The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP for the last two weeks, №21 (07/01/2013 - 07.15.2013)

We bring to your attention another collection with links to news and materials.

Enjoy reading!

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News and Releases

• Index TIOBE: PHP restores positions - According to recently published data on the index of popularity of programming languages TIOBE PHP is growing in popularity. In 2013, PHP showed the highest growth rate - 1.64%, and compared with July last year - 2.17%, which is also the highest result, and +2 points in the ranking. The authors link the growth with the release of ZF2 in September last year, but I think this is not the main and not the only reason.
• Phalcon 1.2.0 released - The fastest PHP framework has been updated. A detailed list of changes is available in the beta announcement .
• EllisLab is looking for a new owner for CodeIgniter - Immediately after the release of CodeIgniter 2.1.4 , EllisLab announced that, for a number of reasons, it was unable to support the framework. Many are skeptical about the future of CodeIgniter and consider alternatives ( Goodbye CodeIgniter, hello Laravel ), but at the moment CodeIgniter remains one of the most popular PHP frameworks with the largest number of job offers on freelance exchanges.
• Fenom - yet another PHP template engine “This“ one more template engine ”actually turned out to be an absolutely wonderful tool - it wins in performance from Twig and Smarty, while consuming less memory, and the code is more compact. Bravo!
• 3 years Behat - The popular BDD tool is 3 years old and the author writes about what has been achieved during this time and what is planned to be implemented in the near future.
• Silex 1.1 has been released - The popular microframe based on symfony has been updated. The release has discontinued support for Symfony 2.1 and 2.2. There is also a small post about Stack and Silex integration.
• The PHPStorm 7 early access program has been launched . Let me remind you that thanks to the program, you can use the beta versions of IDE for free and legally, and, of course, be the first to try all the new features.
• Published draft HTTP 2.0 specification - News that is not directly related to PHP, but all web developers should definitely read the specification that will determine the future of the web.
• Releases PHP 5.4.17 and PHP 5.3.27 - If the first release is a regular set of fixes, then the second is remarkable for being the last regular release of the 5.3 branch. If necessary, security bug fixes will be released during the year, but in general this is the sunset of the era. 5.3.
• PHPCI - continuous integration for PHP projects - A free, open source tool specifically designed for continuous integration of PHP applications. The main goal was ease of use, so of course, this is not Jenkins / TeamCity.
• Yii 1.1.14 RC - A massive release of the current branch of the framework is planned. Users expect many changes and new features.

Php

• We are involved in the development of the PHP core - If you want to join the number of contributors to the PHP core, this post will be an excellent starting point. The author described the main points that are worth paying attention to and also published the project vagrant-php-src-dev , which allows one team to raise a virtual environment ready for experiments on PHP source codes.
• Dynamic Impurities in PHP - In habraposte made a detailed comparison of the two ways of implementing impurities in PHP using standard tools without the use of extensions and traits.
• We get access to the private members of the class in PHP without using reflection - the Author was not satisfied with the too low speed of ReflectionClass and ReflectionProperty, and he decided to try the Closure :: bind method, the use of which showed much better results.
• PHP 5.5: Generators - After the release of a post about a new feature. In addition to the review, an example is given of using generators as a data provider in unit tests. Let me remind you of a good demonstration of the efficiency of generators , as well as a small library from Nikita Popov, in which iterative functions like map() and filter() implemented using generators.

Study materials

• Monads in OOP PHP - A post about monads in PHP in support of the author's library MonadPHP .
• Getting to know Yii 2 through creating a simple blog. - The link is a good habrapost with a tutorial, and in the meantime, work on Yii 2 is in full swing: documentation is being updated, a basic skeleton application is available, and a demonstration of a new component for debugging is available .
• The July issue of the Web & PHP magazine - Now, articles from the issue can be read on the website of the magazine, and the PDF version is still available for download. In this issue you should pay attention to the article on the integration of Node.js and PHP , as well as a review of Symfony2 .
• User library Array_column () - In PHP 5.5 a new function array_column () was added, and for those who do not want to upgrade to 5.5, the author of the function created a micro library with the implementation of it.
• Install Jenkins and integrate with GitHub for a PHP project - A small tutorial on how to install Jenkins and set up integration with GitHub so that when you push, the application build automatically starts. Also a lot of useful information about using Jenkins with PHP projects can be found here .
• Creating a search engine on React PHP - An interesting post, which describes the creation of an indexing daemon using React PHP.
• Parameterized routes on AngularJS and Silex - A quick note on how to expand Controller in AngularJS for convenient use of parameterized routes.
• Saving PHP sessions in Redis - A detailed tutorial in which you will find a description of the reasons for using third-party storage for sessions, some basic information about session processing and data storage, as well as the actual SessionHandlerInterface implementation example for working with Redis.
• PHP Sessions in Erlang Mnesia - If everything is more or less obvious with the storage of sessions in Redis, in this post an exotic solution is considered. However, this is just an experiment that is not yet applicable in production.
• Data structures for PHP developers: trees - The previous post in the series dealt with the stack and the queue, this time with a little theory and PHP examples about trees. The post will be useful to young developers and those who are just starting.
• Vagrant Beginner's Guide , 2 , 3 - No wonder that posts about Vagrant are regularly found in digests, because this tool allows you to raise a virtual environment that is fully ready for work with just one team. It is especially convenient, for example, when a project requires special configuration and software, and you don’t want to change / block up the native OS for development. If you have not tried Vagrant + Puppet, then start right now by reading the posts. In addition, for PHP there is an excellent graphical generator of Vagrant manifests - PuPHPet .
• Building a CRUD application on Yii in a few minutes - A small elementary tutorial on Yii 1.1. Although all the information is in the documentation , but for those who are just starting, a post can be useful.
• \ Zend \ Db \ Sql - we build queries easily and efficiently , 2 , 3 - Three tutorials for beginners in working with the database using Zend-classes.
• We integrate Varnish Cache with a PHP application , 2 - A pair of tutorials on how to speed up PHP applications using the Varnich Cache HTTP accelerator.
• PHPStorm + XDebug + Bitbucket: development on a remote server in a small team - In habraposte, the author described the scheme of work on a PHP project without the use of local web servers by developers.
• Improving PHP performance on Windows using Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) - An interesting post about optimization based on data profiling used in PHP binaries for Windows.
• Automatic fluid interface and ArrayIterator in PHP models - The author of habrapos shared his solution to the problem of simple and visual access to the properties of the model.
• PHP implementation of the Chicken virtual machine - Posted by ReactPHP Igor Wiedler, ported the implementation of an esoteric programming language whose only symbol is “chicken” . Of course, there is no practical application, but the code can be a good subject for study.
• Laravel 4: How to keep your code organized - Some tips on how to prevent clutter in your Laravel project code during application growth.
• We create flexible controllers in Laravel 4 - Laravel Tutorial, which covers the topic of using repositories.
• Statistics on the use of databases, servers, Java and PHP versions in the cloud - Habrapost with statistics from the popular PaaS - Jelastic.
• Is your Framework fast or is it enough to test the performance of Hello World - A small but interesting habrapost: "study as many solutions as possible, take the best from them, combine successful implementations."
• About open source libraries - An excellent post in which the author has gathered the best practices in the organization and design of the repository code when publishing for public use. So, if you have implemented the library and want it to be popular, and you also want to get a constructive feedback, be sure to check out the post.
• Sending notifications from PHP - The author implemented a simple and lightweight solution for managing notifications - Notificator . Notifications can be sent to mail, use Ubuntu desktop notifications, or implement your own handler.
• What's New in PHP 5.5 - A good post about the new PHP features in the latest version.
• PHP in 2013 - Rasmus Lerdorf spoke at a meeting of PHP users in London. The link slides are available, and here you can see the video.
• Using ncurses in PHP - Excellent habrapos about the use of the library ncurses, which allows you to create complex and convenient console utilities.

Link to the previous release.