The best of the world PHP for 2014 + competition from the company JetBrains! PHP ‑ Digest 53

Following the tradition, we decided to take stock of the outgoing year and highlight the most significant events in the PHP world, which, fortunately, were many. And of course, a selection with links to fresh materials over the past three weeks.

Under the cut, you will also have a contest with prizes from the JetBrains company!


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In the contest of forecasts of the past year, he won chris_griffin with the assumption:

Php will become the official language in India.

Fortunately, this did not happen, but the third-place steppefox forecast came close to reality in many ways:

1. The popularity of HHVM will increase.
2. Beta Yii2 will be released in spring, stable release in late autumn
3. In the Russian Federation will make your small Laracon 2014
4. On Habré there will be several dozen failed articles in the spirit of "Your PHP is not very," or "my favorite language" vs PHP.
5. Translate into Russian book on Laravel.
6. Will be a book on Phalcon
7. Another framework will attempt to break into the PHP scene.
8. Zend-certification rules will change.
9. Elephants can finally be ordered

Of course, the most important event of the outgoing year was the release of a new major version of the interpreter - PHP 5.6. The release introduced many new features: scalar expressions in constants , functions with variable number of arguments , exponentiation operator ** , import of functions and constants from namespaces , built-in phpdbg debugger , operator overload for GMP objects and other extensions .
A pleasant surprise was the project codenamed PHPNG - PHP interpreter of the new generation. It all started with the message of Dmitry Stogov in php.internals and the corresponding branch in the repository. A lot of work has been done on optimizing the Zend Engine. The branch was merged into the master and became the basis of the next version of the interpreter. The performance of PHPNG already exceeds PHP 5.6 and is catching up with HHVM.
Also, based on the results of stormy discussion and voting, it was decided to release this very next version at number 7 and according to the plan, the release should take place as early as next year.
The outgoing year has also pleased the appearance of the formal specification of the PHP language .
Good luck to the PHP Group in 2015!




The release of Yii 2.0 - an event that so long waited for many, finally took place this year! First, the beta release , and then the subsequent release candidate and GA . Excellent documentation and guidance , as well as affordable books ( Yii 2 For Beginners , Web Application Development With Yii 2 And PHP ) will help you quickly get started with the framework.




The most popular PHP framework this year has been designated with releases 2.5, 2.6. The symfony project is 9 years old , and more and more universal solutions are being created based on the framework. Not to mention the ubiquitous use of symfony components and the creation of your own frameworks based on them .




The alternative PHP virtual machine from Facebook continues to grow rapidly, release 3.0.0 was introduced. Some large projects are switching to using HHVM - this is Wikipedia and, for example, Box . However, the announcement of the HACK language embedded in HHVM has become really interesting. The language is an improved PHP with such desirable features as static typing, lambda expressions, generics, asynchrony, and others.
Among other alternative implementations of PHP, which appeared in 2014, I would like to mention KPHP , PH7 , HippyVM , JPHP , Recki-CT .




The triumphal march of PHP dependency manager continued in 2014. PEAR is finally dead, PHPUnit , Twig , Swiftmailer , Symfony, and others refused to support channels. Engine Yard has allocated a grant of $ 15k per year to support Composer in the person of one of the authors, Nils Adermann. Another author, Jordi Boggiano, started developing a commercial Toran Proxy to support Composer. We wish them good luck in the new year!




The official PHP mascot - ElePHPant Elephant - was created by Vincent Pontier in 2007. But in 2014, he experienced a new boom. First, the guys from php [architect] launched a campaign on Kickstarter with the goal of collecting $ 1000 to create orange PHP elephants. In less than a day they managed to raise more than $ 20,000! Then the PHPWomen community successfully campaigned with purple elephants - $ 26,395. And at the end of the year, the campaign with black elephants from AmsterdamPHP .
More colors, more elephants in the new year!

News and Releases

• Composer

  
  
  • How Composer is 70% Accelerated - Truly legendary commit , in which the circular reference collector was disabled. Detailed analysis can be found here . Instead of a complete shutdown, it is also suggested to use the trick: gc_enable(); gc_collect_cycles(); gc_disable(); gc_enable(); gc_collect_cycles(); gc_disable(); .
  • Minimum allowed dependency versions in Composer - The ability to use the --prefer-lowest to install minimal version packages has been added to the popular dependency manager.
  • The composer files are indexed in Google - On many sites, the files composer.lock and composer.json are in the web root and are actually indexed , which is potentially dangerous.
  • Melody - single-file Composer-scripts - The tool allows you to describe Composer-dependencies directly in the php-file.
  • Composer 1.0 alpha9 - Review the latest innovations.
  
  
• PHP_CodeSniffer 2.0.0 - 19 months of work and many useful features, including autofixing and much more.
• WordPress updated to version 4.1
• Yii 2.0.1
• TYPO3 7.0 - After two years of development, the release of the open source content management system TYPO3 7.0 has been published.
• PHP 5.6.4, 5.4.36 and 5.5.20 - Updates of current branches, in which vulnerabilities in the unpacking code of serialized data are fixed, and also 20 other errors are fixed.

Php

• RFC: Scalar Type Hints - Another attempt to implement type hinting for scalars in PHP.
• RFC: Unicode Codepoint Escape Syntax - A proposal was made to add the ability to set unicode characters as codes: echo "\u{202E}Reversed text"; .
• RFC: Nullsafe Calls - Suggestions to add a new operator ?-> , which allows you to make safe call chains, in the case where the return value can be null :
  $o?->mayFail1()?->mayFail2()?->mayFail3()?->mayFail4();

Instruments

• PHProutine - Emulation of gorutin in PHP.
• ProxyManager 1.0.0 - A library for generating and managing proxies.
• Omnipay - Easy to use payment processing library for PHP 5.3+.
• Box Project - A tool for easy creation and management of phar archives.
• Elephant.io - A web client client.
• Couscous - Generator of the GitHub Pages website with documentation.
• brandonsavage / booboo - Advanced PHP exception and error handler. Supports various types of error information display.
• commando / dogpatch - Framework for testing HTTP API using curl.

Study materials

• Laravel

  
  
  • Automate the deployment of Laravel applications using Capistrano
  • Greedy loading in Laravel
  
  

• Symfony

  
  
  • VarDumper - a new component in symfony 2.6
  • How to just make friends Symfony2 and RequireJS on the example of SPA
  • Unpacking Symfony2: What are compiler passes
  • Going SOA with Symfony2: A year and a half down the road
  
  
• Converters (Transducers / Transducers) in PHP - The concept of transducers, introduced not so long ago in Clojure , has now been implemented in PHP.
• On the supported version of PHP - It has become known that CodeIgniter 3.0 will support 5.2 . In a post, Anthony Ferrara talks about this topic.
• Async - Multitasking for Hack
• Expert PHP Deployments - Free book on deploying PHP applications using Capistrano, Phing and Vagrant.
• QA process for PHP projects using Jenkins - Installation, configuration, plugins for PHP.
• 3 ways to create cross-platform desktop applications in PHP - Nightrain , wxPHP and TideSDK are reviewed .
• How code coverage works with PHPUnit and Xdebug
• Implementing Traits in Zend Framework 2
• PHP vs Ruby - Application Expiration Date - The first of a series of posts about why the author in his company after 5 years of using Ruby returned to PHP.
• Pay for Bitcoin with Coinbase and Bitpay
• Using Traits in Doctrine Entities
• Simple read / write separation with PHP MySQLnd extension
• Stack Machines: Compilers - Igor Wiedler's series of posts about stack machines , and Anthony Ferarr's guest post about compilers.
• Composer. It is unsafe to use packagist and private package source at the same time.
• WordPress for paranoid, part 1
• How we tried to implement Yandex.Kassa
• Virtual hosting and php5.4, when already?
• Digest of interesting materials from the world of Drupal
• Processing and processing reports in Excel in PHP
• DOMPDF - export data from PHP to PDF
• Some tips for speeding up Drupal
• Random personality generator
• PHP Namespaces

Audio and video

• PHP at 5000 queries per second: Hootsuite scaling history , 2
• Interview with Zeev Suraski for PHP Frameworks Day 2014

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New Year's contest

PHP Digest together with JetBrains company in the latest digest of the outgoing 2014 announce a competition among regular readers.
We offer you to determine the best figure PHP-community in 2014. In the comments write the name of the most worthy candidate and explain for what contribution in the outgoing year he can be considered the best.
The authors of the three comments with the most votes will receive excellent New Year's gifts. JetBrains will award all three winners with personal PHPStorm IDE licenses! Also, each winner will receive a t-shirt with the PHP logo from the #ITStuff online store.
But the most important thing is that the PHP circle will be sent to the nominee who has the most advantages, along with the title “Person of the Year According to the PHP Digest”:


Results will be announced on December 26 at 19:00 Moscow time.
Let's remember together who was the best in 2014?

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Contest results

So, according to the results of the voting, Dmitry Stogov gets the title of “Person of the Year 2014 according to the PHP ‑ Digest version” and we will send Dmitry the PHP mug!

Among the readers we have three winners!
The first place is occupied by merkushin and receives a personal license for PHPStorm from the company JetBrains , as well as a t-shirt with the PHP logo from the #ITStuff store.

Dmitry Stogov with PHPNG, of course!

The second, according to the results of voting, was hell0w0rd , who nominated Nikita Popov. And also receives a license for PHPStorm and a T-shirt.

Nikita Popov, with his router, AST, input to php - traits, generators, version 7 (AST, arguments inside the kernel, a lot of refactoring with Dmitry Stogov).

The third rated nominee was Fabien Potencier. Commentator nazarpc is awarded a license for PHPStorm and a T-shirt.

Fabien potencier
Symfony2 is already as WordPress among CMS, and even in CMS / CMF is taken (Symfony CMF, Drupal 8).

Many thanks to all the participants, as well as to the company JetBrains and the #ITStuff store for the gifts provided!
Unlimited thanks to all the PHP community leaders for your work and contribution to our common cause!
Congratulations to all the upcoming New Year! May this year be for you more productive, richer and more interesting than the one that is leaving!