The recent digest includes several long-awaited announcements and releases, as well as many useful learning materials on Symfony, Zend, Laravel, CMS, and Async PHP. A selection of PHP chats in Slack and Telegram will be a good bonus for those who read to the end:) Enjoy!

News & Releases

• The Future of HHVM — Not so long ago, many companies refused to support HHVM. The HVVM team has announced that they do not plan to fully support PHP 7 in the long term. Instead, the Facebook guys will focus on Hack. Nevertheless, it is planned to fix some compatibility problems with popular tools like Composer and PHPUnit in the near future.
• PHP 7.2.0 RC 2 — The second Release Candidate was delivered on time. The next release is expected on September 28. You can read about the branch changes here. Test using the prepared Docker image.
• Sylius v1.0.0 — Release of the popular e-Commerce platform based on Symfony.

PHP Internals

• [RFC] RFC Workflow & Voting — It is proposed to regulate the RFC process, especially to raise the threshold for accepting changes to ⅔ when voting. Criteria are also indicated for those who can vote.
• [RFC] Class Friendship — The second attempt to realize the concept of friendly classes. A friendly class has access to the private and protected class fields, in which it is declared as friendly.
• [RFC] Fiber — An interesting addition to the PHP generators, which would simplify the asynchronous code.
• Pre-draft PipeOp v2 — A draft proposal for pipe operator was discussed in Internals. The original proposal was criticized because of the use of the $$ placeholder, and now a simpler version is offered:

$x = "hello"
|> 'strtoupper'
|> function($x) { return $x . " world"; };
// $x === "HELLO world"

Tools

• PoweredLocal/vrata — API gateway implemented in PHP and Lumen.
• jamesmoss/flywheel — A Database for PHP that can store data in JSON, YAML or Markdown formats.
• spatie/macroable — A trait to dynamically add methods to a class. Details here.
• felixfbecker/php-language-server — PHP Implementation of the VS Code Language Server Protocol.
• BetterReflection 2.0.0 — Reflexion without loading classes.
• tagua-vm/tagua-vm — Experimental virtual machine PHP on Rust and LLVM.

Learning Materials

Symfony

• Adding custom error codes to you Symphony API responses
• New in Symfony 3.4
• A week of Symfony #559 (11-17 September 2017)
• A week of Symfony #560 (18-24 September 2017)

Laravel

• Voyager 1.0 — Admin panel for Laravel.
• kjdion84/turtle — Laravel 5.5 package for CRUD, activity logs, permissions, contact forms, and more.
• nahid/talk —  Realtime users messaging and chatting system.
• Extending Models in Eloquent
• Nginx Unit with Docker, PHP, and Laravel
• Laravel Podcast s03e02: Interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel.

Zend

• Logging PHP apps using zend-log
• Emitting Responses with Diactoros
• Zend Framework Week 2017-09-14

Async PHP

• clue/php-buzz-react — async PSR-7 HTTP client based on ReactPHP.
• An Introduction to Generators in PHP
• Game Development with React and PHP. Also here.
• Promise-Based Cache With ReactPHP.

CMS

• Choosing JS library in WordPress — Due to the React patent license’s nuance, WordPress developers have announced the rejection of React for the frontend components. However, after the official change of the MIT license, they returned to its review, as well as to the framework-independent solution.
• postlight/headless-wp-starter — WordPress as a RESTful back end and React at the front end.
• Joomla 3.8
• Statistics of  the Drupal sponsors and contributors
• Magento Tech Digest #3 (September 4 — 19, 2017)
• Closures, Anonymous Classes and an alternative approach to Test Mocking (Part 3)
• Testing With PhpSpec
• Symfony Console Beyond the Basics – Helpers and Other Tools
• Goodbye controllers, hello request handlers
• A New API Binding: cloudflare-php
• From PHP to JavaScript with Node.js
• Using JSON Web Token (JWT) as a PHP Session
• UML Diagrams in PhpStorm 2017.2

Interesting

• Video: Running PHP on .NET Core with Peachpie
• Video: Memories of Laracon EU 2017
• A selection of PHP chats:

1. [S] Larachat
2. [S] Zend Framework
3. [S] Yii
4. [S] phpchat.co
5. [S] php.ug
6. [S] Drupal
7. [S] WordPress
8. [T] FED & PHP digests