Opinionated frameworks make decisions for the developer, thus making both the developers and creators lives easier.

There has been some confusion about how to extend the Illuminate Request and/or the Response classes.

Because of their importance in handling HTTP requests, these two classes are handled slightly differently than normal classes. Here I will go over how to extend them and then I will show you a method which favors composition over inheritance.

Facades are great for making your packages easy to use by other developers. Learn how to create and implement your own Facades.

This will go over getting an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server up and running for production use. Note: This does not pretend to be an exhaustive resource, particularly around security. Additionally, if your environment is more complex (Separate DB servers, servers across data-centers, different access levels, etc), then your setup can and will vary.

A reading list for learning about ETags.

This will review solving the "Lost Update" problem with ETags within a Laravel 4 RESTful API. This builds off of previous ETag related articles.

There are many articles describing what a Hypermedia API is. Many have a lot of jargon and cover a lot of topics. This one does neither. Learn what a Hypermedia API is on a basic level.

This 2010 video of Jon Moore's talk is extremely good for connecting the dots on just what a Hypermedia API is and might look like.

There are a few guides out there which help you install Laravel 4 in a way that let you pull in updates to the skeleton app in addition to the composer-based libraries. I think this is the best, quickest way.

I've begun integrated ETag's into a Laravel 4 API application. I've started by implementing Conditonal GETs.

I've been scouring the internet for good information on setting up user and group permissions for Apache. I'll link some resources on the bottom here, but here's what I found:

@fideloper the latter and hope I don't have to use reflection to mock a private/protected method

February 26, 2013

I last wrote about ETags in context of Conditional GETs, which allow a server to see if a resource has been modified since the last time a client checked. If it has not been modified, the server can return a 304 Not Modified response.

My curiosity about ETags (Entity Tags) was first piqued when reading over Github's API documentation. Looking into them, I saw that there explanation often pointed to them as a "cacheing" mechanism.

In looking to build a RESTful API, an important consideration is how to handle errors. Most errors are displayed to users in HTML, as these are web applications. However, API's need some special care.