Opinionated Frameworks

Apr 16, 2013

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

Extending the Request and Response class in Laravel 4

Apr 15, 2013

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.

How to Create a Facade in Laravel 4

Apr 14, 2013

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

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS LAMP Server Setup

Apr 06, 2013

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 Description of Hypermedia APIs

Mar 23, 2013

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.

The 'Best Way' to Setup Laravel 4

Mar 18, 2013

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.

ETags and Optimistic Concurrency Control

Feb 16, 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.

API development: ETags and Conditional Get

Feb 10, 2013

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.

Error Handling with Content Negotiation

Feb 05, 2013

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.