The Laravel News site has posted the second part of their tutorial covering the creation of a Laravel-based single page application with Vue.js. This latest tutorial picks up from part one and covers data loading and error handling.

In this tutorial, we continue Building a Vue single-page application (SPA) with Laravel by learning how to load async data from a Laravel API endpoint inside a Vue component. We will also look at error handling when an API response returns an error and how to respond in the interface.

[...] To keep the server-side data simple, our API will use fake data. In Part 3, we will convert the API to a controller with test data coming from a database.

The tutorial starts with the definition of a "users" API route and an update to the API route configuration to map the routes to the correct controllers. Next comes the frontend functionality to load in the user data with the addition of the "users" route to the current Vue.Router instance. The UsersIndex component is then added with the template and functionality to request the data from the backend API. Some final changes are made to the route handling and error handling is added for when the data loading has issues, relaying an error message back to the user.

Cal Evans, PHP community member extraordinaire, has a new post sharing his suggestions of the top five influencers in the PHP community that "make it awesome" and help make it one of the best he's been involved in.

It is no surprise to anyone who has talked to me for more than five minutes that I think the PHP community is the most vibrant and engaging developer community out there. So as we approach the end of the year, I am going to list out the influencers that help keep this community at the top. These are the people that you need to seek out and thank because without them, the PHP community would not be what it is today.

He goes with categories rather than mentioning names (because, really, there's way too many too name them all):

• 5: Core Developers
• 4: User Group Leaders
• 3: Conference Organizers
• 2: Conference Speakers, Bloggers, and Teachers
• 1: Any developer using PHP

That last one, while it might seem like an "everyone else" kind of category, is one of the most important in my opinion. After all, what is a language without its users. Core developers and community group/event leaders wouldn't have anything to talk about if no one was there to talk. There would be no one to teach or be taught to and the core developers wouldn't have any reason to drive the language forward. Even if you're not well-known in the PHP community, you and your code are making a contribution to the community, even if only in a small way.

In the latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc proposes the idea that "legacy code is a cancer" that can influence decisions and technology choices that shy away from the new and possibly more functional alternatives.

This might come out controversial, but I firmly believe there is no room for legacy code in modern systems. Allow me to elaborate before you sharpen your pitchfork and light your torch. What I mean by that is: there should be absolutely zero reason to keep implementing the functions you’re adding to the new version retroactively into the old version, just because some people are still using it, even if the people using it are a vast majority.

He talks about the "support everything for as long as we can" ideal and how it can come back to bite you in the end. He suggests that, at some point, the v1 users have to "be discarded" and dropped for the upgraded version of the application. He talks about failure potentially brining around success and compares applications versus libraries and components and the upgrade path for each. He ends the post with a suggested upgrade path to move the system itself away from legacy support and into the new, latest version.

On CoderWall.com there's a post sharing some findings about how RockThePost.com scaled PHP to 30,000 concurrent users on Amazon EC2 instances.

RockThePost.com is a LAMP stack hosted on Ec2. We're preparing to be featured in an email which will be sent to ~1M investors... all at the same time. For our 2 person engineering department, that meant we had to do a quick sanity check to see just how many people we can support concurrently.

They have a list of five suggestions/opinions on what has helped them scale out to this level including using Varnish for caching, turning on APC (PHP opcode caching) and using a c1.xlarge EC2 instance. They used Google Analytics and Siege to run their load testing on the "exterior" of the site.

On the Symfony blog Fabien Potencier has a new post talking about a change in the support structure for developers wanting to get help with either Symfony1 or Symfony2 - a split in the mailing list to help make things a bit easier to split out.

Now that Symfony2 is just around the corner, we need to better organize community support for both symfony1 and Symfony2. As more people start using Symfony2, the user mailing-list is becoming more and more difficult to follow. [...] After an opinionated discussion on the mailing-list, I've decided to create two new mailing-lists that are replacing the current users mailing-list: one for symfony1 and another one for Symfony2. The current mailing-list has been switched to the archive mode; all messages will remain browseable and searchable but new messages will be rejected.

If you're a current member of the "users" mailing list and want a similar experience, you'll need to subscribe to both. Otherwise, pick the one you like and watch your inbox fill up. This break up makes it easier for people to find messages specifically related to their version of choice without having to look for the "[Symfony2]" tag in the subject line.

From the New Earth Online website, there comes this new tutorial for showing the current number of people browsing your website.

After recently having seen a way of showing the number of people currently visiting your site by recording IP address I thought I'd demonstrate my own way of doing it that also includes the ability to show which users online, and number of users/guests online.

They briefly explain the goal of the script and touch on another tool for WordPress that does a similar thing, but this solution would work for any site. The rest of the post is the code for the feature that uses a database table to keep track of users online (via insert/update/deletes).

From the New Earth Online website, there comes this new tutorial for showing the current number of people browsing your website.

After recently having seen a way of showing the number of people currently visiting your site by recording IP address I thought I'd demonstrate my own way of doing it that also includes the ability to show which users online, and number of users/guests online.

They briefly explain the goal of the script and touch on another tool for WordPress that does a similar thing, but this solution would work for any site. The rest of the post is the code for the feature that uses a database table to keep track of users online (via insert/update/deletes).

DevShed continues their look at the creation of a simple blogging script with part three of the series (part 1, part 2) - the creation of an admin utility to work with the contents of the blog.

The idea is to give the owner of the blog the ability to manage the blog by being able to remove users and articles as required, or to alter the status of users by upgrading them to admin status or banning them. It is also a place where the administrator can start new topics that will then garner their own replies.

They go through the creation of the main admin script (functionality managed with a switch statement, including other external PHP files) and the functions that go in each of those individual files to make things work - managing messages, managing users, and managing categories.

DevShed continues their look at the creation of a simple blogging script with part three of the series (part 1, part 2) - the creation of an admin utility to work with the contents of the blog.

The idea is to give the owner of the blog the ability to manage the blog by being able to remove users and articles as required, or to alter the status of users by upgrading them to admin status or banning them. It is also a place where the administrator can start new topics that will then garner their own replies.

They go through the creation of the main admin script (functionality managed with a switch statement, including other external PHP files) and the functions that go in each of those individual files to make things work - managing messages, managing users, and managing categories.

On NewsForge, an article with a look at phpMyAdmin has been posted, a "getting started" guide for those not familiar with the software.

So many open source projects depend on MySQL that it's almost impossible for administrators and other open source enthusiasts to avoid working with at least one MySQL database. MySQL's command line interface is easy enough to use, but if you don't feel like reaching for a five-pound MySQL reference book or Googling for proper SQL syntax, phpMyAdmin is a great alternative to learning MySQL commands by heart.

They take a brief look at how it's set up, though it's not an installation tutorial, more about configuration. They guide you through some of the interface before getting to the real functionality - inserts, selects, dumping/restoring data, working with users, and checking/repairing tables when things go awry.