The 7th issue of our PHP digest is really interesting. Lots of news and releases, tools, libraries, books, podcasts – all these materials are waiting for you inside. Enjoy reading!

News & Releases

• PHP 7.2.0 RC3 — One more Release Candidate Added. A fresh review of what’s new in PHP 7.2
• PHP 7.0.24
• PHP 7.1.10
• PHP 7.1 available for Google App Engine
• PostgreSQL 10
• Hacktoberfest 2017 — DigitalOcean together with GitHub announced the support campaign of open source projects. Everyone who registers and makes 4 pull requests until October 31 will receive a T-shirt. If you want to participate, but do not know how to start, take a look at the issues marked with a label: #hacktoberfest.

PHP Internals

• [RFC] Allow a trailing comma in function calls — It is suggested to allow the use of a comma at the end of the function arguments’ list:

var_dump(
   $whatIsInThere,
   $probablyABugInThisOne,
   $oneMoreToCheck,
);

• PHP 7.2 is not yet released, but working on the next version is already in full swing. For example, in PHP 7.3, optimization of sparse conditional constant propagation is implemented. That allows the interpreter to simplify this function:

Class C {
   public $i;
}

function fn(int $x) {
   $c = new C;
   $c->i = 1;
   if ($x) {
       $a = [1, 2, 3];
   } else {
       $a = [3, 2, 1];
   }
   return $a[$c->i];
   $c->i++;
   return $x;
}

To this one:

function fn(int $x) {
   return 2;
}

We look forward to getting the news about JIT.

Tools

• jenssegers/date — Library based on Carbon for working with dates and multilanguage support.
• json-api-php/json-api — The library describes the business rules of the JSON API in the language of domain logic.
• codeception/codeception-progress-reporter — Progress bar for Codeception.
• hybridauth/hybridauth — One of the most popular libraries for authentication with social networks.
• Bit-Wasp/bitcoin-php — Implementation of the Bitcoin protocol in PHP.
• Webiny — Interesting CMS with a backend in PHP and ReactJS on the frontend.
• nbs-system/snuffleupagus — Extension for PHP 7+, designed to improve security by eliminating some error classes at the root.
• NoiseByNorthwest/php-spx — A simple but very interesting profiler in the extension form. It can be a good alternative to XDebug and XHProf.

Learning Materials

Symfony

• How to deploy the Symfony API — CircleCI, Docker, AWS.
• Symfony 3.4 and 4.0 are about to enter into “feature freeze” – The stabilization phase starts, and releases are expected at the end of November.
• A week of Symfony #561 (25 September – 1 October 2017)
• A week of Symfony #562 (2-8 October 2017)

Yii

• Yii development notes #14

Laravel

• nicolaslopezj/searchable — A php trait to search laravel models.
• appstract/laravel-blade-directives — A collection of nice Laravel Blade directives.
• Testing Laravel Middleware with HTTP Tests
• Measure Anything in Laravel with StatsD
• Eloquent Relationships Cheat Sheet

Zend

• Zend Framework Community News for the week of 2017-09-28

Async PHP

• Event-driven PHP with ReactPHP — A full book on asynchronous PHP from the author of articles on ReactPHP.
• Understanding ReactPHP Event Loop Ticks
• clue/php-redis-react — Asynchronous Redis client.
• clue/php-soap-react — Asynchronous SOAP client.

CMS

• The month in WordPress: September 2017
• Drupal 8.4.0
• Magento 2.2.0
• Magento Tech Digest #4 (September 20 — October 9, 2017)

also:

• The book “ Microservices for everyone”  with the examples in PHP.
• Protecting passwords with Argon2 in PHP 7.2
• Is it all PHP OPCache’s fault?

Interesting

• www.phppodcasts.com — All the PHP podcasts on one site.
• The PHP community is poisoning itself and we need to stop it.