The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP over the past two weeks, №8 (12.29.2012 - 01.01.2013)

New Year's holidays are coming to the finish line, and we are back in the ranks with a fresh batch of news and materials from the world of PHP.

Enjoy reading!

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News and Releases

• Accepted PSR-3 - A standard has been adopted that regulates a single log view interface for PHP applications. Some personal thoughts and criticisms on the subject.
• Yii 1.1.13 - A new version of the framework saw the light right under the New Year. The release did not bring major changes, but, nevertheless, the list of changes includes about 70 improvements and more than 50 fixes. Full list can be found here .
• 10th issue of Web & PHP magazine - The following topics are covered in the issue: 5 deadly sins of a programmer; Indexing in databases; 10 facts about social media for business; other.
• Codeception 1.5 - Major release of an excellent testing tool, which includes several interesting features. One of which is generating code coverage reports. In addition, new Redis and MongoDb modules, UX improvements, and many bug fixes.
• Symfony 2.2 Beta 1 - The first Symfony beta under version 2.2 has also been released. The beta release marks the end of the development phase, that is, no new features will be added except for the support of PSR-3 and the addition of several more undisturbed pull requests. The final release should be expected by the end of February. More information about the new features can be found here , here and here .

Php

• Getting rid of duplicate end-to-end code in PHP: code refactoring with AOP - Excellent habrapost, in which the author considers the problem of duplicating pass-through code. Leads the classic ways to solve these problems in the OOP style, pointing out the pros and cons of each approach. After that, detailed examples of solving typical tasks (logging and caching) by refactoring the code in the aspect style using the Go! Library are given . Aop .
• PHP Multitasking - Videotape of a great presentation that uncovers the topic of multitasking in PHP for solving common problems, such as batch processing of data or the creation of demons. The author talks about the basic concepts of multi-tasking systems: compares processes and threads, forking, race condition, semaphores and mutexes.
• 2012: Year of PHP - In the last issue we reviewed the most significant events in the PHP world for 2012. A similar review was made by the author of the post, besides the events highlighting also the directions of development that became apparent during the year. The author also makes assumptions concerning the current 2013 already, predicting improvements in the DiC area and more active use of BDD with the help of PHPSpec and Behat. Also a small discussion with interesting assumptions for 2013 for PHP is available on reddit.
• PHP applications and PaaS - In the post, the author briefly reviews the three main, in his opinion, providers for the PaaS market for PHP, namely Engine Yard / Orchestra, PagodaBox and AppFog. The latter interested the author more than others, and he described in more detail the process of registering, creating and configuring the application on it.

Study materials

• Create a search engine for PHP - A good post in 5 parts about creating your own search engine in pure PHP. The source code for the result is available on GitHub .
• My first captcha guessing script - In the intervals between lunch breaks, Russian Post intrigues honest developers in the form of additional means of protection. In the post, the author talks about personal captcha recognition experience in PHP.
• What's New in Laravel 4 - The question of when version 4 will be released is probably one of the most frequently asked questions about Laravel. And, unfortunately, there is no concrete answer at the moment - it will be released when it is ready. In its current form, the stage in which the framework is located can be described as something between pre-beta and beta. But you can feel the upcoming release now. And in the post the author talks about some of the new features and improvements Laravel 4.
• Why do some PHP developers like static APIs? - There are 10 types of developers: those who are madly in love with static methods, because they are easy to use, and those who believe that the devil himself has invented them in order to experience devotion to proper programming. In the article, the author shares his experience and explains why some developers ignore best practices and use too many static methods.
• Programming with Anthony - Dependency Injection - Continuation of a series of training videos from maestro Anthony Ferrara. This time it will be about Dependency Injection. The whole series is available here .
• We use SSH and SFTP for PHP - Detailed tutorial on working with SSH and SFTP in PHP applications using the ssh2 library. Examples are attached.
• Composer and Versions - A small post about using a great tool for managing dependencies in PHP, in which the author gives advice on correctly specifying versions and branches.
• You need tests ... it is only too early - In the post the author reflects on the need for testing the code. And if you are still working on the implementation of the details and find out whether you can get the desired result, then perhaps there is no need to test yet, which, however, is obvious.
• Thoughts on the directory structure - In his article, the author says that the standard directory structure in ZF2, which can be seen everywhere, is just a recommendation. You should not go on about this approach, if it is obvious that another structure will suit your task better. The author gives an example and recommendations for changing the directory structure.
• Caching Doctrine Entities with Couchbase - Detailed tutorial in which the author actually shows how to use Couchbase as a cache for Doctrine entities.
• We use several PDO connections to the base in Symfony2 via DIC - “A small note in which the author first demonstrates the familiar way of configuring several connections to the base in the“ parameters.yml ”file. After that, the author demonstrates a more advanced approach, configuring the connections in a separate file and creating the Db class, which allows you to receive fully configured and ready-to-use PDO objects from the container.
• 13 things that users hate in the documentation of your open source project - Almost every programmer has a code that he would like to share or already share with the community. However, how much this code will be useful to other developers depends largely on the quality of the documentation. The article contains errors that are most often made by developers when documenting their own works.
• Why is FastCGI with Nginx so much faster than Apache with mod_php? - In his post, the author does several tests on the „hello world“ application and tries to understand why Nginx is faster than Apache. His research showed that Apache deals with processing .htaccess files a significant impact on performance, and disabling it (AllowOverride None) changes the situation and Apache overtakes Nginx.
• Clone Twitter for PHP , 2 - A pair of tutorials that detail how to create a full-fledged Twitter clone from scratch. Demo and full code are also available.
• It was evening, echo "there was nothing" - In previous releases of the digest, there were links to experiments in which the authors write a PHP script without using numeric and alphabetic characters. At this time we have habrapos with the continuation of experiments and the description of PHP functions without using the characters a-zA-Z0-9 <> ?.

Link to the previous release.
Material prepared dbritan , nesttor and pronskiy