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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. “Always close to the source”.

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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.

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

Tag: horde

  • Unit Testing Horde 6

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    Ralf
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    Some years ago I reasoned about upgrading unit tests from ancient PHPUnit 4 to then-recent PHPUnit 9.Back then Horde’s unit test suite would use a Horde_Test class inheriting from the actual phpunit test cases. Even then I was fairly certain that this approach was not very practical in the long run.Why extending PHPUnit might be…

  • I want to run horde/components on new PHP

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    Ralf
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    If you want to run horde-components on a version of PHP which is not yet reflected in packagist.org released versions: me@mine:~/horde/components$ composer config minimum-stability devme@mine:~/horde/components$ composer install –ignore-platform-reqs No composer.lock file present. Updating dependencies to latest instead of installing from lock file. See https://getcomposer.org/install for more information.Loading composer repositories with package informationUpdating dependenciesLock file operations:…

  • Back to the source code? The 2025 agenda

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    Ralf
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    Looking back on 2024, it was a challenging, demanding and sometimes crazy year. But let’s start with athe good things in life: There was so much joy to be had with the family, so much to learn and discover at work, so much progress on personal development and discovering new approaches to things that just…

  • Horde 6: Return of the Git Tree

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    Ralf
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    Over the last few weekends, Horde 6 code has been merged back from the Maintaina fork and from separate contributions to the former Horde development version, “master”. It was time to upgrade the development tool chain. Back in the Horde 5 days, there was a utility called git-tools developed by Michael Rubinsky. It would checkout…

  • Maintaina’s Horde 6 goes upstream

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    Ralf
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    Horde 6 alpha versions with composer 2 support are coming to the upstream repos and packagist.org composer create-project horde/bundle .

  • 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
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    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…

  • Modernizing horde/text_diff

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    Ralf
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    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…

  • 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…