Drupal 8 tip of the day: autoloaded code in a module install file

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Thu, 2015-08-27 08:24
(updated 2017-08-30, see bottom of post). Autoloading in D8 is much more convenient that in previous versions, however, it still has limitations. One such issue is with hook_requirements(), which is supposed to be present in the module install file, not the module itself: when called at runtime for the site report page, the module is loaded and the PSR/4 autoloader works fine. However, when that hook is fired during install to ensure the module can indeed be enabled, the module is not yet enabled, and the autoloader is not yet able to find code from that module, meaning the hook_requirements('install') implementation cannot use namespaced classes from the module, as they will not be autoloadable. What are the solutions ?
Logging for MongoDB Frederic Marand Sat, 2015-08-22 19:51

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:

<?php
// Start logging on the default database.
define(DB_CHANNEL, 'my_logging_channel');
\Database::startLog(DB_CHANNEL);

// Get the log contents, typically in a shutdown handler.
$log = \Database::getLog(DB_CHANNEL);
?>

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 !

Golang tip of the day; PHP-compatible crc32 Frederic Marand Sun, 2015-05-31 17:28

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:

Go tip of the day : running tests for all subpackages recursively

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Sat, 2014-09-27 23:52

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.

Calling methods on null objects in Go and PHP Frederic Marand Sat, 2014-09-20 11:07

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 ?

Debugging spammer mechanics

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Sun, 2014-07-20 09:40

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.

Golang tip of the day: admin dashboard and health checks in Beego applications Frederic Marand Sun, 2014-07-06 12:23

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.

What to do when Go will not run, nor install from source ? Frederic Marand Fri, 2014-06-06 16:39

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 ?

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