When creating Drupal modules I like to keep the hard coded components to a minimum. This helps when changing parts of the module in the future as hard coded links and other elements will require manual intervention and slow down maintenance. Sometimes, though, this isn't an option as you just need to have a few routes in your *.routing.yml file that point to controllers or forms within your module.

I had a situation today where I was looking to load all of the routes that are contained in a module. I could then construct a page of links that would handily point to different parts of the module or feed those links into a sitemap. This meant that I wouldn't need to hard code this list into a controller, I just needed to load all the routes and print that list out instead. Especially handy if I ever added or removed a route as that would mean that list would update without me having to do it manually.

I recently saw a design of a physical clock that inspired me to go about creating one using Python and Tkinter. The clock was essentially a wall of letters with lights behind that light up depending on what time it is. Without the lights the clock looks like a jumble of letters, it is only when the light is on that the relevant time is displayed.

The original clock was of a proprietary design so I set about creating one that was based more on an open source clock design that I found. That clock design I found didn't display the AM or PM of the time, so I ended up tweaking that design a little anyway.

Using Tkinter to create the clock as a GUI application seemed like a nice little project to get used ti Tkinter and Python. This ties in quite closely to my article on converting the current time into a sentence in Python, so I already had quite a bit of the logic figured out.

SOLID is a set of object oriented design principles aimed at making code more maintainable and flexible. They were coined by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin in the year 2000 in his paper Design Principles and Design Patterns. The SOLID principles apply to any object oriented language, but I'm going to concentrate on what they mean in a Python application in this post.

I originally wrote about SOLID principles with PHP as the basis of the article, but as the lessons here can be easily applied to any object oriented language I thought that I would re-write it with Python in mind. If you are familiar with only PHP or Python then this will be a good learning resource on learning the other side.

Strings and arrays can be manipulated in a number of ways in python. Splitting a string or an array into sections can be done using the section slicing that is built into the core python syntax and uses the colon (:) symbol.

Generating a simple array in python is straightforward, the following creates an array of 9 elements.

an_array = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]

To grab a particular element of the array you can use the simplest section slicing syntax. The number in the square brackets represents the position of the item to be returned. Remember that the counting starts at 0, so using 1 will return the item from the "second" position.

When starting out learning Python you will probably start by looking at the command line a lot. This is understandable as it's important to learn about variables, conditionals and loops and the command line is the best way to start out with the language.

I have always found it useful to quickly introduce graphical user interfaces when learning programming as it allows people learning programming to have something they can engage with. Being able to see the output of their program in real, tangible things that they can interact with.

There are a couple of different libraries in Python that can be used to create user interfaces, and perhaps the first one Python developers tend to learn is Tkinter or the "Tk interface" module. This is a Python binding to the Tcl/Tk toolkit to create graphical user interface.

If you've been building websites sites for a while you will realise that no site lives in isolation. Almost every site you build integrates with some form of API, and this is especially the case for the more enterprise sites where data is often synchronised back to a CRM system or similar. Drupal's hook and service architecture means that you can easily build integration points to that API to pull in data.

Pulling in data from an API into a Drupal site means installing an off the shelf module or creating a custom module to provide the integration. What route you go for depends on the integration, but for enterprise sites the API is quite often very custom to the business. I have even seen APIs being built at the same time as the site that it needs to integrate with, which is especially the case for startups and new businesses.

Drupal 8 and 9 are built upon services, with many parts of the system available through dependency injection, so it's important to understand the concepts. Services are a way to wrap objects and use dependency injection to produce a common interface. They are powerful and are used all over Drupal to do pretty much everything.

They can, however, be a little difficult for newcomers to the system to understand, especially if they are coming from Drupal 7 or other non-object oriented systems. When you look at some Drupal source code you are likely to see objects being created out of apparent thin air. It's a little hard to know where they come from if you aren't used to the how they work.