whateverthing.com

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In Part One and Part Two, we built a small web application with a little bit of interactivity. However, it has some problems - it might run fine for a little while, but eventually things will require maintenance. Someone may want to pretty it up, for example, or you might want to add a feature like thumbnails. After being away from the code for six months or a year, you might come back to it and wonder "WHAT was I thinking?!"

This begins a very common sequence in our field: confusion, denial, anger, refactoring, and acceptance testing - the five stages of code grief.

In Part One, we built a basic "Hello Watson" web app using Composer and Silex. In this installment, we're going to add an upload form and a way to view the uploaded images.

Composer is a dependency management utility for PHP projects. What that means is: you can save time on your projects by importing libraries that other developers have written.

For this series of examples, I plan to build a basic image uploading script using the Silex PHP microframework. I want to try uploading images from my iPhone using Mobile Safari, because I have heard of some real-world limitations in that situation that I want to explore. Part One will deal with the basic setup and a slightly different approach to the standard "Hello World".

Today I wanted to try out the StackPHP project to see how it could benefit me at work or in my side projects. However, I faced a roadblock: I only had access to PHP 5.3.8, and several of the StackPHP examples require PHP 5.4! What was I to do?

As it turns out, I already knew the answer, but I'd never tried it. A fellow developer, Juan Treminio, recently launched a project that can assist in this sort of scenario: PuPHPet, the online tool for generating vagrant+puppet virtual machine configurations.

So, while preparing a BBQ dinner, I decided to give it a go.