More Articles and Tutorials

12th April 2014

I've had a few more articles and tutorials published in the past few days, with a number to come later this month. Here's a quick run-down of the articles I've had published in the past couple of weeks.

Abstract File Systems with Flysystem, Sitepoint

An introduction to Flysystem, a PHP library which provides developers with a layer of abstraction over file storage systems including standard local files, online services such as Dropbox and Cloud Files and remote storage mechanisms such as FTP.

Introduction to JadePHP, Sitepoint

Jade is a templating language often found in the JavaScript world. Heavily influenced by Haml, it provides an extremely concise way of defining your XML-based markup. JadePHP brings it to PHP, and in this article I take it for a test-drive.

Getting Started with Assetic, Sitepoint

Assetic is an asset management package for PHP. It helps organise static assets - such as stylesheets, javascript and images - and perform actions on them such as compilation, compression and concatenation. In this article, I give a rundown of how to use it.

Coming Up

Here's a sneak preview of what's coming up.

I've written a huge four-part tutorial on using Apache SOLR along with Solarium, a PHP library which allows you to use SOLR as if it were a native search implementation. It's due sometime around the end of April.

Kirby is a very simple, file-based CMS written in PHP. I've written a comprehensive review of it, which will be published in the next couple of weeks.

I've also written extensively on Piwik which is a self-hosted, open-sourced alternative to Google Analytics. If you've been concerned recently with Google and privacy, or simply want to take control of your analytics data, then it's well worth a look.

I've also been doing some writing about Node, which I've been working with a lot lately. One upcoming article is about using JSON web tokens to secure an application, using examples written in Node with Express and Backbone for the server-side and client-side components respectively. I've also written an article on using streams in Node. Both articles should be published in the next few weeks.

Finally, I've also written a thorough review of Brackets, which is an open-sourced editor originally by Adobe.

Keep an eye out for these if they're of any interest - I'll be continually updating this page with the details.