One nice thing during Drupal 7/8 development is the ability, thanks to the devel module, to get a list of all SQL queries ran on a page. As I've been working quite a bit on MongoDB in PHP recently, I wondered how to obtain comparable results when using MongoDB in PHP projects. Looking at the D7 implementation, the magic happens in the Database class:

With DBTNG, that's all it takes, and devel puts it to good use UI-wise. So is there be an equivalent mechanism in MongoDB ? Of course there is !

While porting (well, actually rewriting) an old PHP library to Go, I had to use a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) on a buffer. In old-school PHP, the standard is well established since PHP 4: just use crc32 from the strings package, and beware of the sign bit or, to be a bit more current while still compatible, use the hash() function from the hash package, like this example:

One of the interesting aspects of the revamped menu/links system in Drupal 8 is the fact that menu links are now in easily parseable YAML files, the "(module).links.menu.yml" in each module, in which each menu link can be bound to its parent link, hopefully producing a tree-like structure.

If you program in Go, you've probably written a lot of packages, and probably split packages in subpackages. Maybe even more than idiomatic Go would really advise... And you may have been grumbling just like I did at the fact that the go test command requires a list of packages, and does not recursively dive into all the subpackages, like PHPunit would, and does not seem to have a working recursion flag.

Call a method on a nil pointer (null object) ? This is a classical bug. What if it somehow turned out to be a valid and useful construct in some languages, say in Go ? And what about PHP ?

I've long been receiving quite high volumes of comment spam on this blog, which is why comments have always been pre-moderated. And, of course, there is usually not much to think of it. Not so with one of the spam messages posted today, which unwittingly provided an unexpected insight into the current mechanisms uses by spammers.

Go syntax has some funny peculiarities which are not immediately obvious, like methods on primitive types. Let's have a look.

Primitive wrapper types

Anyone with a few hours of Go is familiar with the basic object notation, like this example:

One litle-publicized feature of the BeeGo Go framework is its admin dashboard.

Features

Although it may look quite raw visually (think MIME: text/plain), it contains a wealth of information about goroutines, threads, memory usage, and request statistics. It even allows devs to add to a "healthcheck" list, and admins allowed dashboard access to run "tasks" defined in code. The diagram belows shows the hierarchy of features in the version coming with Beego 1.3.0.

Some days ago, at the AWS Summit 2014, DamZ renewed my long-sleeping interest for the Google Go language with wonderous stories about its use in infrastructure of the new Commerce Guys Platform they were launching that same days, so I've been doing my homework getting up to date on Go programming: that's what holidays are for, aren't they ?

Doctrine Annotations is a central part of the Drupal 8 Plugin API. One of its conceptual annoyances is the need for a separate autoloading process for annotations, which in some scenarios leads to duplicated path declarations. Let us see how to remedy to it.