Paul M. Jones

Most routing systems combine the “routing” task with the “dispatch” task. That is, they both extract the parameters and pick the controller/action. Aura.Router v2, because of its truly independent nature, only does routing. It turns out that dispatching is something that can be independent of routing, and so we have a separate Aura.Dispatcher package to handle that (although you can use any dispatching system you like).

…

Aura.Router v2 allows you to examine the $_SERVER values and pick a route based on them using the addServer() method. For example, if you want to match routes based on the HTTP_ACCEPT value …

<?php
$router->addRoute('json_only', '/accept/json/{id}')
->addServer(array(
  // must be of quality *, 1.0, or 0.1-0.9
  'HTTP_ACCEPT' => 'application/json(;q=(*|1.0|[0.[1-9]]))?'
));
?>

…

Sometimes we need a params in the route path to be sequentially optional. The classic example is a blog archive organized by year, month, and day. We don’t want to have to write three routes, one for /{year}, /{year}/{month}, and /{year}/{month}/{day}, each with repeated information about the route.

In Aura.Router v2, there is a special notation similar to URI Templates that indicates sequentially optional params: {/param1,param2,param3}

…

We can now add REST resource routes in a single call to attachResource():

<?php
$router->attachResource('blog', '/blog');
?>

This will add seven REST routes with appropriate names, paths, HTTP methods, and token regexes …

If you decide those routes are not to your liking, you can override the default behavior by using setResourceCallable() to pass callable of your own to create resource routes.

Via A Peek At Aura v2 -- Aura.Router.

... if you respect a writer, then you talk about the work. If you disdain the writer, then you try to psychoanalyze the writer and figure out why would he write this. ... If they mention my work at all, which they rarely do, it’s to dismiss it and to psychoanalyze me, which they are incapable of doing ... They have no idea what I’m talking about.

A lot of criticism is like, including project criticism. Via Critics, community and 'Ender's Game': An interview with Orson Scott Card | Deseret News.

... it turns out extracting Aura.Dispatcher was the key to reducing the Aura.Web package contents. With Aura.Dispatcher, any object can be a controller, since it can dispatch to any method on any object (as well as dispatching to closures). In turn, there is no more need for the Aura.Web package to provide a base controller with interfaces for various implementations. Instead, you can dispatch to any object you like, with the dependencies you prefer, as your controller. That controller object can be implemented at the framework level, or in a separate package or bundle.

As a result, this means that web-specific request and response objects can be in their own package independent of any particular controller implementation. The Aura.Web v2 package contains only those request and response objects.

via A Peek At Aura v2 -- Aura.Web.

It turns out that dispatching at the framework level, and at the web and CLI levels, is all remarkably similar. After realizing that, we extracted the dispatching logic to its own independent package, without any dependendcies on any other packages.

The Aura.Dispatcher package lets you define named objects that will get instantiated only as they are dispatched to (i.e., lazy loading). It picks which named object to instantiate, and optionally which method to invoke, based on an array of router values (or any other array you wish to pass). It also works as a micro-framework dispatcher; instead of using an object factory proper, you can add a named closure and that will be invoked.

Additionally, if you want a two-stage invocation where the dispatcher picks an object, and the object picks its own method, Aura.Dispatcher comes with a trait that lets you pass named parameters to any method you like. You can use that trait in any object to pick a method and invoke it with the router (or other) parameters.

via A Peek At Aura v2 -- Aura.Dispatcher.

If you like clean code, fully decoupled libraries, and truly independent packages, then the Aura project is for you. Download a single package and start using it in your project today, with no added dependencies.

The guys from /dev/hell have invited me on the program tonight to record at 9pm Eastern. You can listen live at http://icecast.wondernetwork.com:8000/devhell.m3u, and be sure to stop by in IRC on Freenode at #devhell!

When you even contemplate bringing an old legacy system into a large-scale web project, you should do load testing on that system as part of the feasibility process before you ever write a line of production code, because if those old servers can’t handle the load, your whole project is dead in the water if you are forced to rely on them. There are no easy fixes for the fact that a 30 year old mainframe can not handle thousands of simultaneous queries. And upgrading all the back-end systems is a bigger job than the web site itself. Some of those systems are still there because attempts to upgrade them failed in the past. Too much legacy software, too many other co-reliant systems, etc. So if they aren’t going to handle the job, you need a completely different design for your public portal.

A lot of focus has been on the front-end code, because that’s the code that we can inspect, and it’s the code that lots of amateur web programmers are familiar with, so everyone’s got an opinion. And sure, it’s horribly written in many places. But in systems like this the problems that keep you up at night are almost always in the back-end integration.

The root problem was horrific management. The end result is a system built incorrectly and shipped without doing the kind of testing that sound engineering practices call for. These aren’t ‘mistakes’, they are the result of gross negligence, ignorance, and the violation of engineering best practices at just about every step of the way.

The title is adapted from Peter Drucker, "All business failures are management failures." The quoted piece is from a comment that I can't link to directly, so go to Arnold Kling on the problems with the health insurance exchanges and look for Dan Hanson on October 25, 2013 at 2:13pm.

The blog post Is ORM Abstraction A Pipe Dream? is one of the best technical articles I’ve read in maybe a year. Not because it describes a successful technical solution, but because it describes an attempt and a failure to achieve a goal. It reminds me of this quote from Feynman in Cargo Cult Science:

If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some
idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out.
If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument
look good. We must publish both kinds of results.

(Cargo Cult Science is one of those essays that everyone should read, especially programmers who think of themselves as scientists or science-minded.)

What Feynman is saying here is that, when it comes to expanding a body of knowledge, the failures are just as important as the successes, perhaps more so in some cases. (Be careful here; they have to be “honest” failures, where you had some reason to believe in advance that it had a good chance of working.)

So what is it about the “Pipe Dream” article that impressed me? It is that the the author first signals his tribe membership by mentioning his “framework of choice”, then proceeds to try to do some work outside of that tribe. In doing so, he is expanding his knowledge and skills so that he can be useful outside the norms of that particular tribe. He realizes that there are other ways to do things than the way his tribe does them, he does some work with those things, he tries to unify them, and he fails at the unification. In the end, he has no technical artifact to show for his exploratory work, but he has now expanded his skills as a programmer beyond his “framework of choice.”

Your Framework Will Fail You

And being able to operate outside a framework is really important, because the framework you choose today, even if it’s the self-described “greatest PHP framework of all time”, is going to fail you in some non-trivial way in 3 years or so, even if it has a “long-term support” version. (After all, how long is long-term in the web world?)

Take a look at some points from this article by Yannick Mahe titled The consequences of living with a legacy PHP framework (note that “legacy” in this case is only 4-5 years):

You can no longer rely on the community. …

Documentation can be hard to find now. …

I can effectively no longer use plugins. …

[This framework] used Prototype (scriptaculous) as its Javascript framework … UX advances which could require just a simple jQuery plugin have to be written from scratch. …

This framework is not compatible with newer versions of PHP. It was written for PHP 5.2, and is compatible with PHP 5.3 but no longer works on PHP 5.4. …

Basically I’m one third less productive when programming than I could be.

Is that a slam against the framework or its defenders? No more than saying “the sky is blue” is a slam against the physics of light diffusion in atmosphere. “The framework is going to fail you” is a truism regardless of the framework.

And everybody uses a framework, whether they recognize it or not. I have said at other times that a “framework” can be defined as “that collection of tools and techniques you reuse on a regular basis from project to project”. So everyone uses a framework one way or another, whether formal or informal, well-architected or not, designed with intent or evolved through use.

How To Handle Failure

So if all frameworks are going to fail you, and you can’t avoid using one, what are your options?

All too often, software is like a complex system in that requires a constant input of energy, and complex systems fail. So the key point here is not “the framework is going to fail you.” The key point is “how easy will it be to handle that failure when it happens?”

A developer twin of Nassim Taleb might argue that whatever framework you have needs to be antifragile. That is, when one subsystem fails or becomes obsolete, it should not render the rest of the system unusable. Indeed, the failure of a subsystem should lead to a replacement that makes the system stronger in the future.

Frameworks in general are especially susceptible to their subsystem failures: they are usually developed as a thing of whole cloth (yes, even the ones that advertise they are “component based” — the components might be OK, but the framework often is not). The different parts depend on each other, and if one fails, you need to dive into the guts of the framework proper to fix it in place, which frequently leaves you worse off than before when it comes to maintainability.

Instead, for a robust or antifragile system, you should be able to swap out the different subsystems when they no longer meet your needs. As each piece fails (and each one will eventually fail to meet your needs), you’ll swap out each of the pieces at different times. Eventually the system will be composed entirely of replacements, but the whole thing will have kept running the whole time.

And that’s where we come back to the “Pipe Dream” article. By taking some steps outside his “framework of choice” the author is beginning to get an idea of how to integrate independent and disparate systems into a whole. In the long run, that ability is going to serve him better as a programmer than his knowledge of any particular framework.

Afterword: Aura for PHP

Of course, I’m going to mention Aura here. The ideals illuminated by article are the ideals that drive the development of the Aura, even to the point of prejudicially declining certain feature requests.

The Aura project is a collection of truly independent and fully decoupled libraries. None of the libraries has any external dependencies. The project is “library-first” and not “framework-first”, even though we do offer a framework built of the combined packages. The libraries evolve independently of the framework and can be incorporated individually or in any combination you like into any project.

If you liked the ideas behind this article, then the Aura project is for you. Download a single package and start using it in your project today, with no added dependencies.

UPDATE (30 Oct 2013): The title on the final section has been prefixed with the indicator "Afterword" since at least one person mistook it for a summary.

... it turns out that merely extracting the SQL parts was not good enough for some of our audience. They asked, “Can we download just the SQL connection classes, without the query objects or the mapper?” As with Solar, we had to answer, “No; although the Aura.Sql package is independent from every other Aura package, the various SQL tools all have be taken together as a whole.”

As a result, we have done even more decoupling with the Aura.Sql-v2 packages. We have managed to make these packages independent from each other:

Aura.Sql-v2 is composed primarily of an extended PDO implementation, along with a connection manager and a bare-bones profiler. Its only dependency is the native PDO; there are no userland dependencies. As an added bonus, we have taken pains to make it PHP 5.3 compatible.

Aura.Sql_Query is a package of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE query objects for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL Server. It has no dependencies at all, not even on PDO. You build your query with the object, then pass it along to the database abstraction layer of your choice. Because it uses traits, it is for PHP 5.4 and up.

Aura.Sql_Schema comprises “list tables” and “list columns” functionality for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Microsoft. As with Aura.Sql-v2, its only dependency is the native PDO (note, not the Aura.Sql-v2 ExtendedPdo). Also as with Aura.Sql-v2, it is PHP 5.3 compatible.

With this dedicated effort at decoupling and true indpedendence, you can now use just the extended PDO connection object, or the query objects, or the schema discovery tools, without having to download the others. Of course, you can use them all in concert if you like.

via Aura for PHP.

From the book Lost Moon, retitled Apollo 13 after the movie was made:

Apollo was downright dangerous. Earlier in the development and testing of the craft, the nozzle of the ship’s giant engine…shattered like a teacup when engineers tried to fire it. During a splashdown test, the heat shield of the craft had split open, causing the command module to sink like a $35 million anvil to the bottom of a factory test pool. The environmental control system had already logged 200 individual failures the spacecraft as a whole had accumulated roughly 20,000.

In January 1967, one of the first Apollo spacecraft caught fire during an on-the-ground test, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. At that point, NASA decided that quality was more important than schedule and they overhauled the Apollo project (although they still managed a moon landing 2-1/2 years later).

Far too many software projects are like that. It usually takes a serious failure, one where blame cannot be shifted, for managers to realize that their schedule is unrealistic. Via Quality, Features, and Schedule | askblog.

From an intellectual perspective gay men allow the rest of us a “control group” of male sexuality, containing within a wide range of masculine expressions, one which refutes or repudiates a lot of the feminist sexual ideology.  After all, you can’t say “society makes straight men do this” without checking to see if society (which has mostly ignored gay men, culturally speaking, except as two-dimensional stock characters to be trotted out for laughs) also makes gay men do it, too.

Case in point: the oft-touted feminist maxim that “men only go after hot young girls because our rape-culture tells them that’s the ideal they should be shooting for.”  Feminism has always taken issue with the masculine preference for youth – and I think we all know why – but blamed it squarely on “the Patriarchy’s” efforts to take power away from older women.  If it wasn’t for our screwed-up youth-worshiping culture, the feminist myth goes, men would get just as hard over saggy tits and cottage cheese thighs as they do perky tits and a tight ass.

But if “the Patriarchy” is the one dictating what men should and shouldn't be attracted to, culturally speaking, then one must also assume that a group like Gay Men, who “the Patriarchy” has traditionally had an antipathy toward, would therefore not be subject to the same “artificial rules” that straight men are.

But it turns out gay dudes like young stuff, too.  A lot.

While the post might not be safe for work, depending on where you work, it is still very much worth reading in its entirety. Via The Red Pill Room: The Lambda Factor.