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. “Always close to the source”.

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.

  • Modernizing horde/text_diff

    If you ever read a github pull request or similar extension proposal, you will likely have seen side by side comparisons of the original and the changed file. You may also have seen some text format that highlights only differences and a little context but hides the unchanged rest of the file. Both of these

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  • Code Generators: Bad, worse & ugly

    Code generators have been invented and forgotten at least four times in software history. They have an appeal to developers like the sun to Daedalus’ son. Let’s not be Icarus, let’s keep them generators at a distance and watch them carefully. Whenever a language, framework or paradigm forces developers to do the same thing over

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  • Tools to build better Tools faster

    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

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  • Why you should develop for latest, greatest

    Developers sometimes choose not to use the latest available language features that would be appropriate to tackle a problem for fear of alienating users and collaborators. This is a bad habit and we should stop doing that. Part of the solution are transpilers. What are transpilers, where are they used and what is the benefit?

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  • Phar out: horde/components in one file

    tl;dr – I packaged horde/components as a single file for easy inclusion in build pipelines. The horde/components commandline app is an important development tool. It lets you generate a composer.json file from the .horde.yml definition, helps with managing the changelog yml and provides a simple workflow utility which I use for release pipeline. Last year

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  • Horde Installer: Return to the Vendor

    TL;DR – horde/horde-installer-plugin will now install apps to vendor dir and then link to web dir Apps in the web dir Until today, the composer plugin for installing horde apps installed apps directly into the web dir and linked configs from outside the webdir into the apps. That had several drawbacks. Developers could not just

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  • Auth Headaches

    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

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  • Exceptional Dependency Decency

    Libraries can become less attractive to 3rd party integrators if they depend on too many unwanted other elements. This is especially true for libraries that are themselves pulled in as a dependency. Our horde/exception library is no exception to this. It is pulled in by almost all horde libraries because it is horde’s goto solution

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  • Horde/Yaml: Graceful degradation

    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

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  • PHP: Tentative Return Types

    PHP 8.1 has introduced tentative return types. This can make older code spit out warnings like mad. Let’s examine what it means and how to deal with it.

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