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On the excellent PHP section of Sitepoint Thomas Punt has written a good high ievel overview of how PHP code is executed.

There’s a lot going on under the hood when we execute a piece of PHP code. Broadly speaking, the PHP interpreter goes through four stages when executing code:

• Lexing
• Parsing
• Compilation
• Interpretation

This article will skim through these stages and show how we can view the output from each stage to really see what is going on. Note that while some of the extensions used should already be a part of your PHP installation (such as tokenizer and OPcache), others will need to be manually installed and enabled (such as php-ast and VLD).

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-php-executes-from-source-code-to-render/

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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

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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
In 2014: 0 (we had no packages)
In 2015: ±150 000
In 2016: 1 500 000
? pic.twitter.com/cZJU9NPBsS

— Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) 16 december 2016

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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

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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/

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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

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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 ?)

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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.

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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.

https://deliciousbrains.com/scaling-laravel-using-aws-elastic-beanstalk-part-2-setting-up-vpc-rds-elasticache/

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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.

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On the Master Zend Framework blog Matthew Setter explains the scripts section of composer.json.

The scripts section of composer.json allows you to set up a range of commands which relate to your project, commands which call command-line executables and PHP callbacks.

The commands can be named as you see fit, such as test, clean, deploy and so on. Or they can use the names of events which Composer fires during its execution process, such as post-root-package-install, pre-install-cmd, and post-package-update.

In today’s tutorial, I’m going to take you through examples which highlight both approaches

http://www.masterzendframework.com/series/tooling/composer/automation-scripts/

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In a post on Sitepoint Christopher Pitt demonstrates some cool usages of eval and exec.

I want to look at two PHP functions: eval and exec. They’re so often thrown under the sensible-developers-never-use-these bus that I sometimes wonder how many awesome applications we miss out on.

Like every other function in the standard library, these have their uses. They can be abused. Their danger lies in the amount of flexibility and power they offer even the most novice of developers.

Let me show you some of the ways I’ve seen these used, and then we can talk about safety precautions and moderation.

https://www.sitepoint.com/the-delicious-evils-of-php/

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In a gist on GitHub Adam Wathan shares some macros that can be used to clean up a request.

Allows you to trim things, lowercase things, whatever you want. Pass a callable or array of callables that each expect a single argument:

Request::macro('filter', function ($key, $filters) {
    return collect($filters)->reduce(function ($filtered, $filter) {
        return $filter($filtered);
    }, $this->input($key));
});

https://gist.github.com/adamwathan/610a9818382900daac6d6ecdf75a109b

If you want to hear Adam talk some more about troubles with requests (generated by webforms) and possible solutions, listen to this episode of the Full Stack Radio Podcast.

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Gary Hockin posted a video with his attempt in solving the Day 1 challenge of http://adventofcode.com/. The video not only shows how he solved the problem codewise but also demonstrates some nice features of PHPStorm.

Mistakes and all, I attempt to code day 1 part 1 of the Advent of Code challenges you can find at http://adventofcode.com.

I deliberately didn't overly edit, or over complicate the video as I'm trying to get them done as fast as possible, if you like this I'll do some more!

I know some people will say "Waaa you should have done it like this!", or "Why didn't you use library $x", well I didn't so get over it. I'm also worried this gives away far too much about my coding quality and how lazy I am, but such is life.

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Christopher Rumpel posted some good practical examples on how to refactor common loops to collections.

Refactoring to Collections is a great book by Adam Wathan where he demonstrates, how you can avoid loops by using collections. It sounds great from the beginning, but you need to practice it, in order to be able to use it in your own projects. This is why I refactored some of my older projects. I want to share these examples today with you.

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2016/11/How-I-refactor-to-collections/

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