The "North Meets South" podcast, hosted by Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, has posted their latest episode - Episode #33: Managing timelines, wireframing, and nested Laravel applications.

Jake and Michael continue with their developing journey and share their approaches to managing timelines. They also talk about different wireframing techniques and setup some future episodes with discussion around containing multiple applications in a single Laravel install.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates on when new shows are released.

In a new post to his site Jason McCreary makes a case for writing clean code in your development processes. He makes three main suggestions of practices you can integrate into your workflow to help make the code you write cleaner.

I noticed [legacy codebases] all suffer from the same fundamental issue - inconsistency. Often the result of years of code patching, large teams, changing hands, or all of the above.

This creates a problem because we read code far more than we write code. So as I read a new codebase these inconsistencies distract me from the true code. My focus shifts to the mundane of indentation and variable tracking instead of the important business logic.

In my experience, I find I boy scout a new codebase in the same way. Three simple practices to improve the readability of the code.

His three suggestions for improving the overall code quality center around standardized formatting rules, consistent naming practices and avoiding nested code. He uses an example piece of code to help illustrate these recommendations with explanations for each.

On the Zend Framework blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted another tutorial, this time showing you how to use nested middleware in Expressive allowing for the composition of your own workflow in the request/response flow.

A major reason to adopt a middleware architecture is the ability to create custom workflows for your application. Most traditional MVC architectures have a very specific workflow the request follows. While this is often customizable via event listeners, the events and general request lifecycle is the same for each and every resource the application serves.

With middleware, however, you can define your own workflow by composing middleware.

He starts by describing one of the main concepts in the workflow of the application: pipelines. He gives an example of the default pipeline included with the Expressive skeleton application and how the middleware it uses nests to create a custom logic and handling flow. He follows this with an example scenario showing how to add authentication into the pipeline, specifically the use of Digest authentication via a PSR7 middleware package. Code is included for the integration of this package and the end result - all pages requiring authentication. He shows how to modify this and limit it to only certain paths and how to nest them in the route definitions.

Finally he shows another approach - creating a custom middleware pipeline inside of the factory for the requested middleware. He also covers nested applications, using traits for common workflows and the use of "delegator factories".

Andreas Gohr has posted an interesting article to his site showing you how you can easily visualize XDebug stack traces and make them a bit more clear than the usual output dump.

As alluded to in yesterday's post, I'm currently hunting an elusive bug with xdebug. The problem is, that it only happens sporadically and when I know it happened it is too late to set a break point. So usual debugging methods don't work. Instead I want to use xdebug's execution tracing: let it log all function calls and then pick through the log when the bug occurs.

[...] To ease my debugging I looked for tools that could read the computer readable format. I found a few promising candidates, but in the end they either didn't work or they did not provide what I needed. So instead of hunting the bug, I built a tool

His tool takes in the XDebug output and turns it into something much more readable and properly nested.

Vance Lucas has a new post to his site sharing at a project he's been working on, a micro-framework for PHP that takes a functional approach to its structure (and the structure of the apps you can make with it), Bullet.

Bullet is a new PHP micro-framework with a unique functional approach to URL routing that allows for more flexibility and requires less verbosity than the more typical full route+callback approach found in other micro-frameworks. The main problem with most micro-frameworks and even full-stack MVC frameworks that leads to code duplication is that the callback or method executed to perform the action and respond to the URL route lives fully within its own scope. This means that you are forced to repeat a lot of setup code across URL route handlers that load the same resource, authorize it, etc.

He illustrates with an example of a GET/DELETE to the same routes and having to create multiple handlers for each. He restructures this with Bullet and shows how it can nest callbacks inside of handlers to make for simpler routing. It also scopes down requests and gets more fine grained as you nest, making it easier to create reusable handlers (like in other files). If you're interested in finding out more about Bullet and its structure, you can find it in the project's main site.

On the PHP Tip-a-Day site Greg Bulmash shares a bit of "convoluted code" that could potentially cause confusion in the future maintenance of your application - combining ternary with anonymous functions.

Following on yesterday's post about chaining if statements without brackets on a single line, I tried to explore other ways to perform this "test if the variable is set, then do a comparison if it is" logic. I created one of the most convoluted lines of code I've ever written. It's no SQL join that spans 5 whiteboards, but it's pretty unreadable.

His example uses not just one ternary comparison, but nested ones with the anonymous function as the first condition. He points out that, if you're not careful with this method and make both sides anonymous functions, you could be in for a "cannot be converted to string" error on the closure side.

I'm sure there might be a very good reason to put two anonymous functions in a ternary operator, but I can't think of one at the moment. It's a fairly ugly proposition.

On the Refulz.com blog there's a new tutorial posted looking at traits (and nested traits) in PHP including examples of them in use and how to create your own.

Traits is a good new addition to PHP language. In our series about the new features of PHP 5.4, we reviewed the concept of Traits in PHP. The introductory article talks about what the traits are and what is the general syntax of Traits in PHP. The second article attempts to explain why we need traits.

The tutorial shows you how to define a custom trait use things like abstract methods, nesting them by making them "users" and how to use multiples at the same time (comma-separating).

The "Introduction to CodeIgniter" series continues on DevShed with this new article, a look at nested views in their sample application.

In this third chapter of the series I’m going to discuss one that bases its functionality on the loader class that comes bundled with CI. [...] By means of this method, it is very simple to replace in one single step all the variables included into multiple views with actual data. Therefore, in the next few lines I’m going to discuss how to use it to generate a dynamic web document, which will display some database contents.

After a quick review of loading views sequentially, they look at the new stuff - a "master view" that can load multiple other views inside. To pass information into this master view, they use the "$this->load->vars()" method included in the framework.

Patrick Allaert has made this recent post to his blog looking at something that a large group of PHP developers seem to forget about - readable PHP code. Specifically, he mentions the "return as soon as possible" mentality.

This is the first article of a series I will dedicate to tips to write PHP code that is easier to maintain, review, refactor,... These tips may be applied for other languages but are mainly focused on PHP. The first one could be entitled as "return as soon as possible.

He compares a code example - simplifying multiple if/elses, replacing the need for multiple nested evaluations that make the code harder to read. Check out the before and after to see how it helps the flow.

On the DotVoid blog today, Danne Lundqvist has posted about a problem he had - creating parent/child style data and displaying it as nested sets with the combination of PHP and Javascript. He outlines two different methods but only chooses one to run with.

The first method is "adjancency", a method that involves storing a parent ID in each node and recursing to find the related ones. He goes with a different solution, however - a "nested set". This method stores the data in terms of where it's located on the tree (layers from right, layers from left, etc).

Last night I was working on an application that display a full tree where the user must be able to to drag and drop nodes to reorder the tree. The problem is that it is much more difficult to insert or reorder the tree using the nested set model.

This was particularly effective in solving his problem, making a reogranizable listing that could be manipulated via a Javascript interface (the MooTree script from MooTools). Hi sPHP solution is included.