Freek.dev

Maxime Fabre has created the best RFC tracker out there. I'll probably use his tracker more than then the official pages.

The PHP internals need to be improved, it's not new, I know it, you know it. Between the wiki, the dozens of mailing lists, the Github repository and so on, information is spread out across the web; difficult to access, to comprehend, and to participate in. If you're not familiar with it, it's an unwelcoming world to whomever might want to know more about advances in the PHP language.

This tool aims to simplify this by unifying sources of information under one roof, and answer all the questions people might have about the PHP internals. Who voted on what? Who even are the people voting? What did they also vote on? What comments were made on a particular RFC? And so on.

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Ross Tuck does not blog often, but when he does you probably are going to learn something useful. In his latest post he shares some techniques regarding exceptions.

Over the last couple years, I’ve started putting my Exception messages inside static methods on custom exception classes. This is hardly a new trick, Doctrine’s been doing it for the better part of a decade. Still, many folks are surprised by it, so this article explains the how and why.

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One of the most important endeavors in the PHP universe is the PHP Framework Interop group. The group consists of several maintainers of big PHP projects. Their aim is to find commonalities between their projects and find ways to work together. They do this by proposing and accepting PSR's, short for PHP Standard Recommendation.

One of the most important PSR's is PSR-4 (and the now deprecated PSR-0) which describes a way to autoload classes. Thanks to this standard packages can be easily be reused in many frameworks and projects. PSR-2 is another important one. It is a coding style guide and greatly improves readabiltiy of code when working with a bunch of developers. There are several other PSR's that have been accepted.

Today PHP-FIG published their new site. It features a beautiful design by Jonathan Reinink (he's the designer of the PHP League sites, author of Glide, and creator of the PHP Package checklist). If you use PHP in any way you owe it to yourself to check it out the new site.

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Matt Stauffer explains when and how you can leverage custom blade directives.

One of the greatest aspects of Laravel Blade is that it's incredibly easy to handle view partials and control logic. I find myself frequently extracting the contents of a loop out to a Blade partial and then passing just a bit of data into the partial.

But sometimes the repetitive code isn't the view itself, but the conditional logic I'm running.

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HTTP/2 has a great feature called server push. It enables the server to send multiple responses in parallel for one request. In a blogpost on the Symfony Finland blog Jani Tarvainen demonstrates how to make use of server push with the Symfony Kernel.

$app->get('/images'), function () use ($app) {
    $images = array('/images/1.jpg','/images/2.jpg','/images/3.jpg');
    $response = new JsonResponse($images);
    foreach($images as $image){
        $response->headers->set('link','<' . $image . '>; rel=preload; as=image',false);
    }
    
    return $response;

Read the entire article for some more background info.

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I recently ran into a problem where I had a suite of applications hosted on a set of subdomains that all needed to be able to share a single cookie. Any cookies other than the shared cookie needed to stay specific to their subdomain, but this one shared cookie needed to be accessible to any of them. I also wanted to accomplish this using Laravel's `Cookie` facade.

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When we built Facebook's mobile applications, we needed a data-fetching API powerful enough to describe all of Facebook, yet simple enough to be easy to learn and use by our product developers. We developed GraphQL three years ago to fill this need. Today it powers hundreds of billions of API calls a day. This year we've begun the process of open-sourcing GraphQL by drafting a specification, releasing a reference implementation, and forming a community around it at graphql.org.

There's already a package to use GraphQL with Laravel.

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Jens Segers explains how to use PHP League's shiny new version of Container. The usage of ContainerInterface seems interesting:

League's container now implements the `ContainerInterface`, which is defined by the Container Interoperability group. This is really great as there are a few projects and frameworks which support this interface. For example, the Slim 3 micro framework already allows you to choose your own container flavour, as long as it implements the interface.

The League's Container seems like a nice alternative to PHP DI that I have been using.

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Q: What does this code return? date('Y-m-d',strtotime('00-00-00'));

A: 1999-11-30 B: 0001-01-01 C: 2001-01-01

The correct answer is A: 1999-11-30.

You'll find the reasoning behind this result as a comment on this bug report.

There is no bug here, 00-00-00 means 2000-00-00, which is 1999-12-00, which is 1999-11-30. No bug, perfectly normal.

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Garrett St. John wrote a clear example on how to use UUIDs in Eloquent models. This kind of logic could go in a trait so it can be reused across multiple models.

By default, Eloquent uses an auto-incrementing integer as the primary key for its tables. While most of the time this is totally acceptable, sometimes there is a need for primary keys to be less predictable.

EDIT: Kirk Bushell has made a trait for this functionality. Take a look at his Eloquence package on GitHub.

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The Retry library by Igor Wiedler has only 19 lines of code. Line 17 is a goto statement. In this issue on GitHub a user asks why Igor chose to use goto instead of resorting to recursion. Igor took the time to write out the reasoning behind that decision. It's a very interesting read on the PHP compiler and opcodes.

Why hello! Thank you for asking this most excellent question!

I have indeed considered alternatives to the goto. I have evaluated them to a great extent, and I am happy to present the results to you here.

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After giving excellent talks at both Laracons, contributing to Laravel's new ACL, putting out an interesting Full Stack Radio episode with Wes Bos, Adam Wathan today published a new screencast. He is now officially on a roll.

After my presentation at Laracon this year, a lot of people asked me how I'd take that same polymorphic approach when the objects would have to be retrieved from the database.

This screencast covers how I'd approach implementing the same idea in a real Laravel application with Eloquent, by using polymorphic relationships and delegation to accomplish the same thing without having to resort to any nasty conditionals.

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When I first learned to program, I made many objects that were mutable. I made lots of getters and lots of setters. I could create objects using a constructor and mutate and morph the heck out of that object in all kinds of ways. Unfortunately, this led to many problems. My code was harder to test, it was harder to reason about, and my classes became chock full of checks to ensure that it was in a consistent state anytime anything changed.

...

Now, I favor creating immutable objects.

The post clearly explains the benefits of using immutable objects and a nice example.

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