The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP for the last two weeks, No. 27 (September 22 - October 6, 2013)

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

By the way, yesterday was exactly one year since the publication of the first PHP digest on Habré. Many thanks to everyone who somehow helped to create digests, thanks to the developers for their wonderful tools, authors for their useful articles, and most importantly, thank you for still reading!

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News and Releases

• Zend PHP 5.5 Certification - Updated certification for Zend PHP developers has become available. New themes have been added and some old ones have been expanded.
  In addition, Symfony certification from SensioLabs is available.
• PHP Frameworks Day 2013 - Let me remind you that on October 12, a PHP conference will be held in Kiev, the special guest of which will be Rasmus Lerdorf personally.
• Zephir Blog - Zephir has its own blog, which will regularly publish news and materials.
• PSR-4 voting canceled - Results are canceled and voting is temporarily closed until the standard is finalized.
• A proposal was adopted to improve the syntax of functions with a variable number of arguments - With a vote of 36 in favor and 1 against, the proposal was adopted and the new syntax will be available in PHP 5.6.

Php

• RFC: Automatic Initialization of Properties - A clause to add some syntactic sugar for constructors to automatically assign values ​​to properties: public function __construct($this->x, $this->y, $this->z) {}
• RFC: Anonymous Classes - The concept of anonymous classes is well-known and well-tried, but is there a need for them in PHP?
• RFC: Nested Classes - Continuing with the previous sentence.
• The order of calculation in PHP - analysis of strange behavior - It may seem that the order of calculation of expressions in PHP is determined by the precedence and associativity of operators , but it is not. Read more about what is actually happening in the excellent post from Nikita Popov.
• Statistics 2013 - PHP today and tomorrow - Analysis of statistics on PHP and frameworks, as well as the reasons for the growing popularity of PHP lately.
• All you need to know about opcode caching - A great screencast about opcode caching in PHP. It is also recommended to familiarize yourself with the original document, on the basis of which the screencast was made: PHP Performance I:

Instruments

• Syngr - A library that attempts to gather a variety of PHP functions into one and provide an object-based approach. For example, $string = new String('hello world'); echo $string->uppercase()->substring(0, 6)->replace(' ', '?')->trim('?'); $string = new String('hello world'); echo $string->uppercase()->substring(0, 6)->replace(' ', '?')->trim('?'); And so on.
• Eden - A library created for fast prototyping of PHP projects. Allows you to quickly integrate third-party APIs.
• OpCacheGUI - A graphical interface for OpCache from PHP 5.5.
• Tonic - A library designed to create RESTful web applications.

Study materials

• Continuous PHP integration: from zero to Jenkins - A screencast with a tutorial on installing and using Jenkins to implement a continuous integration process in a PHP application. There is also a text version .
• Functional programming in PHP - Basic concepts of the functional paradigm and their application in PHP. Posts on the topic were already here and here .
• Profiling PHP applications using XHGui - Tutorial on installing, configuring and using XHGui - a graphical interface for XHProf.
• Web & PHP magazine for October 2013 - In the latest issue of the magazine several interesting articles on the topic of PHP and web development: Symfony2 CMF, Twig, Sylius, advanced tuning of MySQL queries and others.
• DTrace and PHP , 2 , 3 - A series of articles on an Oracle blog about using DTrace with PHP.
• Use of traits in Zend Framework 2 - A small post with an example of the practical application of traits.
• Creating a website with Laravel and Recurly , 2 - A good tutorial in two parts on creating a website with the ability to subscribe to various plans and implement regular payments based on the Recurly service. The second part, unfortunately, has not yet been translated.
• Symfony2 components overview : HttpFoundation , HttpKernel - A series of small posts about the basic components from Symfony2.
• Collections in PHP - A small tutorial on the implementation of classes of collections in PHP. More interesting implementation was already on Habré .
• The file system is slow - The author describes a small experiment and testing the file system to write 1 million lines to a log file on disk and to RAM. The file system is slow, but this is not what PHP developers need to think about first.
• Deploying PHP applications to Engine Yard - Detailed tutorial on deploying all components of a PHP application to popular PaaS hosting.
• API-oriented web application on Backbone, Require.js and Slim - An example of a small one-page application implemented using popular JavaScript libraries and the PHP microfreader Slim.
• PuPHPet and Digital Ocean - Video, which fully demonstrated the process of using PuPHPet and creating instances (droplet) configurations for the recently popular Cloud Hosting Digital Ocean .
• Public properties, getters and setters, or magic? - There are different opinions about how to access the properties of classes. The author considers the advantages and disadvantages of using each of the approaches.
• Git-hooks - Some examples of using Git hooks, for example, running Composer automatically.
• Automatically send mail using PHP, Swiftmailer and Twig - A good tutorial on using Swiftmailer and Twig in a PHP application.
• Dates with weeks according to the ISO 8601 standard - In the post, the author shares information about some features of date processing in the ISO 8601 format in PHP.
• The Myth of Inconsistency Controllers - The author attempts to dispel the myth of the non-testability of controllers and gives advice on how to overcome this problem.
• Installing HHVM on Ubuntu - A small installation guide for an alternative PHP implementation from Facebook.
• How fast is hiphop php? - And immediately an interesting test, which suddenly showed HHVM lower performance than the original interpreter. The study showed that the fault is the implementation of the function str_getcsv.
• CodeIgniter Tutorials - A selection of tutorials on a still popular framework. When will the new owner of the framework be announced?
• Classic in new style: BDD specifications in PHPUnit - A post on how to add a little BDD-style a la Jasmine to PHPUnit using the small tools Specify and Verify .
• Unit Tests. Data Provider without a headache - The author shares the experience gained as a result of the implementation of many unit tests.
• Review Code - Some tips and recommendations on review code processes.
• Responsibility for dependencies - Igor Wiedler writes about why you should not blindly trust third-party libraries and use them at the earliest opportunity.
• Two-factor authentication with Clef - A small tutorial on integration with the Clef service. Previously, there were also examples for Yubikey , Google Authenticator , Duo Security , Authy .
• Integration of web services into popular cms - The guys from Cackle share their experience in creating extensions to integrate their service into popular CMS.
• Expansion for PHP or everything will be in Zephir'e - A small tutorial on creating HelloWorld-PHP extensions on Zephir.
• Utf-8 json generator in php with unicode support 6 - Implementing full unicode support in json_encode for PHP <5.4.
• Hashing passwords in PHP 5.5 using the new API - This has already been written many times, another article in the piggy bank.
• Composer Cheat Sheet - A handy page with tips on Composer.
• Implementing versioned database migration in a PHP project — Tutorial on using the Doctrine Migration Tool to implement the migration mechanism in your PHP application.
• Abstract classes, abstract methods, interfaces? - Post about what is what and when what to use.
• Laravel 4 API - Continuation of a series of comprehensive tutorials on Laravel 4. Previously, there was already authentication in Laravel 4 , Access Control List and deployment .
• Screencasts on Laravel 4 - The site has been updated, which regularly publishes screencasts on Laravel 4.
• Aspect-oriented programming in Yii - Tutorial on using the Go! Library AOP in the Yii Framework.
• Fix CSRF vulnerability in PHP applications - CSRF is one of the 10 most exploited web application vulnerabilities according to OWASP . In a post about what is CSRF, recommendations for developing applications protected from CSRF, as well as an overview of useful PHP-tools.

Materials from past conferences

• PHPNW 2013 - Slides 23 reports from the conference held in Manchester. See the report from Igor Wiedler: Dysfunctional Programming .
• We take PHP seriously (PDF) - Report slides from one of the HHVM developers. The report analyzed the strengths that, whether intentionally or accidentally, made PHP the dominant language in its niche. Facebook's attempts to eliminate the disadvantages of PHP are also highlighted, while preserving the merits.

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