The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP over the last two weeks, No. 23 (07/29/2013 - 08/11/2013)

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

Enjoy reading!

')

News and Releases

• WordPress 3.6 has been released - The latest release, codenamed Oscar, includes a new theme, an improved mechanism for post revisions, blocking and autosaving posts, an improved menu editor, and much more. Full list of changes here .
  Also announced were changes in the development and deployment processes of the WordPress project .
• Phalcon 2.0 - the future - The development team, due to the rapidly growing popularity of the framework, foresees possible difficulties. In the future, timely support and implementation of new features may become a problem, and the assistance of third-party contributors is limited due to the complexity of the C language in which the framework is written. That is why it was decided to develop its own language, a cross between PHP and C.
  Meet the Zephir! The language supports both static and dynamic typing, all code must be in classes, the use of namespaces is mandatory, the $ sign in the name of variables is not needed. Read more in the post on the link. You can also take a look at the Zephir routing component implementation code .
  By the way, if you haven’t felt Phalcon yet, but you want to try, it’s very easy to do. Just install VirtualBox, Vagrant and clone the Vagrant-Phalcon repository, and then launch Vagrant.
  
• A full-time developer appeared in the core PHP team - Good news, let's hope it will affect the development process in the most positive way.
• Version 0.4.0 of Go! AOP - A wonderful library has been updated that implements the concept of aspect-oriented programming in PHP. Among the innovations, for example, the ability to intercept system functions like fopen , array_keys and any others.
• Do not worry about BREACH - At the most recent Black Hat conference, information about a new type of attack, BREACH, was made public. This gave rise to a whole wave of posts and discussions. The link post from Anthony Ferrara, which describes the essence of the problem and how to protect. The author also urges not to panic and focus on protection against XSS and SQL injections - much more likely ways of hacking.
• The release of phpDocumentor 2.0.0 (and immediately 2.0.1 ) took place. The most popular tool for automatic generation of documentation for PHP has been updated.

Php

• What's New in PHP 5.5 - Another good overview of the innovations of the latest version of the interpreter.
• What characters are allowed in the names of variables, methods, classes in PHP? - The answer to the question is not as obvious as it seems. Core-developer Nikita Popov is dotting i in this question.
• RFC: Constructor argument promotion - A proposal from one of the developers of HipHop VM from Facebook, the essence of which is quite simple: it is proposed for the arguments passed to the class constructor to automatically create the corresponding class properties and assign the values ​​passed to them.
• Battle: Kitty kPHP vs. American HipHop - Excellent article which contains a detailed history of the development of HipHop and comparison with kPHP.

Study materials

• ASCII Art Generator - A great post on how to generate an ASCII image from an existing image using PHP and GD. An example before and after .
• There is nothing untestable: AspectMock in action - Test singleton? Easy! Excellent demonstration of the use of AspectMock . A real-life example is also given - testing a login form on Yii2.
• First steps on HHVM - In his previous post, the author made a review of HHVM, and this time he starts working with this tool. In the post instructions for installing a virtual machine using Vagrant, installing all the necessary dependencies and directly compiling HHVM.
• 7 reasons why PHP owes its popularity to WordPress rather than frameworks - The recently published TIOBE programming language popularity rating has shown that PHP has grown in popularity over the past year. The authors of the index associated this with the release of Zend Framework 2, but the author of the post by reference believes that WordPress rather makes PHP popular, not frameworks.
• A simple tool for testing PHP applications - The author of habrapos implemented CSTester - a really simple testing tool, which, nevertheless, can be very useful if you need to test small applications.
• Data Structures for PHP Developers: Columns - Continuation of a series of posts about data structures. Basic information about the graphs, examples of the use and implementation of Dijkstra's PHP algorithm for finding the shortest path.
• Stateless CSRF Tokens - Usually it is customary to store CSRF tokens in a session, but there may be situations when this is difficult. In such cases, you can apply the approaches described by the author.
• From STUPID style code to SOLID - A post on how to write better code - an overview of the SOLID and STUPID concepts.
• Dependency Injection Container Comparison - Test the performance of popular DI containers for PHP.
• Create a simple chat using HTML5 WebSocket and PHP - Post, though not the last two weeks, but interesting. Demonstrates a new feature from HTML5, an example code is attached. To implement something more complicated, you should pay attention to Ratchet .
• Generators in PHP - A post on how to work and when to use generators from PHP 5.5.
• Phalcon - another PHP framework? - A small overview of the framework with code examples.
• Test assignments for a PHP interview - As a continuation of the post with questions for a PHP interview , several interesting tasks were published for applicants for a PHP developer job.
• Testing WordPress plugins with Codeception , 2 - A series of excellent posts about testing in WordPress, waiting for the continuation.
• Selection of mnemonic quotes for car and phone numbers - An interesting habrapost with an example implementation in PHP.
• Profiling PHP Code with XHProf - A quick note on how to install and configure XHProf.
• Push notifications for Android from PHP - In the post, the author describes how to send push notifications to the Phonegap application from PHP.
• How to know that your PHP site has been hacked - Habrapirevod excellent article, which shows how to detect potentially malicious PHP-code on your servers.
• Create an SMS service using Twilio - A good tutorial on using the cloud service of SMS and Twilio telephony in PHP. There is also a post about using Twilio on Google App Engine .
• How to improve programming skills in PHP - The author lists a selection of topics that each developer must master. There are links to materials.
• Benchmark of graphic libraries for PHP - Comparative test of popular libraries: GD, Gmagick and Imagick.
• How to manage fixtures in a PHP project - The author describes the tools he uses to work with fixtures.
• The history of the Laravel - Laravel 1 framework appeared in mid-2011, and this year it has already grown to version 4. In a post about how the framework developed.
• EazyPhoto: a cozy photo hosting for your server - Khabrapost with a description of the implementation of the Flickr alternative and any other photo repositories.
• Multithreading in PHP with pthreads - Recently, the pthreads tool is often mentioned, the crucial issue of multithreading in PHP. But the author of the tool notices that the people writing about him are not very well versed in issues of multithreading and concurrency, therefore, with his post on Reddit, he decided to bring some clarity.
• The August issue of the Web & PHP magazine - As always in the recent issue of several interesting articles on the topic of PHP and web programming, for example, a review of ToroPHP - a minimalistic router for developing RESTful applications and APIs.
• Easily create thumbnails and store them on Amazon S3 - A small habrapos with a description of the solution of the problem.
• Installing Nginx + php-FPM + apc + MariaDB on Debian 7 - the perfect LEMP server - Installation and initial configuration instructions for the designated set.
• Using cURL for remote queries - Tutorial on using cURL in PHP for beginners.
• Interaction of php-soap on linux with certificate authorization using GOST algorithms - The use of GOST encryption algorithms in PHP, as it turned out, is not a trivial task, requiring, in particular, editing and recompilation of the interpreter. In habraposte described in detail the solution.
• Message Queues, AMQP, RabbitMQ - The article deals with simple message queues based on the database, AMQP standard and RabbitMQ queue management system.
• DDD using Symfony2 - This post describes the directory structure used by the author, as well as the Code First approach in comparison with the classic Database First, as an example of creating a small REST-application on Symfony in the concept of problem-oriented design .
• An example of image segmentation using PHP - Another good habrapost with a detailed description of the solution of a specific PHP task. In automatic mode, it is proposed to divide the image into logical fragments.
• Demeter's law. Do I need? - A very interesting discussion in the Q & A section on Habré.
• In search of the most popular programming language - An interesting post with an overview of various ratings and techniques for assessing the popularity of programming languages. The forecast for 2013-2014 is also given.
• Using the built-in SSH-client in PhpStorm - The most excellent IDE has acquired another useful feature in the form of an embedded SSH-terminal.
• Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong on the state of the PLO - A brief interview with one of the gang of authors of the book on design patterns and the creator of the Erlang language, in which they talk about the past and the future of the PLO.

Link to the previous release.