v1.8.0

Ollie Read

PHP & Laravel Development

The Action and Operation approach

For a long time, I followed the approach of creating controllers and repositories for individual entities (models). While this approach works, it slowly started to leave a bad taste in my mouth. After much researching into alternative approaches I was unable to find something that truly fit what I wanted. So I decided to have a go at creating my own.

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Creating a modern day PHP framework

PHP has come a long way since I started development some 15 years ago, and its frameworks are far from the small MVC framework I created back in 2008 to get my head fully around the concept. A lot of frameworks have fallen behind, unable to keep up with the rapidly changing climate, and those that have kept up with it polarise developers. It's easy to bash a framework, but what does it actually take to build a framework? I'm going to give it ago.

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An alternative to Eloquent, Articulate

Lately I've found myself getting frustrated with Eloquent, needing more than Laravels default ORM offers. I'm a big fan of the DataMapper pattern, but I become disheartened with the overhead and complexity of Doctrine. My time spent with Java has brought out a love for objects, and absolutely everything being objects. With this in mind, I created myself a super basic lightweight ORM named Articulate.

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Freelance PHP developer, the return!!

It has only been a year, but I'm making a return to the world of freelancing. For those of you that don't know, I've been working for CleverCherry for the last year (well, a year as of yesterday). It has been a wonderful year and a wonderful experience. I've made some friends along the way and I've thoroughly enjoyed being a part of their team. I handed my notice in some two months ago and my final day of employment will be the 3rd November, followed by a week of me relaxing, and then it's back into it again.

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A streamlined approach to Laravel validation

It has been while (almost two years) since I wrote an article here and I've decided to make my triumphant return with an article I never managed to get around to writing. As the title may suggest, this article is about streamlining validation with Laravel. While the final aim is to explain and present you with a quick and simple abstracted validator that requires minimal code in the actual implementation stage, before we get there I will need to cover the usual methods of validation which are default validation, form request validation and model validation. So let's start.

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