Author: Ashish Datta

Ashish graduated from Tufts University with a BS in computer science. Prior to Setfive Consulting, he worked at ArmchairGM and later Wikia. He has a disposition for single malt scotch and believes drinking on patios constitutes “being outdoorsy”. Connect with him on Quora, LinkedIn, or Google+

Symfony2: Using “request_matcher” for custom firewall rules

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on Symfony2: Using “request_matcher” for custom firewall rules

Last week we were looking to leverage a set of JSON API endpoints in a Symfony2 project to power a single page Javascript app. The way the API had been setup, the routes were all secured with an HTTP Basic Auth firewall matching on “/api”. This worked great for the mobile apps but for a Javascript app it would be awkward to have the user re-enter their credentials to authorize the basic auth firewall. What we really wanted to do was to leave everything “as is” but have Symfony use the normal cookie based firewall when we passed in a special “isOnlineApp” parameters on the URL.

Unfortunately, setting something like this up with the default “pattern” setting in your security.yml file isn’t possible. The “pattern” setting only matches on the route URL, not the parameters so there’s no way to have it selectively trigger when a parameter is present on a URL. So how do you do it? Well as it turns out, there’s a firewall configuration called “reuqest_matcher” which lets you “match” a firewall using a service. Just create a service that extends the RequestMatcherInterface, implment a “matches” function, and then add the class as a service.

Our code for the service ended up looking like:

And then the actual firewall configuration ends up being:

You don’t need a “pattern” setting anymore since the “matches” function supersedes it. Anyway, let me know if you have any questions!

setfive.com: Why you should build a static site with Silex

By Ashish Datta | 8 Comments on setfive.com: Why you should build a static site with Silex

At the beginning of the summer we decided to redo our website. The design on the old site was looking a bit dated and more importantly the content didn’t really reflect the types of projects we’re looking to work on. From a technology perspective, our old site was built on WordPress with the explicit goal of being able to share the same WordPress theme as our blog. The two sites did in fact share the same theme but looking back, we never updated the main site to really make it “worth it”. With that experience in mind, we started looking around for what we could use to build setfive.com.

Stepping back and looking at our requirements, we really don’t need a CMS. I’d argue this holds true for most website projects when there’s less than 20 pages, everyone who might edit it is technical, and the content isn’t updated frequently. Specifically looking at some major WordPress features, we don’t need the WYSIWYG editor, plugin ecosystem, media handling, or theming capabilities. So what capabilities do we need?

  • Routing / Pretty URLs:
    Serving “raw” URLs like “about.php” hasn’t been OK since IE6 so this is obviously a “must have”. Basically, we need some way to map human readable URLs to specific pieces of content. Sure, you could do all of this with mod_rewrite or nginx’s location directive but that just sounds awkward. Whatever we pick should be able to handle these translations internally.
  • A modern templating engine:
    PHP “grew up” as a web templating system but today it’s missing some key features in comparison to purpose built templating engines. Being handicapped by only having “require” or “include” and being forced to set global variables in 2014 is terrible so “real” templating should be a requirement.
  • Access to a CGI/scripting language:
    I’m sure there’s “razor” of some sort describing a phenomenon where eventually a “static” website will need access to dynamic capabilities. For us, from the outset we knew we’d need to do things like pull in RSS feeds and send contact emails so we knew we needed access to some sort of CGI.

There’s certainly more capabilities static websites could need but I think this is a decent list for the “general” case and it captures our requirements. After doing some research, it looks like there’s currently a few options that would satisfy these requirements:

  • Static site generators: Generally, products like Jekyll or Phrozn will “compile” a set of your templates into static HTML pages which would then just be served by Apache or nginx. These solutions are fine except that they’d make things like integrating a RSS feed awkward.
  • “Lightweight” CMS: There’s a slew of “lighter” WordPress alternatives like Apostrophe or Ghost that check all the boxes but come with their own issues. With any “platform” you’d be back to learning the quirks of another platform and of course keeping the software up to date.
  • Use a micro-framework: Frameworks like Sinatra or Silex would offer the templating and routing features found in a “full framework” without the associated code footprint. In my opinion, this option offers the best combination of familiarity, extensibility, and a small enough footprint that updates shouldn’t be a huge issue.

I ultimately chose Silex because our team has deep PHP experience, especially with Symfony2. Because of that we’d be right at home with the Routing component and of course Twig for templating.

OK so how do you actually get this to work? I ran across Jonathan Petitcolas’s Building a static website with Silex post and used it as a guide. Here are the actual commands you’d need to get this all setup though:

Now, you just need to create a file named “index.php” which contains:

And finally, in the “views” directory add a file called “index.html.twig” which contains some content. If you have a web server setup, just point a vhost at the “web” directory, load it, and you should see the content of your index file.

If you don’t have a web server setup, a nifty trick via Gonzalo Ayuso, create a in the “web” directory named “router.php” containing:

And now, you can start the built in PHP 5.4+ server by running:

You can load your Silex app by loading http://localhost:8888 in your browser.

Anyway, as always questions and comments are welcome!

PHP: Faking “typecasting” with reflection

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on PHP: Faking “typecasting” with reflection

As far as type systems go, PHPs is pretty schizophrenic. You’ve got primitive types, like strings and booleans, the ubiquitous “array” type, and then user defined classes. Most of the time, the type system is invisible since it barely enforces anything. Especially for basic types and the standard library, you can almost always use strings, booleans, and integers interchangeably without much complaining from the interpreter. Where things go sideways is when you start using user defined types, especially with type hinting.

Imagine we’ve got the following setup:

If you run that in a terminal, PHP will throw the following error:

PHP Catchable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to sayHello() must be an instance of Dog, instance of Pet given, called in /home/ashish/Downloads/dog.php on line 19 and defined in /home/ashish/Downloads/dog.php on line 14

Because even though every “Dog” is by definition a superset of the “Pet” class, PHP doesn’t see it that way. And now, our original problem. In most other object oriented languages, you’d be able to simply typecast the instance of Pet to a Dog and then call the function as expected. Unfortunately, PHP doesn’t natively support typecasting so we’re stuck looking for a crazy workaround. Enter Reflection. PHPs reflection library lets you do all sorts of nefarious things, like manipulating private properties and retrieving the source for an arbitrary object.

So how do you use it to do a bootleg typecast? It’s actually pretty straightforward:

The “copyShimmedObject” is the money maker. It basically pulls the private properties out of the “from”, makes the property public, and then sets them on the “to” object. If you run the sample you’ll get the expected output instead of the error above:

Hello: Fluffy of destroyer of worlds

Symfony2: Get all available routes in an app

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on Symfony2: Get all available routes in an app

I was building out an API test console a few days ago and realized I’d never actually looked into how to grab all available routes in Symfony2. The “console” is basically a form with a select box and textarea that lets you “ping” the REST API routes in one of our applications. To make this work, I wanted to traverse all the registered routes, filter for the ones that contained “api_”, and then generate dummy URLs for those routes.

I searched around a bit for how to grab all the registered routes and the only link seems to be https://gist.github.com/hubgit/3380250 Unfortunately, if you try and use the code you’ll discover that “getPattern” no longer exists in the CompiledRoute class. It looks like it’s been replaced by getPathVariables

So, working code to generate a list of route names and “dummy” URLs for you API routes ends up looking like:

Three projects we’d love to build!

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on Three projects we’d love to build!

I was catching up with a friend of mine recently and she was asking what I “wanted” to build. As we started talking about it, I realized I didn’t really have a “go to” list of what I’d love to try building. At this point, web apps have become a bit boring, I mean how many times can you really write:

Inspired by Y Combinator’s Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund and more recently Spotify’s Design Lead on Why Side Projects Should Be Stupid here’s a list of projects we’d love to build.

Bitcoin Hardware Integration

Inspired by Bitcoin: How would you build a parlor game?, I think it would be awesome to build some sort of hardware Bitcoin integration. Any interesting angle would be to take something familiar like a casino game, jukebox, or vending machine and then make it “Bitcoin powered”. Also, with the MIT Bitcoin airdrop in the Fall it seems like Central Square and Kendall Square are the perfect places to roll something like this out.

Real Time Stream Processing

From NodeJS to Websockets, “real time” seems to be all the rage but most applications aren’t really dealing with processing streaming data at scale. Processing data streams, even at moderate scale, seems like it would be a fun challenge and would open up the development of interesting solutions. In the last few years, projects like Apache Storm and Akka have significantly lowered the barriers to development so it seems like the perfect time to jump in. We’d love to leverage these tools to analyze click streams, sensor data, or financial “tick” data.

Badass Visualizations

As the price of storage has decreased, organizations are recording and retaining more data than ever before. Unfortunately, most companies are hesitant to experiment with different visualization options and end up with a handful of charts and tables. I’d love to have the opportunity to really take d3js out for a spin and build some awesome visualizations. From visualizing multi-modal data to helping uncover patterns, I’d love to help organizations get the most out of their data.

Anyway, if anyone wants to build any of these definitely get in touch! Would also love to hear everyone else’s ideas in the comments.