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Middleware is a series of wrappers around your application that decorate the request and the response. By wrapping the app in decorators you can add new behavious from the outside. This image explains the idea more visually:

[caption id="attachment_475" align="alignnone" width="726"] source: StackPHP.com[/caption]

The concept isn't new, solutions already exists for many languages (eg. Ruby, Python, Node, ...)

The PHP equivalent is StackPHP. Here's an excellent post by Richard Bagshaw explaining it. There are a lot of StackPHP style middlewares available that you can use in your applications.

Laravel 5 uses middleware for putting an application in maintenance mode, CSRF protection, authentication and more. Unfortunately Laravel 5 middleware isn't compatible with StackPHP-style middleware. Barry vd. Heuvel created at package to convert StackPHP middleware to Laravel 5 middleware and explained the inner workings on his blog.

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Matt Stauffer shows how he built Gistlog in under two hours.

Gistlog is a blogging "platform" for people who want to quickly write and publish content, in Markdown, and don't want to bother with yet another platform and yet another login and yet another group hoarding their content. With Gistlog, you use your pre-existing Github login, you store the data in your own Github account, and you can publish with a single click.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4BbeHYCR1E

Also make sure you check out his blogposts on the new features of Laravel 5.

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Recently some of the Laravel-packages I built at Spatie were updated for Laravel 5.

spatie/laravel-glide This package enables you to generate image manipulations on the fly and generate URL's to those images. These URL's will be signed so only you will be able to specify which manipulations should be generated. Every manipulation will be cached. Under the hood, Glide is being used.

spatie/searchindex This is an opinionated package to store and retrieve objects from Elasticsearch. It was tailormade for a project I was working on and only provides the functionality that I needed. If you need full control over elasticsearch via PHP, take a look at the official low-level client.

spatie/googlesearch This package can fetch results from a Google Custom Search Engine. It returns an array with searchresults.

eloquent-sortable This package provides a trait that adds sortable behaviour to an Eloquent model. The value of the ordercolumn of a new record of a model is determined by the maximum value of the ordercolumn of all records of that model + 1.

A big thank you goes out to Matthias De Winter, who is helping me update these packages.

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For my own reasons, I have decided to cease my involvement with PHP development. This isn’t a judgement of the PHP community nor the internals mailing list, you’re all wonderful people and it’s really been a pleasure, and I mean that completely honestly. However, this has ended up taking up too much of my time (which is my own fault, and my own fault alone) and I can’t really justify it to myself anymore.

So, I’m no longer contributing to PHP, and all four active RFCs authored by myself are therefore withdrawn: Scalar Type Hints, Spaceship/Combined Comparison Operator, Void Return Type, Big Integer Support.

Damn.

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This chart shows the number of requests per second that were performed (more is better). You can see that PHP 7 can do a lot more in comparison with the other versions. Response times drop from 0.2269 to 0.0865 seconds in the production environment.

Nice benchmark-work by Tom Van Looy. It is clear that you'll benefit from impressive speed bumps when upgrading to the next major version of PHP. Tom also provides instructions on how to setup PHP7 so you can perform your own tests.

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When installing an SSL certificate on your server you should install all intermediate certificates as well. If you fail to do so, some browsers will reported “untrusted” warnings for your site like this one.

Searching and downloading those intermediate certificates can be a hassle.

Today my colleagues at Spatie and I launched certificatechain.io. This online tool helps you download all intermediate certificates. Just paste or upload your certificate and you'll get a file containing the entire trust chain that you can install on your server.

The site is built with Laravel 5 and uses the SSL certificate chain resolver we made last month.

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PHP has been supporting type-hints on complex types for quite some time already: PHP 5.0 for objects, 5.1 for array and 5.4 for callable. The question of extending this support to scalar types (integer, float, boolean and string) as been discussed several times those last years, each time with a bit more support.

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PHP-DI is an easy to integrate IoC container that you can use in legacy projects or in apps without a framework.

I regularly have to use Zend Framework 1 for some legacy apps. If you're used to having an IoC container to inject dependencies then not having one is a big pain. Here's a guide on how to integrate it in ZF1:

http://php-di.org/doc/frameworks/zf1.html

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A great talk by John Arstingstall about dependency injection, aka the ioC Container.

http://vimeo.com/88888213

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Laravel 5 has just been released!

http://laravel.com/

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Obfuscating ids in urls is a great way of hiding your application's internals from your visitors. It reduces the chance for malicious users to guess urls and prevents everyone from knowing how many user accounts or articles your website has.

http://jenssegers.be/blog/64/easy-id-obfuscation-with-laravel-5

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Yep.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1868874/does-php-run-faster-without-warnings/1869185#1869185

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An old, but still relevant, blogpost by Derick Rethans (of Xdebug fame) about why the @-operator should be avoided.

http://derickrethans.nl/five-reasons-why-the-shutop-operator-should-be-avoided.html

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Seeding as it is currently done in Laravel is intended only for dev builds, but what if you want to seed a production database with different data from what you use in development? What if you want to seed a table you've added to a database that is currently in production with new data?

This package allows you to use Laravel seeders in the same way you're using migrations.

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Back in September Taylor Otwell said that Laravel 4.3 would be renamed to Laravel 5 to reflect a directory change and “other interesting initiatives”. Since that announcement the excitement for Laravel 5 has been building and “other interesting initiatives” turned into almost two dozen new features to help developers be more productive.

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One thing frameworks have been providing for many years is HTTP message abstraction. PSR-7 aims to provide a common set of interfaces so that frameworks can use the same set of abstractions. This will enable developers to write re-usable, framework-agnostic web components that frameworks can consume.

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This weekend at the PHPBenelux 2015 conference I went to a session about higher order programming by Mathias Verraes. Higher-order programming is a style of programming that uses functions as values.

During the session Mathias demonstrated his Lamdalicious library. This library brings the principles of LISP to PHP. The talk was very fast paced and everything was live coded. PHP was misused to the fullest: global variables, error suppression, ... and there was lots of recursion going on. Basically he was constructing another language in PHP. During the talk there were lots of ooohhss and aaahhhss in the room, so I suspect I was not the only one enjoying it.

If you are intrigued by this, be sure to read his blog post on the subject. The blog post is essentially the written down version of the talk.

You'll never use any of this code in production, but that's not the goal of the library. Like when doing code katas, the train of thought is much more important than the result.

Here's another wonderful blog post.

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Composer is one of the most important pillars of the PHP renaissance. If you're not using it, you're doing it wrong.

It's main repository Packagist reports that there were 525 773 737 package installs since april 2012.

https://packagist.org/statistics

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