Working with larger projects a lot, I sometimes forget some of the earlier decisions I made to get here. Biting the bullet with Zend Framework 3 years ago made some of those decisions subconscious (or seem obvious), but after a little reflection, I am thankful. This post really has nothing to do with ZF, but it does relate to the idea of frameworks a lot. I’ve decided I need to start looking at what other developers are doing more – outside of the few dozen that I actively follow on Twitter. I need to go back, re-evaluate some of those decisions, and hopefully share some knowledge along the way.
After the last #LeanCoffeeKL event, I was brought into a discussion with a fellow developer who could not get mail setup locally. Another guy chipped in with some useful advice. I instantly thought in my head, “who cares? don’t send mail locally”. After thinking how obvious that was for a few minutes, I remember setting up my local dev server ages ago, and being pissed off that I couldn’t get mail working properly. All of the blog posts would explain how to set it up through your ISP. Some, smarter, would show you how to send it through SMTP (or through Gmail, etc.).
A big mindset change for me was when I discovered that I could code for different environments. Having distinct development, staging and production environments made configuration a lot easier. It also made dealing with external tools a lot easier. So, how did that help me with that pesky mail problem?
Mail is a service. My application code does not care how mail works, it just cares that it can call the mail service. If I’m testing things, I don’t want to actually send mail. That can have some very scary unintended problems. I do, however, want to make sure that the generated emails are correct. By abstracting what the mail service does, you can create a basic interface for that service that my application can call. My configuration (per environment) can determine what mail implementation I need.
For example, on development, I capture email to the database. On staging and production, I capture email to the email queue (in the database). However, there is no cron job set up on staging to actually send the mail. However, I can when I need to.
A lot of these problems come up all the time, but unless you know the right questions, it’s pretty hard to navigate forward. I’m hoping to start exploring these topics a lot more in the next few weeks on here.
