The digest of interesting news and materials from the world of PHP No. 39 (March 24 - April 14, 2014)

We offer to your attention another selection with links to news and materials.

Enjoy reading!

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News and Releases

PHP 5.6.0beta1 - The first beta version of the PHP interpreter has become available. From added in this release, for example, asynchronous requests to PostgreSQL.
Releases PHP 5.4.27 and PHP 5.5.11 - Updates of current branches, including security fixes. It is recommended to upgrade.
Kohana, rest in peace - Releases of Kohana 3.2.3 and 3.3.2 were the last in the history of this once popular framework. But the end is always the beginning of something new. So, the developers of Kohana have launched a new project - Ohanzee , which is a set of independent components.
April 13, Yii 2 becomes Beta - Already . An open-source recipe book for Yii 2 is also created. .
Guzzle 4.0 - Major release of an excellent library for implementing HTTP clients. More about the changes and new features in the release candidate announcement . In addition to Guzzle itself, a number of extensions are also available: Guzzle Streams , Log subscriber other.
HHVM 3.0.0 - The release of the already well-known virtual machine from Facebook.
HippyVM - Alternative PHP implementations appear like mushrooms after rain. This time PHP implementation on PyPy . According to the developers, the solution is 7.3 times faster than native PHP and 2 times faster than HHVM.

Php

About PHP 6 - A discussion in php.internals about why you cannot call the next version of PHP 6. But PHP 7 is already taken
Nevertheless, work on PHP 5 ++ is underway, the plan has been formed into a good detailed list . By the way, it is interesting that even JIT is present in it. It is expected that the team will fully start the implementation of the plan immediately after release 5.6, and will finish work in about 2 years.

Instruments

RegExr - A handy tool for analyzing and constructing regular expressions.
Tracy - A good tool for debugging applications.
Hateoas - A library for creating HATEAOS REST web services.
Flint - Silex-based microframe. Yo dawg You can use microframeworks so you can use microframework while you use microframework.
Vlad - A good data validation library with multi-language support.
Cilex - A lightweight framework for building command-line applications based on Symfony2 components.
MailCatcher for PHP - Library for integration with MailCatcher
PHP Parallel Lint - A syntax checker that analyzes files in parallel.
habrapi - The official client of the HabraHabr API, although it is still at the stage of deep development.
Ray.Di - Dependency Injection Framework , a clone of Guice from Google for Java.
VisualCeption - An extension for Codeception that allows you to visually (using screenshots) compare sections of pages.
XStatic - Static proxy interfaces a la facades in Laravel, but with the ability to use in any application.
WP-API - A plugin for WordPress that implements the REST API.
Graceful Death - A small library that allows you to catch fatal errors and execute any final code after that. It is based on the idea of creating a fork of the process, so it only works on unix-systems and requires pcntl_* functions.
SQL wrapper - A simple but interesting wrapper over DBAL. Post with a description from the author.
Pecan - Shell for ReactPHP based on the Symfony Console.

Study materials

Abstract File Systems with Flysystem - Flysystem Library Tutorial , which allows you to transparently use both the local file system and remote storage (S3, Dropbox, FTP, SFTP) without changing the application code.
Get acquainted with JadePHP - Post about one of the representatives of the form of PHP-template engines. Jadephp - Port of the popular Javascript-engine Jade .
How to speed up your application due to proper use of the API - Several recommendations: parallel requests, bring API calls out of the main application flow, caching.
Authentication and authorization in Apigility - A useful post for those who are interested in building applications based on Zend Framework 2 and Apigility .
Making sessions in PHP safer - Custom session handler and some encryption - code .
Processing Amazon SNS messages in PHP , as well as testing locally. - A pair of tutorials on using the Amazon SNS messaging service.
Development of PHP extensions on Zephir - A suitable tutorial for starting with Zephir.
Development of PHP extensions using PHP-CPP . OOP - By the way, the first stable version of the PHP-CPP library has been released.
Check links sent by users for malware and phishing - In the post, the author recommends several services for checking links: Google SafeBrowsing , SURBL , Phishtank , VirusTotal .
We optimize MySQL - A series of good tutorials about database optimization, indexes, search for bottlenecks.
JSON handling in PHP - About using not only the usual json_encode and json_decode , but also the implementation of JsonSerializable .
Legacy Refactoring , 2
There is no such thing as optional dependencies - On the misuse of the suggest directive in the description of composer dependencies.
Less is more - How to stop including everything in composer.json and start developing.
Code coverage with tests: from myth to reality - About why coverage may not really be so important.
Data Transfer Objects - An interesting way to describe data objects (classes only with a set of properties) and validate property types.
Overview of Symfony2 components: ExpressionLanguage , Finder - Previously also were: Validator , Routing , Config , EventDispather , HttpKernel , Translation , Templating .
Deploying Symfony2 Applications with Ansible - About using the Ansible automation tool, for which quite a few ready-made recipes have already been written.
Getting started with Assetic - Tutorial on using a popular resource manager for PHP.
Introducing Symfony Web Application Development - Free online course.
Download all images from the site using the symfony-component DomCrawler
About changes in working with time zones in PHP 5.5.10
Cursors and Aggregation Framework - Due to the release of the massive MongoDB 2.6 update, the corresponding driver for PHP has also been updated. In the post on the link on the use of new features.
Convert Markdown to PDF with PHP - Markdown is converted to HTML and then using dompdf respectively in pdf. Previously, there was a detailed tutorial on the use of dompdf .
Another way to generate PDFs from HTML is to use KnpSnappyBundle. .
Analysis of remote machine traffic using Wireshark - A small trick to using Wireshark sniffer with Vagrant boxes and more.
The way to start PHP-FPM is better - About the configuration of php-fpm and the use of the ondemand process manager.
HHVM and New Relic - The popular application monitoring service New Relic does not officially support HHVM yet, but the author of the post has implemented its extension which solves the problem.
Getting started with HHVM and HACK , 2 , 3
My journey with HHVM - Test HHVM against php-fpm, which, surprisingly, did not show winning the first.
PurePHP - NoSQL pure PHP database
Creating a chat in PHP
Epic PHP Course Slides - Excellent slides for those who learn PHP.
Tips for creating social networking applications - Do not relate directly to PHP, but the recommendations are useful.
Using PhpStorm for WordPress Development
We work asynchronously in PHP or the story of another chat
Thousand and one gif - About the service for recording gif'ok from a webcam using HTML5 and JS.
Use traits with benefits
Use a hash search, not a search of an array - Make the values of the array keys and get a performance gain.
JPHP - How it works. Creation History - More on JPHP - full PHP compiler for Java VM.

Materials from past conferences

PHP South Africa - Slides 7 reports. About asynchronous PHP interesting - Async PHP .
Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo 2014 - Video recordings from a conference in California.
https://code.facebook.com/posts/683726355017955/hack-developer-day-recap/ - Shortly after the official presentation of Hack, Hack Developer Day was held, where developers from Facebook told in detail about the new language. By reference description and video reports.