Roberto Guido

laravel

Talking with the Unit Tests

I had the very bad idea to try browser testing, writing some code on top of Laravel Dusk for an application of mine. Apart the quantity of time wasted to instrument the test for every action (scroll a little down to reach the Save button, add some artifical pause to

laravel

Introducing: Larastrap

At least one year ago I realized that my main open source project (GASdotto: a management application for Purchasing Groups built with Laravel) was stuck on Bootstrap 3, while Bootstrap 4 was been around for a while and Bootstrap 5 was already been announced. So I wanted to upgrade the

css

Boostrap Custom Display

Trying to format a Bootstrap table for decent display on mobile screens, I wanted to hide the thead element below a certain breakpoint. I used the d-none d-md-block combo, then I realized that normally a thead should be in display: table-header-group. And there is no d-table-header-group rule in Bootstrap... I

php

The Ultimate Data Source

"Ehi! Two years ago many municipalities in Italy have been suppressed, created and merged! I need to update the database for a customer of mine, who didn't found one of them! Let's look for an updated CSV!" And, of course, I found nothing. At least nothing usable in my own

laravel

Cutting Eloquent Models with Blade

If you already tried to do something with Blade Components in Laravel, probably you already stumbled upon the many limitations of the subsystems. Among the many, the latest - and most disappointing - I've found is that seems not possible to pass an Eloquent instance as attribute to a component:

laravel

Lazy Async Jobs

UPDATE: I've just published a package on Packagist to manage Asyncronous Jobs over HTTP requests. I have a Laravel application sendings a lot of mail notifications when certain operations are done, so I wanted to delegate mail sending to a Queue to avoid to the users long waits for the

laravel

Dynamic Global Scope

I have an application which usually handles, on the same instance, different groups of informations isolated by context: each user is assigned to one of the contexts, many users act inside the same context, when a user logs in all the managed data are relative to his own context. This

fediverse

PeerTube Direct Links

A note for future self: as the web interface of PeerTube do not exposes any direct link to access the raw video files it hosts (but only a link to the embeddable own player, which may be unconvenient in many situations), a bit of hack is required. Given that a

fediverse

Pushing into the Rocket

A Rocket Chat instance, the same 60 users already pushed into a PeerTube instance, and poor will to understand the too much complex native feature to import by CSV. Let's write another script (very similar to the PeerTube's one...):

fediverse

Pushing into the Tube

A PeerTube instance, 60 users to create, and an import feature not yet implemented. But a suggestion: "You can easily develop a script that create these users via API call". Here, my script:

laravel

Laravel Infinite Scroll

I needed to quickly implement a very simple infinite scroll behaviour on a very simple page. Due laziness I got a look for any dirty hack suggested by random people on the internet to do that in Laravel, ready to be copied and pasted; I found a method using jScroll

laravel

Influenced by SPARQL

It is some time now that I'm working on a SPARQL ORM for Laravel, directly derived from Eloquent and sharing (at least, in the original intention) the same feeling and interface. I've not tagged yet a first release, but I'm actually esperimenting with some very simple use cases to test,

laravel

Not so Static Assets with Laravel

Handling Laravel routing in ReactPHP, I missed a particular use case: managing the assets usually sitting in the public/ folder. Publishing a regular application with a regular web server it takes care to directly fetch and serve the files from the filesystem, but wrapping the application into a ReactPHP loop

laravel

Routing ReactPHP with Laravel

As previously mentioned, I'm actually playing with asyncronous PHP and I'm trying to combine ReactPHP (which is the most popular framework for this kind of tasks, in PHP) and Laravel (which is the most popular "classic HTTP syncronous" framework). Today's challenge: run a ReactPHP HTTP Server, but still leveraging the

php

Scaling Websockets in PHP

I have to implement some kind of sub-system for a larger platform, able to handle realtime communications (such as chat, notifications, and a few other things). And this means: websockets. And, as the platform itself is implemented in PHP/Laravel, this means: websockets in PHP. So I get back to

aws

Who is Who

Using Redis to store Laravel sessions is a good idea. But be sure to allocate an instance large enough, especially if you use it also for caching pourposes. AWS Elasticache graphs are not eloquent enough about you effective memory usage. Querying the instance with redis-cli seems to be more effective.

hack

Progressive PDF Loading

If you have large PDF documents to serve into a website, probably you don't want those are fetched entirely before showing to the user. And if you host them in AWS S3, you may also be concerned about bandwidth usage and costs. Mozilla's PDF.js handles progressive loading and handling,

hack

Cropping Videos

Today, for the second time, I've published something on Dribbble: a demostration of the previously mentioned scrollable calendar. And, as I encoutered the same problems occourred at the first time, here I take some note for the next one. As I've not (yet?) received an invite to the platform, I'm

hack

Scrollable Calendar

In a web application of mine I've added a simple calendar to display time-based informations. Classic month view, colored cells, implemented with FullCalendar. Then, a user asked to not limit the view to a month at a time, but just display the current week and the next three or four.

hack

Symbolic Links in FTP

Note for future myself: FTP doesn't supports symbolic linking, when you have to create a link in a folder just create a PHP file in the same folder as

php

Authenticating SPARQL

Recently I'm playing a lot with SPARQL and PHP, using Virtuoso as triple store and EasyRDF as client library. The only problem was that Virtuoso pretends (of course) some kind of authentication to write data into the store (this is not entirely true, you can also permit write operations on

laravel

Teaching Moodle to Laravel

I had to integrate a Laravel application with a Moodle instance: certain users, under given circumstances, may generate a new course in Moodle, be enroled as teacher, and add other platform's users as students. The first step has been to setup a unified authentication, implementing a OAuth2 server in Laravel

sysadmin

The Memory of Maria

A problem on one of my VPS haunted me for weeks: occasionally, almost once a day, the database (MariaDB, default drop-in for MySQL on Debian) stopped to accept connections and the only way to fix was to manually kill and restart it. A bit more of investigation resulted in a

laravel

Laravel Broadcasting Unveiled

The documentation page about broadcasting events in Laravel to a websocket client is a bit obscure: if you use the Pusher third-party service it will eventually work out-of-the-box (I don't know, haven't tried), but if you choose to setup your own websocket server you will find yourself looking for hints

javascript

Material Navigation

Recently I wanted to use the navigation transition suggested by the Material Design guidelines (the element into the list growns when selected) into a web page, but I've not been able to find any working example online. So I've managed to provide my own implementation. This is part CSS and