Often I see people in articles, comments, and chat espousing "the right way" to code. This is a reaction to that.

In this article, I'm going to cover an example of implementing some business logic in our usual Active Record patterns, and then I'll show how the same logic can be applied using the Data Mapper pattern. In both cases, we'll see how we can move our business logic into our business entities, thus avoiding anemic business domain. We'll also cover pros and cons of the two styles of ORMs and how they affect the way we write our code.

An announcement!

Lots of people have been asking about how to install HHVM with Nginx for use with Laravel. Here's how! This will cover material used in Vaprobash, my project for configuring Ubuntu virtual machine with Vagrant.

Laravel's documentation on Database Transactions describes wrapping our database calls within a closure. What if we need more power? Let's dig in to see what's going on behind the scenes, and what tools we have to work with Database Transactions in Laravel.

When you put your web application behind a load balancer, or any type of reverse proxy, you immediately need to take some important factors into consideration. This article will cover those considerations, as well as discuss common solutions.

As of Laravel 4.1, the framework now uses StackPHP's implementation of Symfony's HttpKernel. This means we can add our own middleware to our HTTP layer! Here's how.

Your firewall is an important first line of defense on any publicly-accessible server. In previous articles I listed how to set up a firewall without getting into any detail. This article goes into depth with configuring your iptables firewall.

Setting up your computer for Vim and Tmux often comes with a few issues. Here's how to manage plugins for Vim and use Tmux to boost your productivity, as well as settle a few common issues.

Mac's come with the ability to serve static content out of the box! and there are simple options to get fancier with dynamic content. Here are some examples.

If you have a highly-trafficked site or want the best site-speed for global traffic, using a CDN such as Amazon's Cloudfront might be worth your time. Here I investigate whether it's worth using Cloudfront to deliver not just static assets, but your whole site.

NodeJS introduced some breaking changes in its 0.10 version. Because this breaks so many packages, I often need to install pre-0.10 versions of Node. Here's how to do that in Ubuntu 12.04 server.

PHP's PDO has many attribute options you can configure. Here's how to set those in Laravel.

How to use raw queries safely.

Here's how to use multiple database connections within Laravel