For a project we're working on at Spatie we're expecting high traffic. That's why we spent some time researching how to improve the request speed of a Laravel application and the amount of requests a single server can handle. There are many strategies and services you can use to speed up a site. In…
David Gilbertson made a lighting fast site and wrote a fantastic article about it.
Writing a fast website is like raising a puppy, it requires constancy and consistency (both over time and from everyone involved). You can do a great job keeping everything lean and mean, but if you get sloppy and use an 11 KB library to format a date and let the puppy shit in the bed just one time, you’ve undone a lot of hard work and have some cleaning up to do.
https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site-in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7
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Nikush Patel created an awesome little site where he shares PHPStorm tips. Every tip is demonstrated by an animated gif.
I'm a big fan of PhpStorm and an equally big fan of keyboard shortcuts and optimised workflows, so I wanted to share all the best tips and tricks I know to help everyone else make the most of PhpStorm as well!I produce useful tips in bite-sized gif recordings so they are easier to consume than reading the docs.
On most of my day to day work I use Laravel Valet to develop locally. When hitting a bug often I just put a dd() statement in the code to quickly inspect what's going on. But when encountering a complex bug this becomes tedious. Wouldn't it be nice if we could add a breakpoint to our code and be…
Starting from tomorrow PHP 5.6. will not be actively supported anymore. Sebastian Bergmann, author of PHPUnit explains how PHP's release process works, and what the ending of active support means for you. Spoiler: you should upgrade asap.
It is high time to think about upgrading your PHP stack to PHP 7, ideally to PHP 7.1. This should be a short-term goal for you.Upgrading the version of PHP you use must not be a rare event you are afraid of. You must not think of upgrading your PHP stack as a "special project". You need to make upgrading the PHP version you use part of your normal operational procedure and align the upgrade cycle of your PHP stack with the release cycle of the PHP project. This should be a long-term goal for you.
https://thephp.cc/news/2016/12/php-5-active-support-ends-now-what
Laravel News published a nice overview of what happened in the Laravel ecosystem in 2016.
As 2016 is coming to a close it’s a great time to look back on the year and see just how much progress has been made. Laravel had a busy year with 5.3 being released, Laracon, updates to all the components, and now gearing up for the Laravel 5.4 release.To look back on the year I’ve put together a list of some of the hits of 2016 and arranged them by month so you can get a quick overview of all the highlights.
https://laravel-news.com/80-laravel-tutorials-packages-and-resources
The Laravel ecosystem sure is moving fast. For me the best new software that emerged from it was Laravel Valet. I use it for most projects now and can't imagine working on a Vagrant box anymore for my normal day to day work. Hopefully Valet will gain more recognition in the greater PHP community in 2017.
I'm also happy to report that the Laravel / PHP packages my company releases have grown in popularity in 2016.
Total # of downloads of @spatie_be packages according to Packagist
— Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) 16 december 2016
In 2014: 0 (we had no packages)
In 2015: ±150 000
In 2016: 1 500 000
? pic.twitter.com/cZJU9NPBsS
On the Laravel Daily blog Povilas Korop published an interview with Bobby Bouwmann. In the past two years Bobby earned almost a thousand best reply awards, an amazing accomplishment.
In recent years, Laracasts has become a no.1 resource for learning Laravel. Also, there’s a really active discussion forum on the website, so we decided to chat with one of the most active members there. Bobby Bouwmann has almost 1000 “Best Reply” awards on the forum, which is a huge number. So what is it like to be so active on Laracasts? Let’s find out.
http://laraveldaily.com/bobby-bouwmann-lessons-1000-best-replies-laracasts/
On the Blackfire.io blog Julien Pauli peeks behind the curtains of PHP. In the five part series he explains how you should write your code to make the best use of the internal optimizations present in PHP 7.
This blog series will show you what changed inside the Zend engine between PHP 5 and PHP 7 and will detail how you, as a developer, may effectively use the new internal optimizations. We are taking PHP 5.6 as a comparison basis. Often, it is just a matter of how things are written and presented to the engine. Performance must be taken care of when critical code is written. By changing some little things, you can make the engine perform much faster, often without losing other aspects such as readability or debugging control.
https://blog.blackfire.io/php-7-performance-improvements-packed-arrays.html
Sebastian De Deyne, my colleague at Spatie, wrote a very nice overview of all different methods in Vue to define a template.
This article isn't about Vue's template syntax, but about where and how to define your templates. I wrote this because at the time of writing there aren't really resources that consolidate all the different manners to manage your templates.I've divided the different ways to define templates in three different categories, each with their own drawbacks:
- Writing templates that compile at runtime (lesser performance)
- Using single file .vue components (requires a build step)
- Manually writing render functions (pure JavaScript, no html-like template syntax)
https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2016/dealing-with-templates-in-vue-20
A fully qualified function name is a little bit faster than a non-qualified one. Toon Verwerft explains it all in his lastest blogpost.
Today, a little conversation on Twitter escalated rather quickly. Apparently PHP runs function calls differently depending on namespaced or non namespaced context. When calling functions in a namespaced context, additional actions are triggered in PHP which result in slower execution. In this article, I'll explain what happens and how you can speed up your application.
http://veewee.github.io/blog/optimizing-php-performance-by-fq-function-calls/
Sam Bellen, an engineer at madewithlove, explains how to draw an audio form in real time using the sound from your computer's microphone.
I've recently started creating an online audio editor. One of the features I wanted to implement was to create a waveform for each track in the editor. This gives a nice overview of the content of each track.While recording a new track, it would be cool to visually see the the waveform you're recording so I decided to generate a waveform in realtime while recording a new audio track.
Below I will go through the basics of how you can create such a waveform from your audio input device.
https://blog.sambego.be/creating-an-audio-waveform-from-your-microphone-input/
Miklós Galicz posted a short article on how he managed to override Laravel's str_slug helper function.
Long story short, until this is resolved one way or another... A really obscure but powerful tool can be a temporary solution for this. It's called Helper Overloading. Laravel's helpers are created in a way that checks if the method already exists. ... This is really great, the only thing remaining is to actually add our own method before Laravel creates it own version.
https://blackfyre.ninja/blog/fixing-slug-generation-problems
According to Fabien Potencier, lead of the Symfony project, the next major version of Symfony, to be released at then end of 2017, will require PHP 7.
#Symfony 4 (to released in November 2017) will drop #PHP 5 support... So, #Twig 2 stable should probably supports PHP 7 only, right?
— Fabien Potencier (@fabpot) December 16, 2016
But Laravel will drop PHP 5 support even sooner. Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, announced that Laravel 5.5, to be released in June 2017, will leave PHP 5 behind.
Laravel 5.5 in July 2017 will require PHP 7+ ?
— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) December 16, 2016
On multiple occasions Taylor et co. have stated that they don't like the strictness that things like scalar and return type hints bring to the table. So I don't expect to see them appear much in Laravel codebase. Smaller syntax improvements like for example the null coalescing operator will almost certainly be used.
A few weeks ago Jordi Boggiano reported that only a miserable 3% of all packages present on Packagist require PHP 7. The best thing about Symfony and Laravel dropping PHP 5 support is that it will send a strong message throughout the entire PHP ecosystem that you shouldn't bother with PHP 5 code anymore. When creating new projects and packages more developers will target PHP 7 as a minimum version as well.
For our PHP and Laravel packages we left PHP 5 behind as soon as PHP 7 was available. Our packages already make extensive use of return type hints, anonymous classes and the null coalescing operator to create more readable (and thus more maintainable) code.
(Fun Scary fact: Wordpress only requires PHP 5.2 ?)
Jordi Boggiano and Nils Adermann, creators of Composer, have recently released a paid version of Packagist. The service aims to make managing private packages a breeze.
Private Packagist aims to remove all these hurdles for businesses to finally make working with Composer as convenient as it should be. Being a hosted service, setting up your own Composer package repository on Private Packagist is done with a few clicks. No matter if your private source code is hosted on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, any of their on-premise solutions, or in any other Git, Mercurial, or Subversion repository, Private Packagist can immediately access your code after setting up your credentials to make it available for installation through Composer.
https://medium.com/packagist/introducing-private-packagist-492553d10660
If you're not afraid to get your hands dirty you could, instead of using Private Packagist, choose to use Satis. This tool is also written by Jordi & Nils. Laravelista has posted this great tutorial to get you started with the tool.
At Spatie we have set up a satis server to register packages that are intended to only be used in our own projects.
On Egghead.io there's a free course available on functional programming. Your teacher is Professor Frisby, who is in fact a hedgehog. Yup, you've read that right. The tempo of the course is quite fast, so you might have to, like me, pause or rewatch the videos to get the most out of it.
This course teaches the ubiquitous abstractions for modeling pure functional programs. Functional languages have adopted these algebraic constructs across the board as a way to compose applications in a principled way.We can do the same in JavaScript. While the subject matter will move beyond the functional programming basics, no previous knowledge of functional programming is required. You'll start composing functionality before you know it.
https://egghead.io/courses/professor-frisby-introduces-composable-functional-javascript
Elastic Beanstalk is a service by Amazon that can automatically scale an application. Gilbert Pellegrom published a second blogpost in his series on how to get Laravel up and running on the service.
In my last article we decoupled Laravel and got it ready for deployment to the Elastic Beanstalk architecture. However, before we race ahead to actually deploying our code to Elastic Beanstalk we need to do some preparation first. Specifically we need to set up some other AWS services that will be used by our Laravel app. These include:
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to keep our infrastructure secure
- Relational Database Service (RDS) for our MySQL database
- ElastiCache for our Redis cache
With these “supporting” services up and running we can finally move on to deploying our Laravel app to Elastic Beanstalk.
A few weeks ago we released our uptime and ssl certificate monitor. It's written in PHP and distributed as a Laravel package. If you're familiar with Laravel that's all fine, but if you have no experience with that (kick ass) framework, it's a bit difficult to get started with using our uptime…
Zach Silveira made a new JavaScript library that aims to make ajax requests much more readable. Under the hood template literals are used.
Anyone familiar with HTTP requests knows what each line in chrome's network tab means. It's too bad we can't copy and paste this into our code and do that exact request..... But we can (almost), if my idea pans out! Take a look at what I'm proposing:
request`
url: http://test.app/settings/user/19
method: PATCH
headers: ${{
Authorization: 'Bearer: token'
}}
body: ${{ name: 'Bob' }}
`
On the Tighten blog Samatha Geitz sums up the benefits of giving developers one day of "free" time a week.
About a year ago, Tighten officially implemented a "20% time" policy for its developers. This means that, on any given week, we only bill our clients for 32 hours of developer work; for the other 8 hours, developers can work on whatever projects they’d like to (as long as they can readily come up with an explanation of how it benefits the company in some way.) ... Here are some reasons that you may want to consider experimenting with a policy like this
https://blog.tighten.co/give-your-developers-20-percent-time
Fractal is an amazing package to transform data before using it in an API. Unfortunately working with Fractal can be a bit verbose. That's why we created a wrapper called Fractalistic around it, that makes working with Fractal a bit more developer friendly. It's framework agnostic so you can use it in any PHP project.
Using the vanilla Fractal package data can be transformed like this:
use League\Fractal\Manager;
use League\Fractal\Resource\Collection;
$books = [
['id'=>1, 'title'=>'Hogfather', 'characters' => [...]],
['id'=>2, 'title'=>'Game Of Kill Everyone', 'characters' => [...]]
];
$manager = new Manager();
$resource = new Collection($books, new BookTransformer());
$manager->parseIncludes('characters');
$manager->createData($resource)->toArray();
Our Fractalistic wrapper package makes that process a tad easier:
Fractal::create()
->collection($books)
->transformWith(new BookTransformer())
->includeCharacters()
->toArray();
There's also a very short syntax available to quickly transform data:
Fractal::create($books, new BookTransformer())->toArray();
If you want to use this package inside Laravel, it's recommend to use laravel-fractal instead. That package contains a few more bells and whistles specifically targetted at Laravel users.
To learn all the options Fractalistic has to offer, head over to the readme on GitHub. If you like it, take a look at our previous open source work as well. There's a list of framework agnostic packages we made on our company site.
