Author: admin yep

Engineers are the artists with better tools. They not only use their senses to create a masterpiece, they also use their brains, so they can achieve it smarter.

Imagine you can become a genuine Laravel engineer.

Imagine you can use a tool that allows you to:

• Create a visual model of your project with just a few clicks
• Generate all model and migration files from this model without typing any lines of a code
• Change the model at any time in the future and get updated migrations at the same moment

Sounds too good to be true? Not at all. Skipper is a powerful visual editor for Laravel Eloquent that can do this all. And it brings you much more.

Benefits of Skipper Usage

• Skipper saves you a huge amount of time.
  At any phase of project lifecycle, it doesn’t matter if you start from scratch or just edit an older project, this is what you always get – a terribly large amount of time, which you can spend in a better way.

• Skipper decreases the demands on your coders’ skills.
  We all want to have the best employees possible. But sometimes, you cannot find them easily. Skipper reduces their lack of qualification by preventing possible mistakes they could make while coding manually. With the course by Tom H Anderson you will be able to give employment also to junior programmers.

• It always allows you to perfectly know your model.
  You and your whole team can clearly see and understand the whole project logic and how the data will flow through the system. Last but not least, with the diagram, you can also easily explain it to your customer.

• It allows understanding and management of the large projects easily
  Skipper can be used for applications with a few or hundreds of tables. Large projects are simply impossible to converse about without a visual model. Can you imagine joining a new project and they give you a SQL dump of the schema and say, “Learn this.” You probably don’t want to. With Skipper this will not be a problem anymore.

All right, until now we’ve been talking only about the comfort and the work that you can save. It might all sound like a nice marketing talk. So, do you wonder what Skipper really does in terms of Laravel coding? We understand that, let’s go through this.

Skipper Features

ORM-based Entity-Relationship Diagramming (not just database design)

• Editing of all objects (entities, modules, associations and indexes) through an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
• In-built value advisors, validators, and assistants.
• Regions and color management for a well-arranged model.

Export of models to abstract classes allowing Skipper to manage them

• Export of Laravel migrations sequentially as your schema changes.
• Exported migrations are in a standardized and ready-to-use format.
• Migrations and abstract models are updated during each export, concrete models are exported one time and prepared for your customization

Import of existing projects

• Smart wizard guides you step by step through the project import from the database.
• You get a project model in just a few clicks.

Perfect tool for project documentation

• Exported migrations, with a complete ERD, give perfect referential integrity.
• Enables clear schema communication across the entire development team.
• Data stored as XML files for better readability and versioning support.

Wide range of customization options

• Support for your own templates, behaviors, custom properties, or data types.
• Allows you to connect Skipper with other external tools.

Well documented

• Comprehensive documentation covers every topic of Skipper usage.
• To get into Skipper really quickly and smoothly, check the section “Course” in this article.

Support for Eloquent and other frameworks

• Eloquent for Laravel.
• Doctrine (1 and 2) and Propel for Symfony and Zend.
• CakePHP and MongoDB ODM.
• Customized and in-house frameworks.

More than 10.000 satisfied customers

• Maybe you know some of them. Apple, eBay, Lidl, Avast, Hostwinds, SuddenLink, University of Kentucky… And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Stable and well-tested software with more than 10-year history.

The course

The course Designing Entity Relationship Diagrams in Laravel, created by erd.design, teaches you how to start using Skipper in your project today with guides on importing existing projects, starting projects from scratch, exporting to models and migrations, and how to create a readable ERD.

The course was built with the cooperation of Skipper and Tom H Anderson. The course also influenced the Laravel Framework, Illuminate, with new functionality added to allow changing of DateTime schemas.

All this was done to share the beauty of development that Skipper catalyzes. With 10 years of Skipper experience, erd.design is in a unique position to teach ERDs with Skipper and, through this ever-improving course, bring better Eloquent ORM engineering to a wider audience. Use the coupon code LARAVELNEWS for and you will get 25% price reduction.

Skipper Licensing

During 14-day long evaluation period, you can try for free all Skipper features and functions.

You can buy a lifetime license for €395 ($495) which also includes all updates for a 1-year period. After that, there is an annual maintenance agreement of €139 ($169) which gives you constant access to updates for the next 1 year.

If you like Skipper and have some ideas you could share with us, we would be happy for your feedback. In exchange, we want to offer you 10% off the price for your purchase. Write to us to support@skipper.com and we will provide you with your price-cut coupon.

Prices accurate at time of writing

Prices accurate at time of writing

Prices accurate at time of writing

Prices accurate at time of writing

If you work inside a team, do yourself a favor – decide on a coding style and get the entire team to use it.

Why Stick To a Standard Code Style?

Making all your teammates’ code look the same will make the codebase so much easier to review, merge and maintain:

• it’ll be easier for you to judge only how the code works, without being distracted by how it looks;
• you won’t have PRs bloated by striping spaces, removing spaces, converting tabs to spaces, moving parentheses on the next line… and so on; less to think about during review; fewer conflicts to fix;
• even if you work solo – I’d argue it’s still very a good idea to do it; adopting PSR-12 in particular will make your code look the same as most well-maintained PHP projects; so when you go look at their code, it’ll actually start looking… a little more familiar; so it’ll be a little easier to learn from them;
• plus, I bet you will adopt PSR-12 one day, so if you start now… you’ll thank yourself later on; be kind to your future self!

Which Code Style to Choose?

Fortunately, thanks to PHP-FIG, it’s easy to choose a standard to start from – PSR-12. Digging a little deeper though, the Laravel ecosystem has pretty much decided on a few rules on top of that. Personally I don’t agree with all of them… but… that’s normal. Ask 10 developers what they like and… you’ll get 10 different answers. So in this case, I found it’s better to just… stick to the Laravel standard. You don’t like X in particular, your coworker doesn’t like Y, and so on, but… you each give in a little bit, for the sake of standardization. Everybody compromises, nobody has a reason to make a fuss… it’s the fair way to go, if you ask me. But hey… you do you 😀

How Do I Automatically Enforce It?

There are quite a few ways to do this automatically:

Option 1. Use StyleCI

If you can use StyleCI, use that. This is why it exists, and it does an excellent job. When someone pushes code to the repo, StyleCI comes in and formats it, by changing their PR to match the code style. It’s simple and brilliant. In fact, we use StyleCI for all the public-source Backpack packages and it’s worked wonders. Just follow the prompts to set it up, then you can forget about it.

If your code is open-source, this is such a good option, that you don’t need to read any further!

However… if your code is closed-source (not public)… you might find your particular company/setup can’t use StyleCI. You might develop A LOT of private projects, that are not under continuous development or maintenance… so you don’t want to pay for a maintenance fee for legacy projects… we get it, we got there too. In that case, the StyleCI pricing won’t make sense for you. In that case…

Option 2. Use PHP-CS-Fixer in Your Editor/IDE

Use php-cs-fixer locally, on each developer’s computer. There are plug-ins for every major editor and IDE, so it should be easy to do. You can store a configuration file in your project root, to make sure you all enforce the same rules.

However, this does assume you can tell your developers “do this, we all need to use the same code style“. In most teams, you can. But even if they do, most developers switch editors, forget to install the plugin, so unstyled code does go through, sometimes. For that reason alone, I don’t trust this method alone. So what I prefer is to…

Option 3. Use PHP-CS-Fixer Inside a Github Action

If none of the above float your boat, there’s one super-simple solution that you can implement, then forget about. It has most of the benefits of StyleCI (it’s implemented where the code is stored, on Github) and most of the benefits of PHP-CS-Fixer (it’s free).

You can implement a Github Action. Every time code is pushed or a pull request submitted, you can run php-cs-fixer on that code and fix whatever is needed. That way, no matter what developers submit, the code will be styled according to the standard.

To be honest, this is the entire reason this article exists – so I get to document how I did this 😀 Hopefully it’ll save you some time (and future me too). Here’s how to go about it:

Step 1. Create a configuration file for PHP-CS-Fixer (.php-cs-fixer.dist.php in your root directory). Here’s the content we use for it, after digging quite a bit. Note that if you don’t have a directory mentioned at the end, you should comment them out, otherwise PHP-CS-Fixer will fail. If you have any comments/improvements on the code style, please suggest them in my gist, it’s open for improvements.

Step 2. Add .php-cs-fixer.cache to your .gitignore file.

Step 3. Add a PHP-CS-Fixer as a dev requirement: composer require --dev friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer

Step 4. Add a Github action/workflow for it, by creating a .github/workflows/format_php.yml file:

name: Apply PHP Code Style

on:
    push:
        branches:
            - 'master'
    pull_request:
        paths:
            - '**.php'

jobs:
    php-cs-fixer:
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
            - uses: actions/[email protected]
              with:
                  ref: $

            - name: Install
              run: composer install

            - name: Run php-cs-fixer
              run: ./vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix

            - uses: stefanzweifel/[email protected]
              with:
                  commit_message: Apply php-cs-fixer changes

That should be it. Once you push code to your repo, a new commit should automatically be created, fixing the style. This works particularly well if you work with PRs, because then you squash and merge them and you won’t bloat up your git history.

I hope this will be helpful to you. If you have a better way of doing this, let me know in the comments. I know there are a lot of ways, but this is what I found to be the best for us, in Sep 2021.

Look what’s rolled into town! Why, it’s the first trailer (finally) for Amazon’s much-anticipated fantasy television series The Wheel of Time. It’s later than we expected, given the show is currently set to premiere on November 19, but was it worth the wait?

Based on Robert Jordan’s massive, best-selling, 15-book fantasy series (the last few of which were co-written by author Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death in 2007), The Wheel of Time serves as the “connective tissue between Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones,” as showrunner Rafe Judkins put it at San Diego Comic-Con. We have been anxiously anticipating the trailer after a few very tiny teases and the first images being released just earlier this month. Well, what are you waiting for? Give it a watch!

The trailer delves into the bare bones of The Wheel of Time’s giant, sprawling tale: In a fantasy world where only women called Aes Sedai are allowed to use magic, the powerful sorcerer Moiraine (played by Rosamund Pike) comes across three boys and two girls—Rand al’Thor (Josha Stradowski), Mat Cauthon (Barney Harris), Perrin Aybara (Marcus Rutherfort), Nynaeve al’Meara (Zoë Robins), Egwene al’Vere (Madeleine Madden)—one of whom she suspects might be the reincarnation of the legendary Dragon, an entity so powerful he could destroy the world.

If you’re a lover of the books, you’ve likely immediately noted a discrepancy in the show. Originally, only the three male characters were seen as candidates to be the magic-wielding Dragon Reborn, as a sort of yin to the Aes Sedai’s yang. But the official synopsis makes it sound like Nyneave and Egwene are contenders as well: “Set in a sprawling, epic world where magic exists and only certain women are allowed to access it, the story follows Moiraine (Rosamund Pike), a member of the incredibly powerful all-female organization called the Aes Sedai, as she arrives in the small town of Two Rivers. There, she embarks on a dangerous, world-spanning journey with five young men and women, one of whom is prophesied to be the Dragon Reborn, who will either save or destroy humanity.”

The trailer also leans heavily into the Aes Sedai as wholly virtuous protectors of the world. In the books, while the Aes Sedai certainly saw themselves as protectors of the world, in reality, they were callous, supercilious, and often misandric. I’m not saying they need to be perfect angels in the TV series, but let’s just say Jordan’s portrayal of female characters left plenty of room for improvement, of which hopefully the show has taken advantage. As for the look of the show, the clips are so brief it’s hard to get a good read on it. The vivid colors are wonderful and the CG looks great, but some of the sets…well, they look very much like studio sets to me, as opposed to the beautiful, on-location scenes of Game of Thrones. Still, it’s worth remembering Amazon has liked what it’s seen of The Wheel of Time so much that it’s already filming a second season.

That’s good news for the rest of the show’s giant cast, which includes (takes a deep breath): Daniel Henney as al’Lan Mandragoran, Michael McElhatton as Tam al’Thor, Álvaro Morte as Logain Ablar, Priyanka Bose as Alanna Mosvani, Jennifer Cheon Garcia as Leane Sharif, Kate Fleetwood as Liandrin Guirale, Sophie Okonedo as Siuan Sanche, Kae Alexander as Min Farshaw, Clare Perkins as Kerene Nagashi, Orphan Black’s Maria Doyle Kennedy as Illa, and so, so, so many more. Please offer your effusive praise/constructive criticism/infuriated rants about the trailer in the comments. And, uh, don’t forget there’s a separate Wheel of Time movie trilogy also in the works now…

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