programming posts

Abstractions: interfaces as lists, details, and flows

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I read a post recently of Dave Rupert lamenting that he can describe any digital interfaces as lists, details, or flows. This is, of course, an abstraction. Abstractions can be useful for reducing complexity and making things understandable. In code, they also can be used to reduce duplication and provide reason for limited responsibility, improving maintainability. But if everything is fit into a small number of buckets, it can certainly make it seem like there is a lack of diversity, a sameness to everything.

With any good abstraction, everything can fit into it with a certain level of mental effort. Some might be more willing to go further than others to make a given classification work. In code, too heavy abstraction can lead to a given abstraction trying to do too much, or conversely, functionality being limited to fit a simple concept of the abstraction.

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Globbing files including dot-files

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Normally globbing for the wildcard * will find all files in a directory except for ones beginning with a .. Sometimes I need to get all files including the dot-files. The pattern .* will find these hidden files, but will also include . and .., referring to the directory and its parent. As I’ve learned in the past, this can be dangerous with commands like rm, (i.e. you running rm -rf .* to remove dot-files will remove more than expected). Today, needing to get all files in a particular path in PHP, I sought a solution. A post on a Perl forum gave me a solution using curly braces: {.??*,.[!.],*}. Braces basically allow multiple comma-separated patterns to be evaluated. The three patterns are:

  1. .??* matches a dot followed by two characters followed by any number of characters.
  2. .[!.] matches a dot followed by a single character that isn’t a dot. This is needed since the previous pattern doesn’t match this case.
  3. * is the normal wildcard glob, matching all non-dot-files.

In PHP, the glob() function requires the GLOB_BRACE flag to use braces. An example might look like: $files = glob($path . '/{.??*,.[!.],*}', GLOB_BRACE);. This did exactly what I wanted.

TMLib meets Require JS

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I’ve recently been working on reorganizing, cleaning up, and improving my javascript library, TMLib. This has included folder reorganization, source cleanup and normalization, a (so far crappy) build system, adding unit testing, a (mostly still unused) class system, etc.

My most recent effort has been to bring in the use of Require JS. Require is an AMD implementation, which is an interesting extension of the module pattern. It takes the dependency injection part of the module pattern (ie passing variables the module will use as arguments into the function expression) a step further by handling auto loading of those modules with a script loader that will asynchronously load and run all dependencies for a module before running the dependent module, injecting the dependencies as either parameters or assigned variables. Require does this with names based on file path, sort of like a JS equivalent of PSR-0. Require also provides a build process that will combine all required module files into one and minify. I have not played with this yet, but am hoping it will take over my currently crappy build process.

So far, I’ve only converted over a small core part of my library, but I really like the direction it is going. The scoping/dependency wrappers around each module may add some bulk, but will also allow minification of all module dependencies and what not, so it may end up being insignificant in the build, especially since my current build process doesn’t involve much minification. Even if it ends up a bit larger than it could be, the development benefits outweigh that concern for me. It has also required a change in the way I construct my library pieces. The early pieces require being constructed in a certain order, and things don’t work as well when modules to depend on each other. But I think it will be really nice when I get the full library converted over and the build process figured out.

PHP Functions: Array as Argument

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A while back, I wrote about using the JSONesque literal value parameters in Javascript, like jQuery does. This allows arguments to be passed: with names, in no particular order, all being optional. I set it up so that multiple arguments could be used as well, allowing for existing functions to still work or people who prefer that syntax to have it. I will now write about something similar for PHP.

In PHP, it is not quite as elegant, but almost. An array with key-value pairs is passed as the single argument for named argument mode. So you could call like this:

testFunction(array("arg1"=>"value1","arg3"=>"value3","argCallback"=>"testCallback"));

or with regular arguments:

testFunction("value1",null,"value3","testCallback");
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