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All my posts about php.

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Essential image optimization

Addy Osmani, a Google Chrome engineer, recently published a e-book on image optimization. You can read it in it's entirety here: https://images.guide/

Images take up massive amounts of internet bandwidth because they often have large file sizes. According to the HTTP Archive, 60% of the data transferred to fetch a web page is images composed of JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs. As of July 2017, images accounted for 1.7MB of the content loaded for the 3.0MB average site.

Per Tammy Everts, adding images to a page or making existing images larger have been proven to increase conversion rates. It's unlikely that images will go away and so investing in an efficient compression strategy to minimize bloat becomes important.

If you need to optimize images in your PHP application take a look at our image optimization package. If you're a Laravel user you'll be happy to know that there's also a Laravel version of the optimizer. Our Laravel Medialibrary also comes with built-in support for optimizing images.

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Handling Stripe payments in Laravel

Povilas Korop, creator of Laravel Daily and Quick Admin Panel, wrote an extensive guide on how to integrate Stripe into a Laravel application.

Stripe is one of the most popular payment merchants for web, but information about Laravel integration is pretty fragmented, so I decided to write a really long tutorial about this topic.

We will cover:

  • General logic how Stripe works
  • Simple one-time payment integration
  • Testing and production environment setup
  • Saving transaction data for future reference
  • Recurring payments with Laravel Cashier
  • Getting invoices data and PDF download

https://quickadminpanel.com/blog/stripe-payments-in-laravel-the-ultimate-guide/

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Partitioning for concurrency in synchronous business processes

On his blog Frank De Jonge, member of the PHP League and creator of Flysystem, explains a cool pragmatic solution how to ensure queued processes for the same user complete in the right order.

The use of multiple workers allows for much higher throughput, but it also allows for race conditions during processing. When messages for the same user are sent to different workers, handling order can no longer be guaranteed. Therefore we have failed to fulfil our business rule.

If we were able to ensure every message from the same user were sent to the same worker, the worker could ensure those messages are handled in order while the system as a whole would still benefit from the degree of parallelism. But how do we make this happen?

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/parallelise-synchronous-business-processes/

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BetterReflection v2 has been released

The awesome Roave team has recently released v2 of their BetterReflection package. It can do anything PHP's native reflection API can, but without actually autoloading the code.

The operational concept is quite simple, really:
  1. We scan your codebase for files matching the one containing your class. This is fully configurable, but by default we use some ugly autoloader hacks to find the file without wasting disk I/O.
  2. We feed your PHP file to PHP-Parser
  3. We analyse the produced AST and wrap it in a matching Roave\BetterReflection\Reflection* class instance, ready for you to consume it.

Read all about it on Marco Pivetta's blog: https://ocramius.github.io/blog/roave-better-reflection-v2.0/

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New features in our packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Every time our team releases a package I have the habit of writing an introductory blogpost. But after the initial release most pages gain more features through PRs by the community and ourselves. Mostly these new feature go unnoticed. That's why I plan on regularly writings posts on noteworthy…

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Building an SMS admin powered by Laravel and Nexmo

JMac, the creator of Laravel Shift, shared how he can very easily spin up a new job on his service by sending a simple SMS message.

In the end, all I need is a quick way to run a Shift on the go. Looking back on almost two years of support, I often have the Shift number readily available. Creating the job and adding it to the queue is at most two lines of code. So the steps are not the pain point.

The pain point is connecting to the server. Unless I want to carry my laptop around, I can’t connect to the server to run the Shift. (I actually have taken my laptop with me during peak times.)

What do I carry around with me all the time? My phone. I’m already reviewing the support emails from my phone. Wouldn’t it be great when I need to run a Shift manually to just reply or send a text.

https://jason.pureconcepts.net/2017/09/nexmo-sms-admin-laravel/

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Goodbye controllers, hello request handlers

Jens Segers, developer at Teamleader and author of the popular Optimus and laravel-mongodb packages, wrote about an alternative to controllers.

Let me introduce you to request handlers. The concept is very simple, yet very unknown to a lot of PHP developers. A request handler is basically a controller, but limited to one single action. This concept is very similar to the Action-Domain-Responder pattern which was proposed by Paul M. Jones, an alternative for the MVC pattern that focuses on a more clear request to response flow for web applications.

https://jenssegers.com/85/goodbye-controllers-hello-request-handlers

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A trait to dynamically add methods to a class original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

We recently released our newest package called macroable. It contains a trait that, when applied to class, can dynamically add methods to that class. This trait is basically a stand alone version of the macroable trait in Laravel. In this post I'd like to show you how you can use it, how it works…

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Who uses PHP (and Laravel) anyway?

Colin DeCarlo, a developer at Vehikl, wrote some thoughts on why PHP has a bad reputation in some circles.

People shitting on PHP isn’t going to go away, it’s a symptom of a few things. PHP has a ridiculously flat learning curve so just about anyone can write code using it, this means a lot of amateurs and ‘get it done’ developers will choose php but won’t really ever level up their skills when it comes to software development.

https://medium.com/@colindecarlo/who-uses-php-anyway-672115ab81de

I agree with Colin on everything he writes in his post. I'm also thinking that the some of the reasons on why people don't like PHP apply to Laravel as well. In my mind Laravel is to PHP frameworks what PHP is to other programming languages. Both Laravel and PHP might not do everything by the "real programming rules", but it sure is easy to use. And when handled properly powerful and maintainable stuff can be built with it.

Because Laravel is an easy framework to get started with, it's a popular choice for newcomers. Even with almost no experience you can build an app. Some of those projects will go to production. If an experienced developer that uses another framework comes by and sees that Laravel app, it might be easy to conclude that the problem lies with Laravel, and not with the inexperience of the junior programmer who just begon his/her journey in coding.

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Extending models in Eloquent

Caleb Porzio, co-presenter of the Twenty Percent Time podcast, published a new article on the Tightenco blog. This time he guides us through a nice use case for extending Eloquent models.

Let’s explore another alternative that can be used as a stand-in for repetitive where statements and local scopes. This technique involves creating new Eloquent models that extend other models. By extending another model, you inherit the full functionality of the parent model, while retaining the ability to add custom methods, scopes, event listeners, etc. This is commonly referred to as “Single Table Inheritance,” but I prefer to just call it “Model Inheritance”.

https://tighten.co/blog/extending-models-in-eloquent

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PHP 7.2 is due in November. What's new?

PHP 7.2 is just around the corner. In new blogpost Martin Hujer walks us through the changes.

PHP 7.2 is planned to be released on 30th November 2017 (see the timetable). And it comes with two new security features in the core, several smaller improvements and some language legacy clean-ups. In the article, I will describe what the improvements and changes are. I read the RFCs, discussions on internals and PRs on Github, so you don't have to.

https://blog.martinhujer.cz/php-7-2-is-due-in-november-whats-new/

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Build a Facebook Messenger chatbot in Laravel

In a new article on his blog, Christoph Rumpel shows how you can easily set up a Facebook Messenger chatbot using the shiny new v2 of Botman Studio. Very cool stuff.

Although it seems quite easy to setup BotMan Studio and Facebook you still need to be aware of a few concepts regarding Facebook. I hope I could provide them there and this article helps you to setup your next Facebook Messenger chatbots. From here you are ready to build more and more features to your bot your own. So make sure to checkout the BotMan documentation to get a feeling of what is possible and learn new stuff.

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2017/09/build-a-facebook-chatbot-with-laravel-and-botman-studio/

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The dangers of mutable datetime objects

Jeff Madsen wrote down a good piece that explains how mutable Carbon dates can lead to some nasty bugs. I would't mind if Chronos were to be promoted to the default datetime library in Laravel.

If you hang out on any sort of programming forums you have no doubt encountered “The Great Mutable vs. Immutable Debate”. While I’m sure you know what the words mean, if you are new to programming or don’t have a strong Computer Science background it might not be obvious to you whether this is an important concept to be concerned with, or just more “architecture astronaut” purists arguing some obscure fine point.

To help you answer that for yourselves, I’m going to show you the difference between the two using two popular Php DateTime libraries — Carbon and Chronos, and then demonstrate the danger of using the mutable one of those.

https://medium.com/@codebyjeff/whats-all-this-immutable-date-stuff-anyway-72d4130af8ce

If you want to read more cool articles by Jeff, be sure to subscribe to his excellent newsletter.

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What Laravel 5.5 means for our packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

At Spatie we've released a plethora of Laravel packages. Now that Laravel 5.5 has been released most of our packages will get a new (major) version. In this blogpost I'd like to explain how we handle new releases of the framework and what it means for our packages. Preparing for release Laravel has…

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