PHP Digest number 58 - interesting news, materials and tools (February 22 - March 16, 2015)

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

Enjoy reading!

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News and Releases

Xdebug 2.3 - In the release, both fixes and new features: forced display of errors , conversion of warnings into errors , overloading of var_dump and others. Support for PHP versions below 5.4 has also been discontinued.
Yii 2.0.3
HHVM 3.6.0 - About the new features previously written. LTS release with support until March 2016.
Joomla! 3.4
An experimental JIT implementation for PHP from Zend is presented. One of the main authors of PHPNG , Dmitry Stogov, announced the implementation of JIT . On some synthetic tests, a significant increase in productivity is noticeable, and for specific cases, for example, the calculation of the Mandelbrot set shows a 30-fold increase and is ahead of implementation by C.
gRPC - a new PRC framework over HTTP / 2 - Google introduced its high-performance open-source RPC framework grpc . Libraries are available for all popular languages, including PHP.
PHPCI updated to version 1.6
Started EAP program PhpStorm 9 - An early version of PhpStorm 9 is already available for download. I recommend to look at least for the sake of the inline debugger.

Php

Scalar Type Hints - The epic about the type hint for scalars continues. Three proposals are under consideration:
1. RFC: Coercive Types for Function Arguments with forced ghost types
2. RFC: Scalar Type Declarations with dual mode - strong and weak typing
3. RFC: Basic Scalar Types - a compromise option in case both of the previous ones fail
For the second option, it was proposed to change the way the type of typing is specified - instead of declare() use a special callback. Voting on the second sentence ends tomorrow. In the meantime, stockpile PHPopkorn .
RFC: Exceptions in the engine - Almost unanimously accepted the proposal to implement standard exceptions in PHP 7 instead of fatal errors. It will also be possible to catch parsing errors. In addition, a new hierarchy has been introduced to ensure that code using the catch of all exceptions catch(Exception $e) does not accidentally catch fatal errors and parsing errors. A new base type BaseException , which is directly extended with the types EngineException , ParseException and Exception .
RFC: Consistent Function Names - One of the most frequently raised complaints about PHP is inconsistency in naming functions and a sequence of parameters. It is proposed to rename functions, and for old names, implement aliases. Attached is an impressive list of renaming candidate functions.
RFC: Strict Argument Count On Function Calls - The clause assumes that the interpreter should issue a warning when the function is called with the number of arguments exceeding the specified signature. Post in support .
RFC: Anonymous Classes - Started voting on the proposal to implement anonymous classes in PHP.
RFC: Easy User-land CSPRNG - It is proposed to add a simple cryptographically strong pseudo-random number generator in the form of functions random_bytes(int length) and random_int(int min, int max) .
RFC: Generator Delegation - It is proposed to implement the syntax yield from <expr> allowing generators to delegate operations to Traversable objects and arrays.
RFC: Generator Return Expressions - A change necessary for the previous sentence - support for return in generators.
RFC: Reclassify E_STRICT notices - It is proposed to get rid of the error class E_STRICT - some are transferred to other classes, and the irrelevant are removed.

Instruments

Webiny Framework - Another PHP framework and post review .
klermonte / zerg - A small library for parsing structured binary files.
wapmorgan / HttpServer - Http server completely written in PHP.
briannesbitt / Carbon - Handy wrapper for PHP date and time functions.
jbroadway / urlify - A library for generating urls (slug), supports transliteration. Port URLify.js from Django.
Dashbrew - Build Vagrant-box with a convenient configurable environment for developing PHP-applications.
maknz / slack - Library for sending and receiving messages from Slack .
Boris - Excellent REPL for PHP.
cartalyst / converter - Library for converting values from various measurement systems.
FastRoute - The fastest router from Nikita Popov has been updated. In version 0.4.0, the possibility of registering a route with several methods by one call is added.
Graphene - Graph database in PHP + MySQL.
phrep - Macro preprocessor for PHP.
mcordingley / Regression - A library that implements basic regression analysis algorithms.
bound1ess / adviser - CLI tool for checking PHP projects for readme / license / contributing files, correct Git repository and Composer manifest settings, PSR-2 support, SemVer, etc.