Named routes in Laravel 4

2013-01-26T14:51:00-08:00

I've been doing some work with PHP & Laravel 4, and had an idea to make naming routes a bit nicer syntactically. Currently, to name a route you wrap the 2nd parameter in an array and add an item with an 'as' key, as in:

Route::get('user/profile', array('as' => 'profile', function(){// code here..}));

I think it'd be more natural to set the name using a method on the route (similar to adding a where() condition) , something like:

Route::get('user/profile', function(){// code here..})
    ->named('profile');

After a bit of poking around, I found this could be done fairly easily with a couple small additions to Route and Router to allow for renaming a route:

--- a/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Routing/Route.php Fri Jan 25 15:35:04 2013 -0600
+++ b/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Routing/Route.php Sat Jan 26 16:37:08 2013 -0600
@@ -411,4 +411,16 @@
                return $this;
        }

-}
+    /**
+     * Change the name for this route.
+     *
+     * @param string $name New Name
+     * @return Illuminate\Routing\Route
+     */
+    public function named($name)
+    {
+        $this->router->rename($this, $name);
+
+        return $this;
+    }
+}
\ No newline at end of file
diff -r 50adf81e2f0f vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Routing/Router.php
--- a/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Routing/Router.php        Fri Jan 25 15:35:04 2013 -0600
+++ b/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Routing/Router.php        Sat Jan 26 16:37:08 2013 -0600
@@ -1159,4 +1159,21 @@
                $this->container = $container;
        }

+    /**
+     * Change the name of a route
+     *
+     * @param $route
+     * @param $name
+     * @return void
+     */
+    public function rename($route, $name)
+    {
+        foreach($this->routes->getIterator() as $n => $r) {
+            if ($r === $route) {
+                $this->routes->remove($n);
+                $this->routes->add($name, $r);
+                return;
+            }
+        }
+    }
 }

It's not the most efficient thing in the world to be iterating over all the previous routes. A small optimization would be to check the last-added route first, in the example usage that'd be the one you're renaming. But to do that would require also patching Symfony's RouteCollection class.

Building additional PHP modules on OSX

2008-12-08T20:09:00-08:00

Normally I try to avoid dealing with PHP if at all possible, but there is now a PHP port of py-amqplib called php-amqplib, and I offered to help out with it a bit. Maybe partially out of guilt for having written the mess of Python code it was based on :)

I thought it would be handy to work on it using my MacBook. OS X 10.5 (Leopard) has PHP 5.2.6 built in standard, but unfortunately it doesn't have the bcmath extension included, which php-amqplib makes use of. Turns out building the module wasn't that difficult. This page got me going - although building bcmath was much simpler. Since I had the Apple Developer Tools for 10.5 installed, it was just a matter of ...

mkdir /SourceCache
cd /SourceCache
fetch https://www.php.net/get/php-5.2.6.tar.gz/from/this/mirror
tar xzvf php-5.2.6.tar.gz
cd php-5.2.6/ext/bcmath
phpize
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd /etc
cp php.ini.default php.ini

And then edit /etc/php.ini to make these two changes:

--- php.ini.default     2008-07-15 14:19:15.000000000 -0500
+++ php.ini     2008-12-08 21:44:52.000000000 -0600
@@ -483,7 +483,7 @@
 user_dir =

 ; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
-extension_dir = "./"
+;extension_dir = "./"

 ; Whether or not to enable the dl() function.  The dl() function does NOT work
 ; properly in multithreaded servers, such as IIS or Zeus, and is automatically
@@ -595,6 +595,7 @@
 ; needs to go here.  Specify the location of the extension with the
 ; extension_dir directive above.

+extension=bcmath.so

 ; Windows Extensions
 ; Note that ODBC support is built in, so no dll is needed for it.

After that, I was able to run the amqp_test.php file for the first time, sending a message and receiving it in py-amqplib's demo/demo_receive.py

Fun with ones and zeros - php

Named routes in Laravel 4

Building additional PHP modules on OSX