The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP over the last two weeks, No. 22 (July 15, 2013 - July 28, 2013)

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

Enjoy reading!

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News and Releases

• AspectMock - we test any PHP code - Great Go library application ! AOP , thanks to its capabilities, now you can literally test everything in PHP! In this case, the code becomes even easier. A screencast with an AspectMock demo is available . Fine!
• PHP 5.5.1 Released - A month after the release of 5.5, the first update was released, which includes about 20 fixes, including the security of the XML parser, as well as errors in opkash, web server, PDO, Phar and others.
• KPHP from VK - On his page, Durov talked about translating the entire VKontakte code into a compiled programming language - KPHP, which, as it became known later, required complete disposal of the OOP. Soon on Habré appeared answers to questions and comments from the developers of VKontakte . Well, wait for the appearance of KPHP in the public domain.
• Slim Framework 2.3.0 - Updated popular microfreemvork.
• WordPress Command Prompt - A very useful tool for developers using WordPress.
• Gerar PHP - The author was excited to implement a configuration management system like Chef or Puppet, but in PHP, since he, as a PHP developer, would have been comfortable working with PHP syntax. The result was Gerar PHP .

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• Development of syntax - An interesting post from Igor Wiedler, core developer of PHP, author of React and Stack . The idea of ​​implementing the mechanism of syntactic abstraction in PHP is described. Inspired by macros in Lisp and using PHP Parser , the author created a demonstration of his idea and ported the capabilities of PHP 5.4 to version 5.3.
• Syntax Sugar for PHP - The author habraposta began to create a project PHP Mirror , which involves adding a number of useful features in PHP. Currently casting is already implemented.
• RFC: Import Functions from Namespaces - Currently PHP allows you to import individual types (classes / interfaces / traits) from namespaces using the use operator. The author of RFC suggests adding the ability to import individual functions using the use function construct and the constants use const .

Study materials

• PHP internationalization with gettext - An excellent large and detailed tutorial on using the gettext library .
• Laravel 4 - easy to expand - The author was forced to help in using Laravel 4 on a shared-hosting with not the latest version of PHP. In the post, he demonstrates how, thanks to the framework architecture of the framework, it can be easily expanded and modified, for example, to reduce the requirements for the PHP version.
• Scalable PHP on EC2 up to 30,000 users per server - In the post, the author provides several recommendations for optimizing the performance of a PHP application running on Amazon servers. Most of the recommendations are universal and will be relevant for all platforms.
• PHP explodes Google App Engine - Just over two months ago, Google announced PHP support on its App Engine cloud platform. Link interviews with the App Engine project manager, who among other things speaks of Google’s intentions to compete with Amazon, Microsoft and other players in the cloud platform market.
  Also some thoughts on the topic.
• Using the PHP embedded web server in your tests - Starting with version 5.4, PHP comes with an embedded web server. The post author demonstrates how to configure PHPUnit to run the web server before executing the test suite, and completing its work after testing.
• Data structures for PHP developers: Heap - Continuation of a series of posts for young and novice developers. Read also about trees , stack and queue .
• Using third-party libraries in projects with Composer - A little advice on how to connect libraries that do not support Composer in projects using it.
• Yiistrap and yiiwheels - A couple of excellent extensions for Yii, which significantly reduce the time for the implementation of front-end tasks.
• PHP twins using Prophecy - The post deals with using the Prophecy library to implement test twins: dummy-objects, stubs, mock-objects.
• We work with multibyte strings - Full-fledged support for UTF-8 in PHP is promised not earlier than in version 6.0, but for now you can use the features of mbstring. In the tutorial on the link you will find a little theory on encodings and information about using the mbstring extension.
• Create a decent API - A series of tips and tricks for PHP developers to design and implement an API.
• Beanstalkd and queues from Laravel 4 - A small tutorial on using queues in Laravel 4, and how to organize background execution of tasks from a queue using Beanstalkd .
• We get access to private properties of objects in PHP without reflection - Habrapirevod post, in which the author was not satisfied with the too low speed of ReflectionClass and ReflectionProperty, and demonstrated a more efficient way using the Closure :: bind method.
• Create an application on Laravel on AppFog - Screencast on the deployment of Laravel 3 on the popular PaaS-hosting.
• Internationalization in the 5 most popular PHP frameworks — Overview of the implementations of the internationalization capabilities in CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Zend Framework, and Yii.
• Symfony2 subscribe to dynamic events - The author of habraposta describes one of the options for implementing an event handler whose name is not known in advance.
• Go to development in the cloud - A small post on how to organize the development process using cloud tools. Of the available IDEs, the author opted for Cloud9 , the capabilities of which are truly impressive as for an IDE running in a browser.
• Perform HTTP requests in parallel - A small post about the use of curl_multi_ * functions. The author also recommends using the Guzzle library, which simplifies the creation of RESTful clients in PHP.
• Writing SOAP client-server application in PHP - A large and detailed habrapost about creating a SOAP-service with an example implementation in PHP.
• Plans for the next releases Phalcon - A small overview of what developers should expect in versions 1.3 / 1.4.
• PHP and session file locking - The problem described in the post has been known for a long time, but not everyone knows about it. Description in Russian can be read here. .
• Questions at a PHP Interview But the world does not stand still and I wonder what issues are relevant now?
• We define the device on the server side using Browscap - The tutorial talks about the Browscap project and its application in PHP applications. Let me remind you about a small but convenient PHP-class Mobile Detect , which allows you to identify mobile devices.
• WordPress SQL Injection Class Vulnerability - Well-known PHP developer Anthony Ferrara discovered a serious vulnerability in WordPress code, the essence of which is described in a post. Despite the fact that the threat to users does not carry a vulnerability, since it cannot be exploited in the default installation, but it is noteworthy that the vulnerability was not eliminated even after almost 3 months after reporting it to the developers.
• HHVM overview , Facebook sped up PHP nine times thanks to HipHop VM - A couple of posts about the Facebook virtual machine PHP, which allows you to execute code much faster than the traditional interpreter. At the moment, HHVM supports PHP 5.4 almost completely. More information about HHVM can be found in the official blog .

Link to the previous release.
I also recall that there is a quick search in digests.