For the first time in 4 years we completely redesigned our company website. We launched it today. The site is a simple Laravel app with some technical niceties. True to form we also open sourced the app, you can find the code in this repo on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like you to give you a tour…
Larry Garfield, director of developer experience at Platform.sh, published some interesting numbers on arrays vs classes.
The first thing we can conclude is that if the one and only thing you care about is serialization/deserialization performance, associative arrays still win. They're the most time efficient by more than 50%, and the most space efficient by up to 20%. The second thing we can conclude is that stdClass should be used basically never. It's slower and more memory intensive than arrays in every circumstance. Just don't go there.
Read more [steemit.com]
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Just sent an email to internals@, detailing what I hope could be the beginning of a blueprint for PHP 8. It's a small step in what would hopefully be a long and fruitful journey.
— Zeev Suraski (@zeevs) June 25, 2018
Here's a sneak peak for the JIT part: pic.twitter.com/GMXXWvtRly
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At the Zeit conference React core member Andrew Clark showed off an upcoming React feature named Suspense. It can automatically pause the render process of a component if it hasn't got all its data. In can be used to avoid things like spinner showing up too quickly.
Async rendering in React gives us a powerful new set of primitives for addressing longstanding problems in UI development. I'll discuss React's vision for how async rendering can improve data fetching, code delivery, prefetching, view transitions, and more.
Barry van Veen recently fixed an interesting performance issue at our permissions package.
Recently I was investigating the performance of an application we have built at SWIS. To my surprise, one of the most excellent costly methods was part of the spatie/laravel-permission package. After reading some more it was clearly a performance issue that could be improved upon. Since the solution was already clearly outlined it was quite easy to code it and submit a pull request.
https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/46-improving-the-performance-of-spatie-laravel-permission
In an amazing (and funny) talk Lukas Eder demonstrates how powerful SQL (or any 4th generation programming language) really is.
In a new post on his Medium Blog, Laravel.io maintainer Dries Vints wrote how he managed do drastically improved the build time of the popular forum.
CircleCI 2.0’s builds run with Docker which makes spinning up new instances super fast. If you use pre-built images which are customized to your needs, you don’t even need to do any provisioning during the build which saves you quite a bit time. Pulling various images and orchestrating them in a CircleCI 2.0 config allows for very rapid build times. If you add their new workflows to their mix you could easily enable parallelization and speed things up even more.
https://medium.com/laravelio/how-circleci-improved-our-build-time-8d5c40b8cc60
If you find yourself having a bunch of slow tests that don't need to execute every time you run the tests, take a look at PHPUnit's defaultTestSuite setting. TJ Miller explains it in a blog post he wrote last year.
To avoid running the interactive test suite with the rest of my tests, manually or via a CI job, I had to explicitly include all the other suites using phpunit --testsuite Api,Feature,Unit. This felt a bit grim and I would rather exclude just that one suite. So I did some digging and found the defaultTestSuite configuration for phpunit.
https://medium.com/@sixlive/separate-interactive-test-suites-f6fd59316ec2
laravel-medialibrary is a powerful package that can help handle media in a Laravel application. It can organise your files across multiple filesystems, generate thumbnails, optimize images and much much more. At Spatie we use this package in nearly every project. The last few months our team has…
Our team is currently prepping a new version of our medialibrary. One of the highlights is support for responsive images. On his blog my colleague Brent explains what it entails and why it is important.
I want to share some thoughts on responsive images. I'll write about a certain mindset which many projects could benefit from: small- and mid-sized web projects that don't need a full blown CDN setup, but would enjoy the performance gain of responsive images.
https://www.stitcher.io/blog/responsive-images-done-right
Today at the JSConf in Iceland, React core developer Dan Abramov demonstrated some very cool features that will soon land in React.
We’ve built a generic way to ensure that high-priority updates don’t get blocked by a low-priority update. We call this time slicing. If my device is fast enough, it feels almost like it’s synchronous; if my device is slow, the app still feels responsive. We’ve also built a generic way for components to suspend rendering while they load async data. We call this feature suspense. You can pause any state update until the data is ready, and you can add async loading to any component deep in the tree without plumbing all the props and state through your app and hoisting the logic.
https://reactjs.org/blog/2018/03/01/sneak-peek-beyond-react-16.html
In a new post on his blog Matthieu Napoli, creator of PHP-DI, explains how he made v6 much faster.
But the good thing is that, after 6 years of existence, the project has matured and is now quite stable. The original objectives are met, even though there is of course always room for improvements and innovation. There is room to push the container to be better on other levels. And the most obvious one is performances.
PHP-DI 6 will be much, much faster because it is a compiled container.
http://php-di.org/news/21-php-di-6-compiled-container.html
Collin O' Dell, member of the PHP League, shares how he was able to significantly improve the performance his json5 package using Blackfire profiling.
Back in November I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It's essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP's json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.
...
I always knew that a PHP-based implementation would be slower than PHP's native C implementation, but execution time measured in minutes was completely unacceptable!
So I fired up Blackfire (which I've previously used to optimize league/commonmark) and got to work.
https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201801/optimizing-colinodelljson5-blackfire
In a post on vuejsdevelopers.com Anthony Gore explains how to get started with serverside rending with Laravel and Vue. Cool stuff!
Server-side rendering is great way to increase the perception of loading speed in your full-stack app. Users get a complete page with visible content when they load your site, as opposed to an empty page that doesn’t get populated until JavaScript runs.
One of the downsides of using Laravel as a backend for Vue.js was the inability to server render your code. Was. The release of Vue.js 2.5.0 has brought server-side rendering support to non-Node.js environments including PHP, Python, Ruby etc.
In this tutorial, I’ll take you through the set up steps for Laravel and demonstrate a simple server-rendered app. Get the code for this here on Github.
https://vuejsdevelopers.com/2017/11/06/vue-js-laravel-server-side-rendering/
My colleague Brent is currently creating a new package called spatie/async. This one will let you easily do some asynchronous parallel processing in PHP. In a new post on his blog Brent explains why we are creating the package and compares it to a few other solutions out there.
If you're into parallel PHP, you probably heard of Amp and ReactPHP. Our package aims not to compete with those two, as it only solves one tiny aspect of parallelism in PHP. We did however use both the packages to run some benchmarks against. Let's take a look at the results.
https://www.stitcher.io/blog/asynchronous-php
Laravel has an excellent Collection class that has many useful operations. The class is also macroable. This means that you can add function to it at runtime by calling macro on it and passing a name and a closure. In our projects we tend to code up the same macro's over and over again. That's why…
Using regular UUIDs stored as a text-based primary key is very slow. Our newly released package spatie/laravel-binary-uuid aims to solve that by binary storing a slightly tweaked version of the UUID. My colleague Brent wrote a blogpost describing how it works behind the scenes. He also included some interesting benchmarks.
The binary encoding of UUIDs solved most of the issue. There's one extra step to take though, which allows MySQL to even better index this field. By switching some of the bits in the UUID, more specifically time related data, we're able to save them in a more ordered way. And it seems that MySQL is especially fond of ordered data when creating indices.
https://www.stitcher.io/blog/optimised-uuids-in-mysql
In a new blogpost published at Sitepoint, Christopher Pitt explores the various ways you can handle reading big files in PHP.
Though this isn’t a problem we frequently suffer from, it’s easy to mess up when working with large files. In asynchronous applications, it’s just as easy to bring the whole server down when we’re not careful about memory usage.
This tutorial has hopefully introduced you to a few new ideas (or refreshed your memory about them), so that you can think more about how to read and write large files efficiently. When we start to become familiar with streams and generators, and stop using functions like file_get_contents: an entire category of errors disappear from our applications. That seems like a good thing to aim for!
Probably you know that that keeping the disk & transfer size of a JavaScript file low is pretty important. But have you considered the time needed to parse and compile the code? In this great post on Medium Addy Osmani, an engineer at Google, explains the complete cost of having JavaScript on your page.
As we build sites more heavily reliant on JavaScript, we sometimes pay for what we send down in ways that we can’t always easily see. In this post, I’ll cover why a little discipline can help if you’d like your site to load & be interactive quickly on mobile devices. tl;dr: less code = less parse/compile + less transfer + less to decompress
https://medium.com/dev-channel/the-cost-of-javascript-84009f51e99e
PurgeCSS is a tool that can reduce the filesize of a CSS file. It does this by removing any css classes that are not used. It can detect which CSS classes are used by scanning the source files of your application. In this tweet Jonathan Reinink shared how it can be configured in Laravel Mix: ???? I…
