On the Medium.com site today Laravel project lead and creator Taylor Otwell has posted about a feature coming in the 5.6 release of the Laravel framework: single server scheduling.

Today Laurence Ioannou, founder of the Laravel monitoring application Eyewitness.io, contributed a great new feature to Laravel 5.6 (February 2018 release): single server scheduling.

He illustrates the new feature by first defining a new "inspire" job, making it run hourly with the artisan command and not overlap with a previous execution. While this works with a simple server, it doesn't scale to multiple - that's where the "single server scheduling" comes in. The addition of this support provides a new onOneServer option that prevents the job from running elsewhere. It makes use of Redis or Memcache to store the information about which server it is running on so that will need to be enabled to use this feature.

Sameer Borate has a new post to his site today showing how you can handle multiple exceptions in PHP 7.1, the latest release in the PHP 7.x series.

Exception handling is one of the ways in which modern languages handle errors. PHP usually handles exception in a separate catch block for each different type of exception. Below is a example exception code that uses three custom exceptions ‘MyFooException’, ‘MyBarException’ and ‘MyBazException’ that is later handled in a ‘try’ block.

He includes a bit of code showing the "old way" of doing it with multiple catch statements, one for each type of exception. With PHP 7.1 however, you can collapse all of those down into a single catch statement and type hint each type you want caught (pipe delimited). This can make for much cleaner code and a lot less repetition in your error/exception handling.

On the Paragon Initiative site they've posted a new tutorial sharing a method for creating "one login to rule them all" for your PHP-based applications. The goal is to make one system that can provides a single authentication point and secure credential storage.

Problem: You want to create a system whereby when a user authenticates to example.com, they're also automatically logged in at foo.com, bar.com, baz.com, and any other domains that you decide to add to the list at a later date. Okay, great, that seems straightforward, except there's a complication: The Same Origin Policy prevents you from getting/setting cookies on domains other than the one you control.

[...] Let's narrow it down a little bit further: Unlike a situation where e.g. "Login with Facebook" would be appropriate, you control all of the domains. They just happen to be different, so the Same Origin Policy kicks in. For simplicity, feel free to assume they're on the same server and application codebase, but you have a multi-site architecture in place where some of the sites have a different domain name.

Let's work around this limitation with as few moving parts as possible.

He then shoes how to use libsodium (via the Halite wrapper) to secure your credentials (passwords) and hooking it into a custom API endpoint that takes in a hex-encoded JSON string and a signature for the payload. He then expands this to provide "automatic login" handling making use of another endpoint to fetch an image to and log in the user by passing it the payload and signature values. He ends the post with a few security concerns around using this method and some things that it assumes are correct (and robust enough).

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post to his site talking about PSR-7 and HTTP headers and how they (headers) are handled in the structure of this PHP-FIG specification.

Yesterday, a question tagged #psr7 on Twitter caught my eye: "When I call $request->getHeader('Accept') for example, I was expected that I'll get [an array] but, in reality I got [a string]. Is this correct?" In this post, I'll explain why the behavior observed is correct, as well as shed a light on a few details of header handling in PSR-7.

He talks about the planning that went into PSR-7 and how they had to work around some of the "flexibility" (quirks) in the HTTP specification. This was especially true when it came to repeated headers. He also walks through their thoughts on multiple header handling and that custom header values are allowed. Because of these two things, they decided to treat all headers as collections and, despite there being separators already in the values. Instead they collected headers of the same types into these collections, some containing only one value while others could contain multiple. Back to the question - this explains why the "Accept" header they desired was still in its comma-separated form and not split into the array they expected.

The [...] example provides another good lesson: Complex values should have dedicated parsers. PSR-7 literally only deals with the low-level details of an HTTP message, and provides no interpretation of it. Some header values, such as the Accept header, require dedicated parsers to make sense of the value.

Stephan Hochdörfer has a new post with a handy tip on speeding up the indexing Satis does on your local repositories to generate its information. His tip involves being more selective in the rebuild process, only indexing the projects that might need it.

In the last couple of months this [indexing] process takes quite a while because Satis rebuilds the index for every repo it knows about. Since we deal with quite a few repos containing a large amount of versions it slowed down the "build time". Obviously it does not make any sense to run Satis on a repo that has not changed. Since Satis was lacking this feature I started hacking on it and I am happy that the feature got merged into master this morning.

With his patch, you can specify only the repository you want reindexed via the "build" command. You can even specify multiple repositories to rebuild, allowing for a bit more automation around the process.

NetTuts.com kicks off a new series of posts today with this first article covering the SOLID development practices. SOLID is a set of principles that can help make your code more robust and well structured in the long run. In this first post they jump right in with the first letter - "S" for Single Responsibility Principle.

[The Single Responsibility Principle] is one of the five SOLID agile principles. What it states is very simple, however achieving that simplicity can be very tricky. A class should have only one reason to change. But why? Why is it so important to have only one reason for change? [...] Even though you may not use a compiled language, you may need to retest the same class or module for different reasons. This means more QA work, time, and effort.

They go on to talk about how to figure out the "audience" for your class and how that effects what it should contain. A few "class examples" are shared in the post including objects that can print or save themselves. There's a bit of talk about software design ideas to consider and a less obvious example that might be breaking the principle (and how to fix it).

Chris Jones has a new post to his site showing you how to use Oracle 12c's implicit result sets in your code. Note: this functionality is still in development, so the naming/exact functionality might change.

The new Oracle Database 12c "Implicit Result Sets" (IRS) feature allows query results to be returned from a stored PL/SQL procedure (or a PL/SQL anonymous block) without requiring special PHP code. Support for IRS is available in PHP OCI8 2.0.0-devel extension when it is compiled and used with Oracle Database 12c. (OCI8 2.0 can be compiled and used with other versions of Oracle Database but the available feature set is reduced).

He shows a normal fetch loop that calls the oci_* functions and grabs each row with a oci_fetch_row call. He updates this to use an anonymous PL/SQL block (a string) instead that allows for more flexibility. He includes examples that fetch from one table, multiple tables and returns multiple result sets (that can be fetched one at a time) from the same single call.

In a recent post to his site, Brandon Savage has a few helpful hints to keep in mind when you're refactoring your applications to make them easier to maintain (and possibly perform better) in the future.

The downtime [of this week] provides a perfect opportunity for the aspiring software developer to do the one thing they are always told there’s no time to do: make the code better for better’s sake. With few deadlines and plenty of free time, most developers can get a few hours of refactoring in to their code towards the end of the year. They can rearchitect sections that were implemented with haste in September; they can write tests for sections that were untested in April. Put another way, the “lost week” can be redeemed.

He has a few recommendations, each including their own brief summary:

• Test Everything First
• One Method, One Job (Also One Class, One Job)
• Don’t Be Afraid Of More Objects And Classes
• Remove Dead, Unused, Unnecessary or Old Code
• Document Your Code

Check out the full post for the summaries and links to other useful resources.

On PHPMaster.com today Alejandro Gervasio has a new tutorial posted about the Single Responsibility Principle - a guideline that states that each class should only have one "area of concern" and not try to do to much.

One of the most notorious consequences of this rational associative process is that, at some point, we effectively end up creating classes that do too much. The so-called “God class” is quite possibly the most extreme and coarse example of a structure that packages literally piles of unrelated operations behind the fence of the same API, but there are other subtle, more furtive situations where assigning of multiple roles to the same class are harder to track down. [...] What the principle attempts to promote is that classes must always be designed to expose only one area of concern and the set of operations they define and implement must be aimed at fulfilling that concern in particular and nothing else.

He starts off with a typical violation of the principle, showing a class that not only handles user data but also includes the functions to work with the database directly as well (insert/update/delete). He refactors this into a few much more manageable classes - a mapping class to handle the database interaction and a "User" class representative of a true user object.

Freek Lijten has written up a new post to his blog about a set of development principles that have been getting more press in the PHP community lately - SOLID. In his post he starts with a look at the "S" in the set - "Single Responsibility".

The single responsibility principle isn't all that hard to explain. It states that an object should do one thing, and one thing only. [...] A responsibility is a reason to change, and a class should only have one of those. Now all of this may sound abstract and since the objective of this series is to avoid just that we'll just dive into the why now.

He includes some sample code to illustrate, going with an active record implementation, some of the problems that come with a typical setup including issues with unit testing, bad practice of using the data store directly, etc. He shows a refactored code example that splits out the functionality previously all in the one class ("Bike") into three different ones - one is the normal Bike object, another compares the Bikes and the third works with the data store to handle the CRUD for the objects.