The last week has been my first foray into GraphQL, using the GitHub GraphQL API endpoints. I now have Opinions^TM.

The promise is fantastic: query for everything you need, but nothing more. Get it all in one go.

But the reality is somewhat... different.

Yesterday, following a unanimous vote from its Core Committee, PHP-FIG formally accepted the proposed PSR-15, HTTP Server Handlers standard.

This new standard defines interfaces for request handlers and middleware. These have enormous potential impact on the PHP ecosystem, as they provide standard mechanisms for writing HTTP-facing, server-side applications. Essentially, they pave the way for developers to create re-usable web components that will work in any application that works with PSR-15 middleware or request handlers!

I faced an interesting question recently with regards to middleware: What happens when we go from a convention-based to a contract-based approach when programming?

Convention-based approaches usually allow for duck-typing; with middleware, it means you can write PHP callables — usually closures — and just expect them to work.

Contract-based approaches use interfaces. I think you can see where this is going.

We all know the standard HTTP request methods and status codes, right? Or do we?

We definitely know whether or not they should be integers or strings, and/or how string values should be normalized, right?

And our IDEs can totally autocomplete them, right?

Oh, that's not the case?

I've been trying to automate everything this year. When working on OSS, this is usually as simple as setting up Travis CI; in some cases, even that becomes a little more involved, but remains possible.

But that's continuous integration. What about continuous development?

One aspect of Zend Framework 3, we paid particular focus on was leveraging the Composer ecosystem. We now provide a number of Composer plugins for handling things such as initial project installation, registering installed modules with the application, and more. It's the "more" I particularly want to talk about.

AWS CodeDeploy is a tool for automating application deployments to EC2 instances and clusters. It can pull application archives from either S3 or GitHub, and then allows you to specify how to install, configure, and run the application via a configuration specification and optionally hook scripts. When setup correctly, it can provide a powerful way to automate your deployments.

I started looking into it because I wanted to try out my site on PHP 7, and do a few new things with nginx that I wasn't doing before. Additionally, I've accidently forgotten to deploy a few times in the past year after writing a blog post, and I wanted to see if I solve that situation; I'd really enjoyed the "push-to-deploy" paradigm of OpenShift and EngineYard in the past, and wanted to see if I could recreate it.

Enrico first pointed me to the service, and I was later inspired by a slide deck by Ric Harvey. The process wasn't easy, due to a number of things that are not documented or not fully documented in the AWS CodeDeploy documentation, but in the end, I was able to accomplish exactly that: push-to-deploy. This post details what I found, some recommendations on how to create your deployments, and ways to avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into.

Enrico just returned from phpDay, where he spoke about Expressive and the upcoming Zend Framework 3. One piece of feedback he brought back had to do with how people perceive they should be building Expressive applications: many think, based on our examples, that it's completely configuration driven!

As it turns out, this is far from the truth; we developed our API to mimic that of traditional microframeworks, and then built a configuration layer on top of that to allow making substitutions. However, it's not only possible, but quite fun, to mix and match the two ideas!

A month or two ago, we pushed a new release of zend-mvc that provides a number of forwards-compatibility features to help users prepare their applications for the upcoming v3 release.

One of those was, evidently, quite controversial: in v3, zend-servicemanager no longer defines the ServiceLocatorAwareInterface, and this particular release of zend-mvc raises deprecation notices when you attempt to inject a service locator into application services, or pull a service locator within your controllers.

The arguments go something like this:

• "Dependency injection is too hard to understand!"
• "This feature simplifies development!"
• "If this is so bad, why was it in there in the first place?"

These are usually followed by folks:

• saying they'll switch frameworks (okay, I guess?);
• asking for re-instatement of the feature (um, no);
• asking for removal of the deprecation notices (why? so you can delay your pain until upgrading, when you'll ask for re-instatement of the feature?); or
• asking for a justification of the change.

So, I've decided to do the last, justify the change, which addresses the reasons why we won't do the middle two, and addresses why the assumptions and assertions about ServiceLocatorAware's usefulness are mostly misguided.

I've been intending to play with React for some time, but, for one reason or another, kept putting it off. This past week, I carved some time finally to experiment with it, and, specifically, to determine if serving PSR-7 middleware was possible.