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Technical insights and software architecture

Deep dives into PHP development, Horde Framework evolution, and practical software engineering. Focused on real-world solutions for complex technical challenges.

Core Topics

PHP, Horde Framework, authentication systems, composer workflows, and modern development practices.

Long-form Analysis

Comprehensive technical articles exploring architectural decisions, migration strategies, and lessons learned from real projects.

Code & Community

Open source contributions, framework development, and sharing knowledge with the PHP developer community.

Category: horde

  • Let’s have a date. Revised horde/date ideas

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    Ralf
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    It’s bad but not as bad as you think. The way we write dates is very different among cultures and technologies. Even countries of the same language family might have totally different notions where to put the year, where to put the month, where to put the day when writing down a date in numbers.…

  • Horde on PHP 8.1 and Composer: Update

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    Ralf
    in

    Regular readers of this blog and many other are aware that PHP 7.4 will stop receiving security updates when PHP 8.2 comes out in November. This has made many horde admins question if they can continue to run Horde. Some events in life have made progress slower than originally planned. So where are we? Confirmed…

  • Tools to build better Tools faster

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    Ralf
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    Behind every lofty architecture mantra there is mundane execution. This is best left to tools and I don’t mean anybody in particular but programs that help us make better programs. It basically goes like this: Build tool. Use tool. Build better tool. Build tool to build better tool. Build better tool to build better tool…

  • Auth Headaches

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    Ralf
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    Back in the old days when rock musicians took the same drugs as your grandfather, authorisation and authentication might have been very simple. You had a user name, you had a password. Most likely you had one and the same password for each and everything. Congrats if you were smarter back then. Maybe your application…

  • Horde/Yaml: Graceful degradation

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    Ralf
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    Tonight’s work was polishing maintaina’s version of horde/yaml. The test suite and the CI jobs now run successfully both on PHP 7.4 and PHP 8.1. The usual bits of upgrading, you might say. However, I had my eye on horde/yaml for a reason. I wanted to use it as part of my improvements to the…

  • Horde Installer: Recent Changes

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    Ralf
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    Major codebase change. Now triggers on autoload-dump rather than earlier in the install phase. Outputs info to console, new comments in autogenerated files.

  • Maintaina/Horde UTF-8 on PHP 8

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    Ralf
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    On recent OS distributions, two conflicting changes can bring trouble. MariaDB refuses connections with ‘utf-8’ encoding Recent MariaDB does not like the $conf[‘sql’][‘charset’] default value of ‘utf-8’. It runs fine if you change to the more precise ‘utf8mb4’ encoding. This is what recent MySQL understands to be ‘utf-8’. You could also use ‘utf8mb3’ but this…

  • Maintaina Horde: Tumbleweed and PHP 8.1

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    Ralf
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    PHP 8.1 is available off the shelf in openSUSE Tumbleweed. I will shortly prepare a PHP 8.1 / tumbleweed version of the maintaina Horde containers. These will initially be broken due to some outdated language constructs. As PHP 7.4 will EOL by the end of this year, I decided not to bother with PHP 8.0…

  • Simplifying Routing / PSR-15 bootstrap in Horde

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    Ralf
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    As you might remember from a previous post, Horde Core’s design is more complex than necessary or desirable for two main reasons: Horde predates today’s standards like the Composer Autoloader and tries to solve problems on its own. Changing that will impair Horde’s ability to run without composer which we were hesitant to do, focusing…

  • Rdo: Persistence is not your model

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    Ralf
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    Remember that post on how your backend might betray you? You can store your Turba addressbook into an LDAP tree, but if the addressbook is manipulated from LDAP side, your CardDAV Sync may be ignorant of this. The bottom line is: You cannot trust the backend. Nor should the persistence model govern your application internal…