Learning to Code with Minecraft, Part One

I love Minecraft. Not because it’s one of the biggest games of our time, or because it has created a community of creative expression. Not because it started as a hobby project, or because I’ve seen many people (including my son) fall in love with it. I want to show you just one of the ways in which this is true. We’re going to look at how to build a cooperative code school, using Minecraft, PHP, and JavaScript. by Christopher Pitt

Strangler Pattern, Part Five: Producer-Consumer Programming in CakePHP/RabbitMQ

In this final installment of The Strangler Pattern series we walk through the code for a particular BATS worker. We wrap up the series with some observations about production microservices. Finally, we leave you with an extensive reading list for designing distributed messaging systems. We include the reason for each recommendation. by Edward Barnard

Creating a Cross-Platform App With Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is very popular mobile application development framework that offers several APIs for creating applications using a command line interface with HTML, CSS, and JS. Using Cordova, you could develop applications for popular mobile platforms including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how you could create a simple to-do app for Android using Cordova. by Ahmed Khan

Mocking the File System with VfsStream

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Working with files is a common task in many PHP applications, whether for input data to be processed, generated results, or even as a logging tap. But the file system is a persistent resource, and creating unit tests that involve files requires some special care. In this article, you’ll learn how to test against a mock file system the pieces of your application which use file operations, instead of involving your actual drive. by Gabriel Zerbib

Education Station: Instrument Your Apps and Make Them Fly—With Tideways!

If there’s one thing you want to do properly if you’re serious about the applications you’re developing, it’s ensuring they perform optimally. The question is, how do you do it? You have to instrument the application, using tools designed to measure application performance; tools which can profile and trace, digging deep into how your application works. by Matthew Setter

Leveling Up: Building Better Objects

Last month, we started talking about objects. Joseph Maxwell’s article discussed several common design patterns for objects, including factory, strategy, and chain of command. Additionally, he talked about dependency inversion. This month we’ll continue talking about how objects should be built and why using objects to build applications has advantages over the old style of building procedural pages. by David Stockton

Community Corner: Learn to Say No

Recently, I was approached by a friend who wanted me to deliver a keynote address at their upcoming conference. I had to tell them no. I am going to pause here and let that sink in. Why did I say no? by Cal Evans

Security Corner: PHP 7—a Step Closer to a More Secure PHP

As I write this another milestone in the PHP language has been reached. As of January 19th, 2017 the last version of PHP in the 5.x series (5.6) has finally rolled out of active support and is in “security only” support. Why am I talking so much about PHP 5.6 in an article clearly titled to cover PHP’s next major version? I wanted to give you a little perspective on the state of things right now and encourage you that, if you haven’t already, the upgrade to PHP 7 is practically a must now. There are all sorts of goodies that come with PHP 7’. by Chris Cornutt

The Value of Moving Forward

I often write about how it’s important for us not to alienate the newer programmers. To not immediately put down the coding methods and styles that are older (and more well known). However, today I want to talk about the value that exists in at the same time, pushing things forward in technology. by Eli White