Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a very common design pattern in modern web applications. The wide usage and acceptance of the design pattern means that many of the most popular web frameworks are built around this architecture. Laravel 4 is one such framework that uses the MVC design pattern to cleanly separate the various aspects of a [...]
If you have ever worked on a big project with multiple developers, you will probably have found that keeping everyone’s database structure consistent can be a nightmare. For example, say one of your colleagues adds a new feature, and in doing so, is required to add a new column to the database. They commit their [...]
Laravel 4 is the upcoming latest release of the popular PHP framework Laravel. Laravel is a “clean and classy” modern PHP framework for building web applications. Heavily inspired by the likes of Ruby on Rails, as well as other modern PHP frameworks like Symfony, Laravel 4 aims to show how far PHP has matured over [...]
“REST” is a common word in the world of web applications and services. REST usually refers to the transfer of data between servers and clients. For example, if you wanted to get updates from Twitter, you would be using Twitter’s REST API. In this post I hope to explain exactly what REST means, how you [...]
One of the legacy problems with WordPress is it does not offer an easy out of the box solution for using Git. This means that it is often the case that theme management is handled through FTP. Using Git for deployment is far superior than FTP in just about every way. In this post I [...]
When you start to build complex web applications, it’s important to structure your components so that they remain independent and your architecture remains flexible and maintainable going forward. However, once you add even the slightest bit of complexity, it can become difficult to maintain this form. In Object Orientated Programming, it is inevitable that one [...]
Lambdas and Closures are relatively new additions to PHP after shipping with version 5.3. Both offer some new functionality and the ability to refactor old code to be cleaner and more intuitive. However, I think many developers are unaware of Lambdas and Closures or confused about what they actually do. In this post I will [...]
On Monday I introduced the concept of Test Driven Development. Test Driven Development is a programming methodology that promotes writing unit tests before you write your actual code. This means that every aspect of your code will have a explicit test to ensure that it is functioning correctly. By writing your tests from the outset, [...]
Over the past couple of years, there has been a strong shift in the development community to move towards Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration (CI) is where a team of developers will push changes or new features multiple times per day. The benefits of rapid deployment is that new features and fixes can be applied to [...]
One of the most important aspects of building scalable websites is how you manage the caching of data. The problem with learning about cache is, it only really comes up when you fighting to keep your site online, which by that point, it’s too late. Implementing a cache should really be one of the fundamental [...]
