This morning I had a nice breakfast with a friend where various workflow and technology advances came up. This is really an email to him, but I thought it was worth sharing.

Composer and Packagist for PHP

Composer is a project-based dependency manager which makes it very easy to integrate PHP libraries into projects. Packagist is where you find which libraries are available, and has the simplest installation instructions. With Composer installed, adding features like Markdown or YAML parsing literally becomes as trivial as editing a json file.

Composer relies on modules being authored according to PHP Framework Interoperability Group’s PSR-0 standard. Since I’ve been guilty of bashing PHP, it’s probably worth mentioning Fabien Potencier’s post, PHP is much better than you think. PHP is far better than it used to be and the developer ecosystem is very, very active. (but I still prefer Python)

Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for OSX. Similar to apt-get or yum on Linux, this is the successor to MacPorts or Fink. It installs with one line pasted into the terminal (assuming you’ve got XCode already) and makes installing and removing packages ridiculously clean and easy. Homebrew is pretty much the first thing I install on a new Mac.

Forecast.io

The weather app Forecast.io is a terrific example of what’s possible with web apps that perform like native code. They’re also pushing a lot of cutting edge HTML 5 technologies. Startup times could be better, but that will come with hardware. Forecast is an offshoot of Dark Sky, my favorite iOS weather app.

Unreal on the web

Continuing the theme of what’s becoming possible on the web, Mozilla and Epic recently demoed the Unreal engine running in a browser. You’ll need Firefox Nightly for the best experience. The port uses HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript compiled from C source. This runs at 50+ frames per second from my laptop full screen on a second display. Crazy.