The Symfony ChoiceType is a complex, interesting beast. By far my biggest complaint about it is the error messages shown to the user during validation are not great. Defaulting to, "This value is not valid," with no help for the user on what values are actually allowed. That's okay for plain HTML interfaces where the… Continue reading Improving Symfony ChoiceType Error Messages
PHP has a use statement that allows the importing or, more accurately, aliasing of classes into the current namespace. In other languages, like Python, importing a nonexistent class or module will fail at the import. In PHP, this doesn't happen, instead the program will fail later when the aliased class, function, or constant is is… Continue reading In PHP Use is More Like an Alias than an Import
Something I've found myself doing more and more is writing lifecycle objects that add notification-like extension points to other objects. A good example is the MessageLifecycle interface and its implementations in PMG's queue library. Rather than pollute the queue consumers with events or other more generic things directly, the lifecycle provides and extension point into… Continue reading Lifecycle Objects as Extension Points
The neatest thing I've discovered about Docker in the last few months are multi-stage builds. To put it simply a multi-stage build is a Dockerfile with two or more FROM stanzas. Let's explore what that means for a PHP project. First, a goal: the images built for any application should 100% ready to go. That… Continue reading Multi-Stage Docker Builds for PHP Applications
A parameter object replaces one or more parameters to a method with a single object instance. A result object is a object created specifically for a return value from a method. Parameter Objects Changing a method to accept a parameter object is a common refactoring for grouping parameters that belong together. Unfortunately that's not the… Continue reading Parameter & Result Objects: More Than Grouping Values
In the marketing world, the de facto way to send data around is a file. Usually via SFTP -- five years ago it was almost 100% FTP. Occasionally a third party tool will have an API, but clients will almost always only deliver things like product feeds or first party revenue data via a file.… Continue reading PHPSecLib SFTP Error Handling
PMG uses Papertrail to aggregate logs and we've found it to be really solid over the last four years. Example Monolog Configuration Here's a quick example of configuration for Monolog Bundle to get logs to papertrail. This uses Monolog's remote syslog handler to do its work. Couple key points around the services here: PsrLogMessageProcessor is… Continue reading Logging to Papertrail from Symfony Applications
