Your Favorite Framework is not Enough

Abdul Malik Ikhsan — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:45:00 +0000

Yes! You may be a fan of a very awesome wow Framework X. But:

Nobody's perfect. Living by supporting each other is the game called life.

Kamen Rider Skull.

You can of course tweak very hard to make your lovely framework works as your wish for your needs, but time will limit it.

Whenever there is another tools that just right for that, you should just use them - combine them - profit.

A Use Case

I got a project using PHP, and I use Zend Framework. Everything seems perfect in the beginning, all I needs were in there, until a reporting feature coming. I need a html to pdf converter. After I tried many PHP libs, I found a one that suit my needs, which named Snappy , which can be easily required via composer command:

$ composer require knplabs/knp-snappy

This lib require non-php executable command line tools, named wkhtmltopdf

If I remember correctly, my client want to code also in his windows, the server is using linux, and for my dev tools, I am using OS X. Virtual Machine is not a solution at that time as I have limited resource, so, I downloaded 3 versions (windows, linux, and mac) of the executable files in my application.

.
├── bin
│   ├── linux
│   │   └── wkhtmltopdf
│   ├── mac
│   │   └── wkhtmltopdf
│   └── windows
│       ├── bin
│       │   ├── wkhtmltoimage.exe
│       │   ├── wkhtmltopdf.exe
│       │   └── wkhtmltox.dll
│       ├── include
│       │   └── wkhtmltox
│       └── lib
│           └── wkhtmltox.lib

I created a simple code to detect os which returns wkhtmltopdf executable file like the following :

<?php
private function getWkhtmlToPdfLocation()
{
    $os = PHP_OS;

    if ($os === 'Darwin' || $os === 'Linux') {
        $os = ($os === 'Darwin') ? 'mac' : strtolower($os);
        return realpath(getcwd() . '/bin/' . $os . '/wkhtmltopdf');
    }

    return realpath(getcwd() . '/bin/windows/bin/wkhtmltopdf.exe');
}

I need to generate a pdf from html report, and download it, then I do following action:

<?php

use Knp\Snappy\Pdf;
use Zend\View\Model\ViewModel;

// ... demo: not actual code
public function generatereportAction()
{
    $filename = '/path/to/report.pdf';    

    $snappy = new Pdf($this->getWkhtmlToPdfLocation());
    $snappy->generateFromHtml($this->getOutput(), $filename);

    return $this->sendResponse($filename);
}

Here I created separate methods to buffer html output and send response to ease you to see the logic for above action:

<?php
// ... demo: not actual code
private function getOutput()
{
    $viewModel = new ViewModel();
    $viewModel->setTemplate('/application/report')->setTerminal(true);

    // renderer is a Zend\View\Renderer\PhpRenderer instance
    $output = $this->renderer->render($viewModel);   

    return $output;
}

private function sendResponse($filename)
{
    $response = $this->getResponse();

    $response->getHeaders()->addHeaderLine('Content-Type', 'application/pdf');
    $response->getHeaders()->addHeaderLine('Content-Disposition', 'attachment; filename="'.basename($filename).'"');
    $response->getHeaders()->addHeaderLine('Content-Length', filesize($filename));

    $response->setContent(file_get_contents($filename));

    //remove file after not needed
    @unlink($filename);

    return $response;
}

Well, You can of course wrap them inside service, models, use bundled module for its service to be usable in many applications, you name it.

Conclusion

Be open minded.

How to Politely Ask for Help from Open-source Contributors and Maintainers

Abdul Malik Ikhsan — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 15:06:27 +0000

There are many open-source contributors/maintainers out there. Some of them may look not seem like "patient people", closing issues without comment, or not replying at all. There are reasons behind it: this may not be a priority, they may be busy in another project (which is paid), or your problem can be marked as "feature request" which will take another maintenance burden, and possibly open new bug(s), or, you simply did not follow the contribution guidelines.

Apart from all of these reasons, the maintainers are still human, and we need to respect it. Here are some suggestions for effectively requesting assistance from maintainers:

Always Read Contributing Document

Don't blindly create issues unless you want them to be closed blindly too. OSS usually have documentation, and if it is available in any capacity, you should read it before creating an issue or asking for help.

Never tell "Please fix/merge it, urgent!"

Or any other "I need it today" statements. Remember, unless you pay for it, they do not owe you anything. Never. Act. Like. A. Boss.

Always wait for a few days. If you really need a fix, you can write better statements, like:

Is there anything I can do to get it merged? Thank you.
Any other information about the issue you need? Thank you.

Yes, you should always say thank you, even if it is never merged. And if the person you asked for help is back and tried to help you, say thanks again. Well, for merged pull request, saying "thanks" to maintainers can fill up his/her inbox, so consider it for issues primarily.

While waiting for the merge, you can do fork the repository and use your fix temporary in your project until it merged. Remember, it is open-source.

Avoid asking for help privately

Your issue can be another person's issue as well, so, unless it is a security issue, you should ask it publicly (issue, irc, forum). While the maintainers don't have a chance to answer, other contributors may can.

Be Active

Always be active, provide a reproducible code/repository, a clear explanation about your issue, and/or a failure test case. If you don't provide them, it will be very hard to get good feedback.

P.S
I got mention in twitter from @apr that this article misses a link to Eric Steven Raymond's document. While I didn't read that before, and I didn't pull anything from that, I can say that the document is very good and I think you need to read that.

Forem: Abdul Malik Ikhsan