Optimizing PHP performance by using fully-qualified function calls

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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Overriding Laravel's helper functions

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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Symfony and Laravel will require PHP 7 soon

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.

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.

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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Introducing Private Packagist

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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Scaling Laravel Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk

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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An easy to install uptime monitor original

by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

A few weeks ago we released our uptime and ssl certificate monitor. It's written in PHP and distributed as a Laravel package. If you're familiar with Laravel that's all fine, but if you have no experience with that (kick ass) framework, it's a bit difficult to get started with using our uptime…

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A developer friendly wrapper around Fractal

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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How to automate projects using composer scripts

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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A package to fluently generate schema.org markup original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Schema.org is a vocabulary of microdata markup that aims to make it easer for search crawlers to understand what's on a webpage. The vocabulary is very extensive: here's the official list of things that can be described with Schema.org. This article on Tutsplus explains schema.org and structured…

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The delicious evils of PHP

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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Upgrading to PHP 7.1 is easy original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

PHP 7.1 was released last week. It has many nice new features. If you're anything like me, you want to use the latest version right way. Upgrading to PHP 7.1 is not that difficult. Personally I use homebrew. The steps required to upgrade from 7.0 are laughably simple. Just issue this command in your…

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Improving the performance of our PHP based crawler original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Today a new major version of our homegrown crawler was released. The crawler is used to power our http-status-check, laravel-sitemap and laravel-link-checker packages. A new major feature is the greatly improved crawling speed. This was accomplished by leveraging multiple concurrent requests. Let's…

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Some request filtering macros

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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No Time for a Taxicab

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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How I refactor to collections

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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What's new in PHP 7.1

With PHP 7.1 scheduled to be released next week, it's probably a good idea to go over the new features is offers.

The newest version of PHP – 7.1.0 – is already at RC6 (Release Candidate 6) status, which means it will be out soon. After a huge update that took PHP from 5.6 straight to 7.0 increasing speeds considerably, PHP is now focusing on core language features that will help all of us write better code. In this article I’ll take a look at the major additions and features of PHP 7.1.0 which is just around the bend.

https://kinsta.com/blog/php-7-1-0/

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An uptime and ssl certificate monitor written in PHP original

by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

Today we released our newest package: spatie/laravel-uptime-monitor. It's a powerful, easy to configure uptime monitor. It's written in PHP and distributed as a Laravel package. It will notify you when your site is down (and when it comes back up). You can also be notified a few days before an SSL…

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PHP 7 is gaining ground fast

Jordi Boggiano shared some new stats on PHP version usage he collects via Packagist.

A few observations: 5.3 and 5.4 at this point are gone as far as I am concerned! 5.5 still has a good presence but lost 12% in 6 months which is awesome. 5.6 basically stayed stable as I suspect people jumped from 5.5 to 7 directly probably when upgrading Ubuntu LTS. 7.0 gained 15% and is now close to being the most deployed version, 1 year after release! That should definitely encourage more libraries to require it IMO, and I hope it is good encouragement to PHP internals folks as well to see that people actually upgrade these days :)

It's very cool that PHP 7 is being adopted so quickly. I suspected that it would go down this way. Unfortunately the majority of package creators are still targeting PHP 5. Jordi has this to say on that.

As I wrote in the last update: I would like to encourage everyone to be a bit more aggressive in bumping PHP requirements when tagging new major releases of their libs. Don't forget that the old code does not go away, it's still there to be used by people using legacy PHP versions.

Amen!

Read Jordi's blogpost here: https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2016-2-edition

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An unofficial Forge API

You might not know this but Forge already has an API, it's just not a documented and feature complete one. Open up your dev tools and inspect the web requests being sent while you do various stuff on Forge.

Marcel Pociot published a new package called Blacksmith (great name Marcel) that can make calls to that API. Here are a few code examples taken from the readme:

$activeServers = $blacksmith->getActiveServers();

$server = $blacksmith->getServer(1);

$sites = $server->getSites();

$newSite = $server->addSite($site_name, $project_type = 'php', $directory = '/public', $wildcards = false);

$jobs = $server->getScheduledJobs();

$newJob = $server->addScheduledJob($command, $user = 'forge', $frequency = 'minutely');

Very cool stuff. Because the Forge API doesn't include a method to login, the package will under the hood just submit a filled in login form.

An official API for Forge has been on my wishlist for quite some time. Because Forge's code base already includes an API my guess is that it wouldn't be too work to grow it in to a full, publicly available one. Though I surely cannot read Taylors mind, I think that if there were some more indications that a Forge API would be used by enough people, there's a higher chance that an official API would be built. I think the only reason why the API hasn't been built yet is because not enough people are asking for it. It makes sense for Taylor to only work on things that would actually be used. So if you are using Forge and do want an official API go ahead and star the BlackSmith package on GitHub and make some noise about it.

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