Category: News and Updates

The 2018 Beginners Guide to Back End (JSON API) + Front End Development

It’s been a few weeks in the making, but I am happy now to reveal my latest course here on CodeReviewVideos:

The 2018 Beginners Guide to Back End (JSON API) + Front End Development.

This course will cover building a JSON-based API with the following back-end stacks:

  1. ‘raw’ Symfony 4 (PHP)
  2. Symfony 4 with FOSRESTBundle (PHP)
  3. API Platform (PHP)
  4. Koa JS (JavaScript / node)

Behat will be used to test all of these APIs. One Behat project, four different API implementations – in two different languages (PHP and JS).

We’re going to be covering the happy paths of GET , POST , PUT , (optionally) PATCH , and DELETE.

We’ll also be covering the unhappy paths. Error handling and display is just as important.

Where possible we’re going to try and use just one Behat feature file. It’s not always possible – the various implementations don’t always want to behave identically.

There’s a ton of good stuff covered in these videos. But the back end is only half the battle.

Whether you want to “catch them all”, or you’re working with a dedicated front-end dev, it’s definitely useful to know the basics of both.

With that in mind, you can pick and choose whether to implement the back-end, or front-end, or both.

If you don’t want to implement a back-end yourself, cloning any of the projects and getting an environment up and running is made as easy as possible by way of Docker. But you don’t need to use Docker. You can bring-your-own database, and do it that way, too.

The Front End

Whatever back end you decide to spin up, the front end should play nicely.

We’re going to implement a few different front-ends. The two I’m revealing today are:

  1. ‘raw’ JavaScript
  2. React

I have plans for a few others, but each implementation is a fair amount of work and I don’t want to over promise at this stage. There’s definitely at least two more coming, but let me first get these two on the site 🙂

The raw JavaScript approach aims to show how things were in the ‘bad old days‘. The days before your package manager  would take up ~7gb of your hard disk with its cache  directory.

The benefit of working this way is that there’s really no extra ‘stuff’ to get in the way. We can focus on making requests, and working with responses.

But that said, this is 2018 and the many modern JavaScript libraries and frameworks are fairly awesome. You’ll definitely get a renewed sense of appreciation for how much easier your life is once you’re comfortable using a library like React, after having done things the hard way.

Again, as mentioned we will cover more than just raw JS and React. Currently each implementation is between ten and fifteen videos. Each video takes a couple of hours to write up, and another couple of hours to record on average. I’m going as fast as I can, and will upload and publish as quickly as possible.

You can watch them as they drop right here.

Site Update

Behind the scenes over the past 10 weeks I have been working on integrating CodeReviewVideos with Braintree.

This is to enable support for PayPal.

I tried to create a ticket for everything I could think of ahead of starting development.

And I added a new ticket for any issue I hit during development. I’m not convinced I tracked absolutely everything, but even so I completely underestimated just how much work would be involved in this feature.

Being completely honest, I have never been more envious of Laravel’s Spark offering. For $99 they get Stripe and Braintree integration, and a whole bunch more. Staggering.

There’s a bunch of other new and interesting features in this release.

I’ve taken the opportunity to migrate from Symfony 3 to Symfony 4 for the API. There’s a bunch of new issues that arose during this transition – I hadn’t given it much prior thought, but with the new front controller (public/index.php) totally broke my Behat (app_acceptance.php) setup.

This work is also enabling the next major feature which I will start work on, once PayPal is live. More on that in my next update.

I appreciate that from the outside looking in, there doesn’t seem to have been a great deal of activity on the site over the last few weeks. I can assure you that behind the scenes, there has never been more activity.

Have A Great Weekend

Ok, that’s about it from me for the moment.

As ever, have a great weekend, and happy coding.

p. s. – I would be extremely grateful if you could help me spread the word by clicking here to tweet about the new course.

[PayPal] 22 Reasons You Can’t Rush The Push

This week saw two more videos added to the Symfony 4 Beginners Tutorial series. There’s only one more video left in this series, which I am going to record over the weekend.

I also will be recording a further ~10 videos on deploying Symfony 4 using a variety of methods. How far I’ll get with these is uncertain at the moment.

As a little bit of insight into my video tutorial creation process:

Each video takes me about three times longer to record than the final length of video would suggest. By which I mean if a video is 5 minutes long, it takes me ~15 minutes to record. The editing takes me anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes per minute of video.

That means for 15 minutes of raw footage I would spend about an hour on the edit. I’d love to make more videos but hopefully that explains why they take a while to release.

My favourite video from this week’s set is this one on AbstractController. I’d love to hear your feedback on it.

Support Changes

I’d like to welcome Joel to the CodeReviewVideos team.

Joel will be handling support issues. As a heads up, Joel is not a Symfony / software developer.

Can I please ask that any technical questions related to video content be left as a comment on the relevant video.

I am working to replace the comments section with an alternative to Disqus. I like the service Disqus offer, but appreciate that having to sign in to two services is not good. A better alternative is coming, but for now, please use the comments system.

PayPal Integration

I mentioned last week that I’m adding PayPal (via Braintree) as a payment method.

I get asked frequently how this is coming along. The answer is: as well as I can expect 🙂

I was a little over optimistic with my due date estimate.

Payment integration is a ton of work. There’s a bunch of obvious tasks:

  • Does the sign up form work with PayPal?
  • Is the payment processed?
  • Is the subscription activated?

And so on.

Then there’s the big list of “oh yeah, I forgot about that” stuff. Things like:

  • Invoices
  • Updating card details for an active subscription
  • “Translating” the errors returned for failed payments into stuff humans understand
  • Not allowing an upgrade from payment Plan A to Plan A
  • Showing the correct proration amount on a payment upgrade

And the like. Some of these issues are small, others are bigger.

During my research into this I found out about services like Chargebee – a one stop shop for this kind of thing. Or in Laravel-land, there is Spark. And in Rails, bullet train.

I was curious as to whether others in Symfony-land would find this kind of thing useful?

The response was sadly underwhelming. I mean I know I have a small number of followers on Twitter, but surely this could be useful to more than just me? Especially given that the other services I mentioned above are $$$.

Wrapping Up

Thanks to everyone who replied to last weeks email. There were a small number interested in seeing videos on PayPal / Stripe integration with Symfony. I’ve added the idea to my list and prioritised according to that feedback.

I’m looking forwards to having finished this PayPal work as I’m itching to get back to writing and recording new content. I have a bunch of topics to cover.

Until next time, have a great weekend and happy coding.

Chris

Symfony 4: Removing the Mystery

The Beginners Symfony 4 tutorial is in progress. I have all but the final video recorded now. I ended up re-recording a number of sections in both of the recent video uploads:

Why?

One of the areas I found most confusing when first starting with Symfony was in the widespread use of Interfaces.

You may have encountered the following problem:

Let’s say you’re working under a tight deadline. You’re writing some Symfony Controller code and working with a form. It’s not going quite as smoothly as you’d like. You reckon something is going awry with the form submission.

Being the inquisitive developer, you remember the oft touted advice:

Read the source, Luke

The thing is, when you ctrl+click on $form->submit($request); you’re taken to… an interface.

This is good stuff.

Your life will be much easier if you code to an interface, rather than tie your methods to specific implementations.

However, with that deadline looming over your shoulder, such things are nice to know, but right now, just show me the code!

Finding An Implementation

When I first recorded this video I initially just said what the outcome of a call to the submit  method would be.

Watching back, I couldn’t help but think about that stuck, and stressed developer. Sat in a noisy office, headphones in, listening to music when you’d rather have peace and quiet.

Everyone around you seems to be goofing off whilst you’re struggling to think through this really important problem.

The last thing you need is to be met with this weird interface  thing. If only you could find the implementation then life would be a lot less stressful.

How can you find out what is really happening when you call $form->submit($request);?

And what happens when you find the implementation and even then the code is tricky to follow?

I know these feels.

That’s why when recording this video I worked hard to make sure you come out at the end with a good understanding of the code that makes this happen.

This is a beginners series for Symfony 4. This is the stuff that will make working with, and understanding Symfony that much easier.

I hope you enjoy it.

Site Stuff

There’s a ton of work going on behind the scenes at the moment.

Can I pay by PayPal?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions that I get.

Currently: no.

That sucks. I appreciate that.

The reasoning for this is that Stripe is super shiny and as a developer, they were high on my wish list of cool things to implement.

Also, from a code perspective Stripe is actually a joy to work with. They really are awesome.

But still, I get asked a lot for PayPal.

I’m adding PayPal.

It’s quite a big job, but I’m about 65% of the way through the implementation.

Here’s a sneak peak:

That’s the Stripe form using Stripe’s React elements.

PayPal functionality is provided through Braintree.

There’s a nice transition between the two options too, which came for free via Bootstrap 4 and I really like it.

I’ve been working on completely extracting the membership code.

Would you have any interest in seeing video tutorials on how to make your own Symfony bundles?

Leave a comment and let me know.

There’s some other cool features that this work enables, which I’ll share with you in a future update.

Until next time, have a great weekend and happy coding.

Chris

The First Symfony 4 Tutorial Is Here

This week saw six new videos added to the site.

These are the final four in the Docker Tutorial for Beginners series, and the first two in the Beginners Symfony 4 Tutorial series.

A tutorial on Symfony 4 has been highly requested since it released on 30th November 2017.

Since then we’ve had three patches, so we’re now on Symfony 4.0.3.

Have you tried it yet?

I Had My Doubts

I will be completely honest, for the longest time Symfony 4 scared me.

We switched from the Symfony 2 / Symfony 3 Standard Edition, to the Symfony 4 skeleton. From a nice “full stack” to a minimal, bare bones starting point.

The first time I used Symfony 4, I just couldn’t wrap my head around why they would remove most of the very useful things:

  • Monolog
  • Twig
  • Routing…

And then the more I read, the more I thought that the symfony/skeleton was taking Symfony to become a replacement Silex. And whilst I have used and quite like Silex, I preferred the Symfony Standard Edition / full-stack approach.

I also went into a panic as I thought pretty much everything on the CodeReviewVideos.com would be obsolete.

Moar Skellingtons

Thankfully, all my fears were eliminated when they released the symfony/website-skeleton.

For me, this is perfect.

All the benefits of why I use Symfony for all my web projects, with all the added new features and bug fixes.

And a bare bones edition for my command line apps.

My Favourite Video

Even though this is a Symfony 4 beginners series, the last two videos get a little geeky. I can’t help myself.

There’s a really interesting change in Symfony 4 with the way we use controllers.

It’s useful to know as a beginner, and hopefully it sparks your curiosity into knowing more about the “how” and “why” of Symfony generally.

This one should be useful even if you’re not a beginner.

Other Stuff

There’s a lot of other change in progress at the moment, particularly on the back end of the site.

I’ve been putting some of the front end tweaks live this morning, and these take on board the suggestions I’ve had from site visitors. Thank you for all your feedback I really appreciate it.

There are still 15 or so videos to come from this batch. I’m currently taking a break from editing to write this.

Ok, on that note, have a great weekend, and happy coding.

Chris – CodeReviewVideos.com

Bigger Updates For 2018

I hope you’ve had a good Christmas and New Years, and that 2018 has started positively for you.

For the first half of this year, I am trying an alternative approach to the way I produce videos for the site.

My previous approach was to write out the videos on Saturday, and then record three lessons on the following Monday.

This works well in terms of getting regular new content created. But the delay between recording the first three videos, and the next three videos could be tricky for me if the videos followed on from one another as is the case in a longer series.

Infrequently over the last few years I have been asked why I don’t release all the videos as soon as they are available. Why do courses “drip” out, rather than arrive complete?

Well, as mentioned that’s because I hadn’t been recording in one sitting.

I’m changing this.

I am now writing and recording in larger batches.

What this means is that content will come in bigger updates of full and finished courses, rather than a few videos per week.

I am going to change the newsletter schedule accordingly. For the entirety of 2017 I sent one mailing per week – every Friday.

I will now only send you an email when new content is published.

My current target is to have the first of these new, bigger updates out within the next two weeks.

If you have any questions or feedback regarding this, or anything else, please don’t hesitate to get in contact.

Chris