Freek.dev

Another big boy on the web upgraded to PHP 7. If you're not yet on the train heading for PHP7-ville, best get your ticket soon, you won't regret it.

At Tumblr, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the performance of the site. This means things like adding caching to heavily used codepaths, testing out new CDN configurations, or upgrading underlying software. Recently, in a cross-team effort, we upgraded our full web server fleet from PHP 5 to PHP 7. The whole upgrade was a fun project with some very cool results, so we wanted to share it with you.

https://engineering.tumblr.com/post/152998126990/php-7-at-tumblr

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On his blog Barry van Veen listed some examples of things you can do within a Laravel service provider.

Currently, I'm working on my first Laravel package. So, it was time to dive into the wonderful world of the service container and service providers.

Laravel has some great docs about, but I wanted to see some real-world examples for myself. And what better way than to have a look at the packages that you already depend on?

This post details the different things that a service provider can be used for, each taken from a real open-source project. I've linked to the source of each example.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/34-laravel-service-provider-examples

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For a new package I'm working on I had to test some Artisan commands. The commands I want to test contain calls to ask and confirm to interactively get some input by the user. I had a little trouble finding a way to tests such commands, but luckily a blogpost by Mohammed Said pointed me in the right direction, which was to leverage partial mocks.

Here's the most interesting part, Artisan Commands can ask the user to provided specific pieces of information using a predefined methods that cover all the use cases an application might need. ... So we mock the command, register the mocked version in Kernel, add our expectations for method calls, and pretend the user response in the form of return values. ...

http://themsaid.com/building-testing-interactive-console-20160409/

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The Bulgaria PHP conference organizers recently released videos of all the sessions of this years edition.

https://vimeo.com/album/4217236

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Inani El Houssain created a switch Blade directive. It's a good primer if you want to learn how to create Blade directives yourself.

One of the good points of Laravel’s framework is that it allows you to make your own components, macros and directives. so today we will make use of Laravel’s Custom Blade directives and make something good.

https://medium.com/@InaniT0/build-your-own-switch-statment-using-laravels-custom-blade-directives-218244e41a7c

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On the sitepoint blog Bruno Skvorc explains some of the inner works of the PHP version of snake created by Andrew Carter.

At a recent conference in Bulgaria, there was a hackathon for which Andrew Carter created a PHP console version of the popular “snake” game.

I thought it was a really interesting concept, and since Andrew has a history of using PHP for weird things, I figured I’d demystify and explain how it was done.

https://www.sitepoint.com/howd-they-do-it-phpsnake-detecting-keypresses/

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Alain Schlesser wrote an article on how to manage exceptions in a large codebase.

I seem to constantly work on improving my habits regarding the use of exceptions. I think it is an area that I haven’t yet fully explored, and it is very difficult to find anything more than very basic explanations and tutorials online. While the consensus is to use exceptions, there is very little information on how to structure and manage them in a larger codebase. The larger and more complex your projects become, the more important it is to start with a proper structure to avoid expensive refactoring later on.

https://www.alainschlesser.com/structuring-php-exceptions/

In my opinion a good exception message in most cases contains three things:

• the reason why something went wrong
• the data that caused the problem
• suggestions on how to solve the problem

Named constructors for exceptions are the perfect place to build up such a message. Want to learn more? Ross Tuck wrote a good blog post on the subject too.

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Matthew Setter demonstrates PhpStorm's handy refactorings. Personally I use "extracting code to a new method" quite a lot.

Refactoring covers a range of different techniques, including moving, extracting, copying, deleting, and renaming. These cover all the types of changes which you are likely to make to your code on an ongoing basis.

Gladly, PhpStorm’s refactoring functionality, which is included as part of the core package, has support for all of these. In this tutorial, I’m going to step through a couple of them; specifically:

• Extracting code to a new method
• Renaming a function
• Changing a function's signature

https://www.matthewsetter.com/refactoring-code-with-phpstorm/

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PHP does not support method overloading. In case you've never heard of method overloading, it means that the language can pick a method based on which parameters you're using to call it. This is possible in many other programming languages like Java, C++.

So, under normal circumstances, you can't do this in PHP:

class Foo
{
   function bar(A $baz)
   {
      ...
   }

   function bar(B $baz)
   {
      ...
   }
}

However, with some clever coding, Adam Wathan made a trait, aptly called Overloadable, that makes method overloading possible. It works by just accepting any parameters using the splat operator and then determining which of the given functions must be called according to the given parameters.

Let's rewrite that example above using the Overloadable trait.

class Foo
{
    use Overloadable;

    function bar(...$arguments)
    {
        return $this->overload($arguments, [
            function (A $baz) {
               $this->functionThatProcessesObjectA($baz);
            },
            function (B $baz) {
               $this->functionThatProcessesObjectB($baz);
            },
        ]);
    }
}

Pretty cool stuff. In a gist on GitHub Adam shares a couple of examples, the source code of the trait and the tests that go along with it. Check it out!

https://gist.github.com/adamwathan/120f5acb69ba84e3fa911437242796c3

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Jani Tarvainen explains where PHP is heading performance-wise.

PHP 7.0 was a leap in performance that came with very easy adoption. Simply verify compatibility with the version and upgrade your server environment. Speeding up many older architecture apps like WordPress and Mediawiki by a factor of two is a testament to backwards compatibility.

In 7.1, the language runtime will continue to make modest improvements, but bigger gains will have to wait. One of these opportunities for a bigger improvement is the JIT implementation that is now bound for PHP 8.0

https://www.symfony.fi/entry/whats-in-store-for-php-performance

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Keith Adams, Chief Architect at Slack, gives some background on how PHP is used at his company.

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you?

Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if given the choice; and that some of the most extraordinarily successful projects in history use it. This is not quite a contradiction, but it should make us curious. Did Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Etsy, Baidu, Box, and more recently Slack all succeed in spite of using PHP? Would they all have been better off expressing their application in Ruby? Erlang? Haskell?

https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329

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Laravel employee #1, Mohammed Said, recently gave an interview at codeforaliving.io on his career and how he started with open source. Terrific story. A lot of what he says resonates with how I feel about working on open source.

Said believes many developers, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are interested in the open source community, but not sure how to get started: “They think they have to wait until they have something perfect.” That’s simply not the case, Said maintains. He encourages developers to dig deep into their favorite projects, especially into software they work with on a daily basis, and look for places they can offer “enhancements” to existing code.

Open source, he believes, is the best experience a developer can show in an interview. “Tech interviewers want one thing,” he says: “Show me your code.” You can share code you’ve written for your day job, but it’s probably impersonal or boring or even proprietary and closed source, so you can’t share it at all. Some code at work is done as part of a team and you can’t pick out what you did and what Jane down the hall did. Open source, on the other hand, is all you. It’s your passion, it’s publicly accessible, and it has your name on it.

http://www.codeforaliving.io/how-i-open-sourced-my-way-to-my-dream-job-mohamed-said

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