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PHP 7.2 is just around the corner. In new blogpost Martin Hujer walks us through the changes.

PHP 7.2 is planned to be released on 30th November 2017 (see the timetable). And it comes with two new security features in the core, several smaller improvements and some language legacy clean-ups. In the article, I will describe what the improvements and changes are. I read the RFCs, discussions on internals and PRs on Github, so you don't have to.

https://blog.martinhujer.cz/php-7-2-is-due-in-november-whats-new/

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? My buddy @thatguychriswJS showed me that you can use the "plus equals" operator for a sort of "array merge assignment" - pretty sweet pic.twitter.com/UJEUlfSs7E

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) September 7, 2017

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In a new article on his blog, Christoph Rumpel shows how you can easily set up a Facebook Messenger chatbot using the shiny new v2 of Botman Studio. Very cool stuff.

Although it seems quite easy to setup BotMan Studio and Facebook you still need to be aware of a few concepts regarding Facebook. I hope I could provide them there and this article helps you to setup your next Facebook Messenger chatbots. From here you are ready to build more and more features to your bot your own. So make sure to checkout the BotMan documentation to get a feeling of what is possible and learn new stuff.

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2017/09/build-a-facebook-chatbot-with-laravel-and-botman-studio/

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Jeff Madsen wrote down a good piece that explains how mutable Carbon dates can lead to some nasty bugs. I would't mind if Chronos were to be promoted to the default datetime library in Laravel.

If you hang out on any sort of programming forums you have no doubt encountered “The Great Mutable vs. Immutable Debate”. While I’m sure you know what the words mean, if you are new to programming or don’t have a strong Computer Science background it might not be obvious to you whether this is an important concept to be concerned with, or just more “architecture astronaut” purists arguing some obscure fine point.

To help you answer that for yourselves, I’m going to show you the difference between the two using two popular Php DateTime libraries — Carbon and Chronos, and then demonstrate the danger of using the mutable one of those.

https://medium.com/@codebyjeff/whats-all-this-immutable-date-stuff-anyway-72d4130af8ce

If you want to read more cool articles by Jeff, be sure to subscribe to his excellent newsletter.

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An official toolset for testing Vue components will be released soon. In a new series Jover Morales tells you all about it.

vue-test-utils, the official VueJS testing library and based on avoriaz, is just around the corner. @EddYerburgh is indeed doing a very good job creating it. It provides all necessary tooling for making easy to write unit test in a VueJS application.

Jest, on the other side, is the testing framework developed at Facebook, which makes testing a breeze, with awesome features such as:

• Almost no config by default
• Very cool interactive mode
• Run tests in parallel
• Spies, stubs and mocks out of the box
• Built in code coverage
• Snapshot testing
• Module mocking utilities

https://alexjoverm.github.io/series/Unit-Testing-Vue-js-Components-with-the-Official-Vue-Testing-Tools-and-Jest/

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One of the first things I do after a fresh setup. That annoyed me for the /longest/ time. pic.twitter.com/j9LvzbMQQd

— Jaggy ? (@jaggygauran) August 31, 2017

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Devron Baldwin wrote down a few words on the excellent Laracon EU conference, edition 2017.

The awesome talks and the amazing people made Laracon EU 2017 an experience to remember. I’ll split this up into a few sections to talk about the non-technical and the technical talks. I found myself enjoying the non-technical talks slightly more than the technical this year.

https://medium.com/@devron/7-laracon-eu-2017-talks-and-the-people-i-met-381e55ebf898

I can't believe it' already over and am already looking forward to Laracon EU 2018.

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Jeff Ochoa wrote a nice walkthrough of one of Laravels lesser known functionalities: pipelines.

Basically, using laravel pipelines you can pass an object between several classes in a fluid way to perform any type of task and finally return the resulting value once all the “tasks” have been executed.

https://medium.com/@jeffochoa/understanding-laravel-pipelines-a7191f75c351

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Here's a great story by Collin O'Dell, maintainer of league/commonmark amongst other things, on how he was able to extract the class definitions out of obfuscated PHP source files.

Per the framework's license, decrypting the IonCube-protected code was not allowed. This meant it was impossible to recover the original source code. However, I could require those files and execute them in PHP, which would cause those classes to become usable in code. So how does one figure out what code just got loaded & executed?

https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201708/generating-ide-stubs-ioncube-encoded-classes

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Fav piece of code for today ❤️ Partition collection method, array destructuring, catching multiple exception types... loving PHP + Laravel pic.twitter.com/jkIQkFSzhf

— Jacob Bennett (@JacobBennett) August 24, 2017

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To view some real time statistics of your server you use top or htop. But there's a new new kid on the block: gtop. It looks pretty nice.

https://github.com/aksakalli/gtop

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At Spatie, we're building a multi-tenant app. Seb figured out a great way to handle theme based views.

Laravel allows you register a view vendor namespace which points to a specific directory containing Blade files. This feature is intended for package development, but it's a perfect solution to our problem.

By registering a namespace with the current theme's location, we can drop all the dynamic parts of our view names when we're calling them.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/theme-based-views-in-laravel-using-vendor-namespaces

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? Dedicated view objects are a great use case for Laravel 5.5's new `Responsable` interface.

Can remove the need for other fancy patterns ? pic.twitter.com/qFpK6SRHLC

— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) August 16, 2017

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Daniel Coulbourne, an engineer at Tighten Co and co-host of the amazing Twenty Percent Time podcast, recently released Ziggy, a tool to share your Laravel named routes with JavaScript.

Ziggy creates a Blade directive which you can include in your views. This will export a JavaScript object of your application's named routes, keyed by their names (aliases), as well as a global route() helper function which you can use to access your routes in your JavaScript.

https://github.com/tightenco/ziggy

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In an older post on his blog Mohamed Said demonstrates how you can leverage virtual columns to speed up queries on data stored as JSON.

Laravel 5.3 is shipped with built-in support for updating and querying JSON type database fields, the support currently fully covers MySQL 5.7 JSON type fields updates and lookups,

...

Let's see how we may create a generated column to store users favorite color for later indexing.

https://themsaid.com/laravel-mysql-json-colum-fast-lookup-20160709

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