How not to prove your php skills

I'm always interested learning about ways of doing things. So when I came across an article about routing in php I was curious.

And then I saw the code.

32 lines to get one route?

The getCurrentUri function does 'magical' things with the SCRIPT_NAME and REQUEST_URI server variables.
The first thing I thought of was why don't they use the parse_url function?

And then it got worse on line 14 and 15, two $routes variables?
The idea is to get a array of the url segements. Line 15 is enough.

Now we are getting to the meat, the actual router. It reminds me of the time I used an asteriks in sql queries and referred to the fields as numbers, because I'm too lazy to type their actual names.

Because I was so outraged by this abundance of code, I wrote my own.

On line 3 you see how I get the path from the server global. For some reason PATH_INFO isn't set anymore, but REDIRECT_URL has the same value.

And then I'm doing my magic. Looking for the /search/book segments, stripping them when found and echoing everything that comes after them.

From 32 lines to 3, that is amazing!

PS: I commented on the article first but that was two weeks ago. My voice must be heard!

How (not) to use SPA software

I see more and more solutions on what shouldn't be a problem in the first place, SEO of pages.

As a developer I understand wanting to use the new and shiny things. But that is a poor excuse to make them an hammer, because everything is a nail.

Google is getting a lot of attention with its angular SPA framework. It's strange that they as an search engine started to guide people to misuse angular by adding escaped_fragment to the url for crawlable content.

Because it's a google only solution people turned to server rendered SPA content, an example. The author of the example uses the term isomorphic javascript in a too narrow definition, but that is another discussion.

The keyword in the acronym is application. An application by definition is dynamic and therefore SEO is not an issue.
A website is static, don't be fooled by the dynamic backend, and SEO is very important.

So don't make an application of a website.