morphOne" method in your models. For example: I have two tables, pages and products. I want to be able to add one featured image to each of these. The Product model would look like this: <?php class Product extends Eloquent { public function image() { return $this->morphOne('FeaturedImage', 'imageable'); } } The Page model would be: <?php class Page extends Eloquent { public function image() { return $this->morphOne('FeaturedImage', 'imageable'); } }

Vagrant, RBENV, Rails 4 and PostgreSQL headaches

Forewarning: This post is more of a rambling and future reference to myself. I've been working on a project in Ruby on Rails for a little while and a few days ago I made the mistake of upgrading to OS X Mavericks with the thoughts "What's the worst that could happen?" running through my mind. Well for some reason the PG gem really doesn't like my computer anymore. Long story short I decided that I would fire up a Ubuntu development environment on Vagrant and well, it has been a difficult ride. To keep it short. First time around I had many issues.

Middleman Template: bootstrap3, SASS and Slim

As quoted from their website, Middleman is "A static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development". I really love using Middleman for simple static websites. Everything I use in my front end stack (SASS and coffeescript) just works out of the box. Using two commands middleman while developing a website locally and then middleman build when I'm ready to push the static content to my server. It really saves a lot of time.

Creating a Twitter Feed in Laravel 4

This tutorial is now out of date - checkout philo/laravel-twitter or thujohn/twitter for an easier and more up to date solution. In this tutorial I aim to show three things How to get Twitteroath working with Laravel 4 How to create and access a new configuration file for your twitter settings How to create a helper method for your tweets To start off install twitteroath via composer. Put line 4 in your composer.json with the rest of the Laravel Composer set up and run composer update or composer install if you haven't already { "require": { "laravel/framework": "4.0.*@dev", "abraham/twitteroauth": "dev-add-composer-json" }, "autoload": { "classmap": [ "app/commands", "app/controllers", "app/models", "app/database/migrations", "app/database/seeds", "app/tests/TestCase.php" ] }, "scripts": { "post-update-cmd": "php artisan optimize" }, "minimum-stability": "dev" }

Automating Configurations with Laravel

One of my favourite features of Laravel is how it handles configurations for different environments. You can have different settings for development, staging, beta, production and even separate configurations for each developer working on the project. With a fresh version of Laravel installed: take a look at the app/bootstrap/start.php file. Near the top of the file you should see the following snippet of code: <?php $env = $app->detectEnvironment(array( 'local' => array('your-machine-name'), )); Within the detectEnvironment() method you can define an array of configurations. If you and a friend or coworker are working on a project and using Git to keep track of changes you could use the following: <?php $env = $app->detectEnvironment(array( 'mitch' => array('mitch-machine-name'), 'tom' => array('tom-machine-name'), )); Laravel will detect which configuration to use from your computer's hostname.

Using Eloquent, Twig and Slim PHP

Note: See the update to this post where I've made several changes Originally while I was writing this blog I intended to make a step by step guide to putting together three of my favourite PHP tools. After a few issues and finding out that Slim Views is now a thing I decided instead to put together a git repo so anyone can get started quickly. I will use this blog post to quickly show how it works! *Note that this tutorial doesn’t aim to teach you Slim, Twig or Eloquent It’s to show you how to use them together effectively.* You can find the repo here: https://github.com/acoustep/slim-twig-eloquent After following the Installation instructions you should be able to use each component as well as Eloquent validation.