..but I would be lying if I didn’t admit to flirting with the sexy new framework going by the name of Laravel 4.

Laravel?

I first learnt of Laravel by reading articles published by Jeffrey Way in Web Designer magazine. It is a framework which takes advantage of the latest developments in PHP (such as Composer), and makes building sites more.. well.. fun!

This isn’t a post about explaining how great Laravel is however (I’ll let Jeffrey do that). Rather, this is a post, primarily aimed at myself, to list all the useful composer packages which I’ve found during my time learning the framework, and as I’m still learning the framework, as I find new and existing packages, I’ll try to keep this post updated accordingly.

Packages I’ve used

JeffreyWay/Laravel-4-Generators

This is the first of three packages created by Jeffrey Way which I’m going to recommend. It builds upon Artisan by adding a number code generation tasks to it. One of the things I liked about CakePHP (back in 2006) was it’s Bake feature – and this is the closest thing I’ve found to it in any framework (although, I have seen that Yii also offers something similar).

JeffreyWay/Laravel-Guard

I’ve been a fan of Guard since I discovered it’s ability to automate a large amount of your workflow simply by watching for file changes and acting accordingly, i.e. you can set it to automatically compile Sass files before livereload‘ing your screen. This package makes the process of configuring Guard for use with Laravel really simple.

JeffreyWay/Laravel-Test-Helpers

I don’t know much about Test Driven Development, but I’m currently learning how to do it (thanks, once again, to Jeffrey Way), and I know enough to make me want to use the technique for everything I build. This package helps simplify the process by offering a number of shortcut methods for the tasks you’re most  likely to do.

barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper

Although I’ve been trying to get into the flow of using Sublime Text 2 for coding, I keep reverting back to PHPStorm for a number of it’s features, one of which being code autocompletion. The problem I’ve found, however, Laravel’s facades paradigm prevents this from working out of the box. This package seeks to rectify this problem by creating  a docblock helper file which the IDE can take cues from.

Packages I’ve not used… yet

• onigoetz/profiler – adds a profiler bar to your in-development site with lots of useful information.
  
• fzaninotto/Faker – generates fake data for seeding your database with.
• cartalyst/sentry - fully-featured authentication & authorization system.
• Anahkiasen/rocketeer - provides a fast and easy way to deploy your Laravel projects.
• Intervention/image - PHP Image handling and manipulation class.
• FrozenNode/Laravel-Administrator - administrative interface package.
• Anahkiasen/former - automatic form markup for your favorite CSS framework (Bootstrap, Foundation).

…and more can be found at the Laravel Packages Registry (thanks Luke).

(Featured image by rafdesign)

Introduction

I’ve been meaning to make this post for a few months now, but one thing lead to another, and before I knew it an unhealthy amount of procrastination had set in. I really don’t have any real excuse for this either, as all I really wanted to do was share the following resource with you…

iOS App Icon Template

The iOS App Icon Template is a Photoshop template (and action) which makes it easy to create, and then export, an iOS icon in all the different sizes you might require, for whatever purpose you might require them (in this instance, we’re looking to provide a custom icon for sites that get added to the iOS home screen).

I’ll not go into detail on how to use the template itself (its site does a good enough job of that), but I will tell you that once you’ve created the files, you need to rename the files with the relevant dimensions like so:

• apple-touch-icon-114×114-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-144×144-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-57×57-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-72×72-precomposed.png
• apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png (57×57)
• apple-touch-icon.png (57×57)

Once you’ve done this, and compressed them using TinyPNG, simply upload to the root of your site, and iOS (upon someone choosing to add your site to their home screen) will do the rest.

Within one hour I’d received a reply from their deputy editor, Tom May, giving me the go ahead, within one week the article had been written and sent off for approval, and within one month, my work was on the news-stands (check the June 2012 edition of .net to see it for yourself).

As cool as it was to see my work published (and believe it, it is very cool), I was a little upset that they had edited it down as much as they had, and chosen to fill all the empty space they had created with a HUGE photo of myself (one of THREE locations they used my photo in).

Because of this, I decided that at some point in the future I would publish the entire article myself – and it appears that point in the future is today, so enjoy.

The Lone Developer

I’ve been dabbling in web development since around 1999. I started teaching myself in my spare time, and by around 2006, I felt I was good enough at this-whole web-development-malarkey that I would probably enjoy it as a career. Fast-forward three and a half years, and not only had I graduated from the University of Worcester with a degree in Computing/Web Development, but was just about to start my first professional web development gig, working as an intern for a local college in Evesham.

Although I was part of the marketing department, I was a lone developer. The people that I worked for didn’t have any real knowledge of the Web, making me the go-to guy for any and all Web-related questions. During my nine month tenure with the college, I built a site that not only achieved all the college’s goals, but one that I felt very proud of. I was clearly the best developer this side of sliced bread (or something like that).

It wasn’t until my next job, working as part of a team for a medium-sized Web development company in Rugby that I discovered that I maybe wasn’t the super-developer that I thought I was, and that maybe, some of the techniques I was employing were just a tad out of date.

For example, when I first started to learn PHP, version 4 was the latest and greatest. But in the years since then, version 5 had been released, changing PHP in some very fundamental ways, and I had failed to keep up to date with these changes. It is a similar story all across the Web, with HTML5 superseding XHTML, CSS animations taking over from JavaScript, the rise of mobile devices killing Flash and forcing us to cater for more than just desktop users, and the death of Internet Explorer 6 meaning that we can finally put our hacks away.

This is the curse of the lone developer – the constant challenge of staying up to date in an industry that is forever pushing forward.

Most lone developers tend to be jack-of-all-trades (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Apache, Design, Graphics, Usability, etc.), meaning they have various different technologies to keep up to date with, as opposed to a team’s dedicated JavaScript developer, who has the luxury of being able to focus on a single technology.

So with the Web industry growing, with more people choosing it as their career every day, how does the lone developer keep up to date, and avoid being replaced by someone younger, and powered by more up to date knowledge?

My first piece of advice is to become part of a community. Although I am no longer with the company in Rugby, and am, once again, a lone developer, working for a small company in Leamington Spa, I keep in touch with my old work colleagues. This small community of people, who meet from 9:00 till 5:00, Monday to Friday, in the virtual realm of IRC, allow everyone there to benefit from shared knowledge, and can provide a sort of peer-review of everything you do. The community you belong to could be via a group on Facebook, a forum, or even a physical meet up once a month, it doesn’t matter, the important thing is that you use it to share knowledge and learn from one another.

• Stack Overflow has saved my life on more than one occasion. The question/answer format of this site makes it very for you to find solutions to your problems, as well as help others with theirs.
• GitHub seems to be the centre of the open source community at the moment, allowing remote members of a team easily share and contribute towards projects.

My second is to take full advantage of RSS. The Web is full of fantastic sites just begging to give you news and information on the latest developments in the industry, each of which publishes their latest articles via RSS. Sure, they no doubt also use Twitter and Facebook to promote these articles, but if you follow even a moderate number of people via these social networking sites, you have to be in the right place at the right time to see them, before they get flushed under the constant stream of information. RSS, on the other hand, lets you choose when to read it.

• WebAppers provide regular updates on the latest open source resources for web developers, and has had the predictive quality of featuring a useful resource, just as I need it.
• .net I couldn’t write an article for .net without telling each and every one of you to subscribe to their RSS feed.

This leads me to my final piece of advice, which is to always try and learn something new. Many of the aforementioned RSS feeds will include tutorials on just about anything you can imagine. By dedicating some time each week to working though these tutorials (which sometimes can be completed in no more than 30 minutes), you’ll be reinforcing your knowledgebase, and even if you don’t see any immediate need for what you’re learning, that isn’t to say that you will never need it.

• Codrops I’m always amazed at the quality of the tutorials provided by codrops, they’re always informative, and the result of the tutorial always looks stunning.
• Nettuts provides tutorials on just about every aspect of web development, each one easy to understand and follow.

It is hard work being a lone developer, and I admit that what I’m suggesting above probably sounds like I’m trying to make your life harder, but it is human nature to want to make things easier, and by learning the latest way of doing something, you’ll probably find that you’re actually making your life that much easier.