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Yesterday our local user group, PHP Antwerp, held it's third meetup. There were two excellent speakers and a bunch of familiar faces.

First up was Gabriel Somoza who talked about his project Baleen. It's goal is to provide an intuitive framework to migrate almost anything. You can view his slides on Speakerdeck.

The second speaker was Marco Pivetta, better known on the interwebs as Ocramius. He is a member of the Doctrine core team. His talk was about best practices when using Doctrine. His slides can be found on GitHub. Here's the video of the talk:

https://youtu.be/j4nS_dGxxs8?t=6m44s

Spatie, of which I'm a partner, sponsored the meetup. Before Marco's talk I got the opportunity to talk a bit myself about why my company is sponsoring the local user group. My short talk can be viewed on YouTube.

The organisers announced that the next meetup will be held at the end of March. If you're living in the vicinity of Antwerp, you should definitely attend.

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This Friday the PHP Benelux Conference will kick off. It has an excellent line up and I'll probably blog about the sessions I will see there.

Last year the keynote of the conference was given by Yitzchok Willroth aka Coderabbi. He emphasizes on the power of the community. It was a great talk, I even dare to use the word "inspirational". In the weeks and months after his talk numerous PHP user groups were formed in my home country, Belgium. I believe this was no coincidence.

A few days ago a video of this talk (given at another conference) was published. You can watch it below.

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Adam Wathan posted another excellent article on testing on his blog. This time he talks about creating test doubles. Adam demonstrates that creating your own fake can result in a much more readable test than using mocks or spies.

You'll learn to create an InMemoryMailer like this:

public function test_new_users_are_sent_a_welcome_email()
{
    $mailer = new InMemoryMailer;
    Mail::swap($mailer);

    $this->post('register', [
        'name' => 'John Doe',
        'email' => 'john@example.com',
        'password' => 'secret',
    ]);

    $this->assertTrue($mailer->hasMessageFor('john@example.com'));
    $this->assertTrue($mailer->hasMessageWithSubject('Welcome to my app!'));
}

That seems like a pretty readable test to me. Read (or view) the whole tutorial here: http://adamwathan.me/2016/01/25/writing-your-own-test-doubles/

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Whoops is an error handler framework for PHP. It's easy to integrate into a lot of frameworks, including Laravel 5. I prefer using Whoops over the default Laravel behaviour because Whoops displays the lines of code where the error/exception occurred. The maintainer Dennis Sokolov recently released a new major version which features a new beautiful design.

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Marko Lekić explains how he used Blackfire.io to solve a performance problem in one of his long running Laravel console commands.

The command worked, but very slowly. We left it working like that for some time until we finished critical stuff in the system and had time to go back and refactor some slow running code.

We ran the command with Blackfire.io and saw some interesting information when we ordered functions by percentage of exclusive time.

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Typically my applications have a UI and authentication is done through a simple login page. Obviously for a RESTful API, having a login page isn't ideal. Instead, my hope was to have users append an api_token to the end of their query string and use that to authenticate their request. I was happy to find that 5.2 also ships with a TokenGuardlink class that allows you to do exactly that, but the documentation on getting it to work was a bit thin, so here you go.

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Composer really needs no introduction. At this point the PHP community pulled in billions of packages. Here are some Composer options that are not so well known.

You can view the versions of all the packages in your project by running composer show -i. Let's try it out in our Blender Laravel template:

Want to see all the dependencies of the installed packages in a tree? Then run composer show -t:

If you need help using a specific package then you can open it's documentation in a browser using composer. Try running composer home spatie/laravel-fractal to see it in action.

Know some other nice Composer tricks? Let me know in the comments below.

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Chris Fidao posted a good tutorial on how to use some lesser known built-in Laravel methods to handle content negotiation.

An HTTP client, such as your browser, or perhaps jQuery's ajax method, can set an `Accept` header as part of an HTTP request.

It's up to the server to follow the rules of HTTP. When a request comes to our application, it's pretty easy to ignore these rules, as our frameworks generally let us return whatever we want.

Laravel provides a nice, easy way to check if a request "wants json".

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Last week Jan Oris gave a talk on creating your own development tools at the Limburg PHP User Group. He touches on the why and how of creating packages as well. I hope some of you will start creating packages too after seeing this.

https://youtu.be/KTdA7kf2cUM?t=1m21s

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Matthias Noback, author of "Principles of Package Design", published the first article in a new series on programming best practices on the iBuildings blog. The subject of the first article is reducing complexity.

Inside your method or function bodies, reduce complexity as much as possible. A lower complexity leads to a lower mental burden for anyone who reads the code. Therefore, it will also reduce the number of misunderstandings about how the code works, how it can be modified, or how it should be fixed.

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At work I’m working on a project in which we need to track the share count of an URL. Below are my quick notes.

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Adam Wathan of Tighten Co. shared some cool code to create static sites using Laravel's Blade.

Building a Jigsaw site is exactly like building a static HTML site, except that files ending in `.blade.php` will be rendered using Laravel's Blade Templating Language.

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The past few weeks we released several new packages: laravel-sluggable, laravel-robots-middleware, laravel-glide and pdf-to-text. These packages have in common that they all require PHP 7. Because there were several reactions and questions about this, I'd like to shed some light on that decision.

I expect that lots of developers will make the move to PHP 7 in the coming year. Sure there will always be legacy projects that'll never see an upgrade, but it makes no sense starting a greenfield project in PHP 5.X. The performance benefits are just too good. On the package side I expect that some widely used packages will make the jump as well. Jordi Boggiano has already announced that the next version of Monolog targets PHP 7. Also keep in mind that active support for PHP 5.x is coming to end this August (or at the latest December).

Not only developers will make a quick move to PHP 7. The speed benefit is quite interesting for hosting companies as well. A speedier PHP version means a machine can host more sites. There quite a few hosting companies that already made the jump and are offering PHP 7 support.

When we work on projects at Spatie we have to solve a lot of problems. When we solve a problem in way that the solution can be used in future projects, we create a package. So we create these packages primarily for our own future projects. We decided that from now on every greenfield project wil be a PHP 7 one. So it makes sense that our new packages would require PHP 7 as well. By doing so we can make use of the latest new features such as the scalar type hints, return types, anonymous classes and the null coalescing operator. At some point all our projects will leave PHP 5.6 behind. The earlier we won't have to deal with PHP 5.X code anymore the better.

I'm well aware that requiring PHP 7 will hurt the popularity of our packages in the short run. But popularity is not our main goal. People who are using the latest and greatest version of PHP can benefit from our work. And I hope others will be nudged a bit towards PHP 7 by our decision.

(EDIT: we won't change the requirements of our older packages. PHP 7 will only be required when we create a new major version.)

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Glide is an easy to use image manipulation library by Jonathan Reinink. It was bumped to version 1.0.0 a few days ago. Glide can created optimized images on the fly by levering url's such as /img/users/1.jpg?w=300&h=400&fit=crop. Take a look at the example in the Glide documentation to know more.

I think Glide provides a very nice API to create image manipulations. Unfortunately it isn't very easy to use the API to generate an image using code. So I created a little package for that called laravel-glide. All new major versions of Spatie packages will require PHP 7, laravel-glide is no exception to this.

Here's an example of how to create a greyscale version image with a maximum width of 50 pixels.

GlideImage::create($pathToImage)
    ->modify(['filt'=>'greyscale', 'w'=> 50])
    ->save($pathToWhereToSaveTheManipulatedImage);

Take a look at Glide's image API to see which parameters you can pass to the modify-method.

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One of the main questions when doing a major release is which minimum PHP version to support going forward. Last summer I decided I wanted to do a big jump from 5.3 and directly target PHP 7. It provides a lot of nice features as well as performance improvements, and as Monolog is one of the most installed packages on Packagist I wanted to help nudge everyone towards PHP 7.

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