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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”.

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.

Tag: PHP

  • CardDAV: What is Turba’s true data model?

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    Ralf
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    Turba Addressbook imports, exports and syncs to and from many formats. I discussed all the formats in a previous article. You can even customize the addressbooks, make them contain extra fields or omit common fields. Saving and loading data from the addressbook backend is in some way one more such conversion. Turba can actually read…

  • Horde’s HTTP component goes PSR

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    Ralf
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    This weekend, I gave the horde/http component a some major redesign. See how things escalated. Oh my. My minimum goals were namespacing, PSR-4 (Revised Autoloading Standard) and some minor, schematic adjustments. The final result is quite different. I ended up implementing PSR-7 (HTTP Message Interface), PSR-17 (HTTP Factories) and PSR-18 (HTTP Client). The code largely…

  • Horde/Rdo ORM: PSR-4 and BC Breaks

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    Ralf
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    Summary: Horde/Rdo ORM got upgraded for Namespaces. User code conversion is straight-forward. Backward Compatibility is limited. If you ever wondered, RDO stands for Rampage Data Objects. This has been on my list for quite long, but it took some time to get it right. The horde/rdo library is horde’s Object Relational Mapping (ORM) solution. It…

  • Why extending PHPUnit might be wrong

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    Ralf
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    Over the last few months, I spent a lot of cold winter evening hours looking into porting ancient PHPUnit 4.x test suites over to PHPUnit 9.x. The test suites, you guessed it, belong to the Horde framework. Horde actually does not just use phpunit but wraps it into its own testing library horde/test. The full…

  • PEAR down – Taking Horde to Composer

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    Ralf
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    Since Horde 4, the Horde ecosystem heavily relied on the PEAR infrastructure. Sadly, this infrastructure is in bad health. It’s time to add alternatives. Everybody has noticed the recent PEAR break-in. A security breach has been found on the http://pear.php.net webserver, with a tainted go-pear.phar discovered. The PEAR website itself has been disabled until a…

  • horde trustr – A new horde CA app step by step

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    Ralf
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    Trustr is my current project to create a simple certificate management app. I decided that it is just about the right scope to demonstrate a few things about application development in Horde 5. I have not made any research if the name is already occupied by some other software. Should any problems arise, please contact…

  • Sara Golemon (Facebook) announces PHP Language Specification for OSCON 2014

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    Ralf
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    For more than 10 years, PHP core developers repeatedly raised the topic of providing a formal language specification for PHP. Now a team of facebook employees has written such a specification. The spec document is currently only available as a preview chapter a preview chapter . PHP veteran Sara Golemon announced on the “PHP internals”…

  • Sara Golemon (Facebook) kündigt PHP Language Specification auf OSCON 2014 an

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    Ralf
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    Seit über 10 Jahren bringen immer wieder einige der PHP-Sprachentwickler den Plan an, eine formale Spezifikation für den Sprachkern bereitzustellen. Ein Team bei Facebook hat das nun getan. Die Spezifikation, die bisher nur als Vorschau vorliegt, wurde von Sara Golemon auf der Entwickler-Liste angekündigt und soll auf der OSCON 2014 vorgestellt werden. Sara Golemon veröffentlichte…

  • I managed to bring large file uploads into PHP 5.6

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    Ralf
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    A colleague of mine recently faced difficulties to upload large opensource DVD images (>4G) into ownCloud during a demonstration. After some analysis, it turned out that it wasn’t ownCloud’s fault at all: PHP itself simply could not cope with large file uploads due to an overflow in some key variables. Further research showed that this…

  • Heads Up: PHP deprecates mysql extension in 5.5.

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    Ralf
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    In a recent developer vote, the php project decided to deprecate the mysql extension in PHP 5.5 and finally remove it from the main PHP project. It may or may not be available for a longer period as a PECL extension. The mysql extension has long been superseded by two more powerful extensions, PDO/Mysql and…