PHP 7.3 is On Track!

By Damien Seguy

PHP 7.3 successfully passed the “feature freeze” deadline. On Aug. 1st, 2018 all features for PHP 7.3 were identified. This triggered the first PHP 7.3 beta, on the following day, and, from there, we’ll reach RC in September. It is time to review what this new PHP version has available for us, help test PHP 7.3, and get ready.

• Read PDF
• Read Web Version

Upgrading Old Legacy Apps to PHP 7 and Beyond

By Sammy Kaye Powers

There are many PHP 7 upgrade paths one could take. The sheer number of options can be paralyzing. Certainly, there are better ways than upgrading your production server to PHP 7.2 and hoping for the best (in fact, this is not a recommended upgrade path). If upgrading a legacy PHP 5.x application to PHP 7 seems daunting, read on and let’s start eating this elePHPant one byte at a time.

Using the Symfony Workflow Component as a State Machine for Ecommerce

By Michelle Sanver

The Symfony workflow component is a powerful tool that can be used in many ways; we used it to create a state machine for our ecommerce API. In this article, you’ll see how to use it to define the states for a workflow and use events to customize transitions between these states.

The Dev Lead Trenches: How Long Will It Take?

By Chris Tankersley

This month, let’s discuss what we can do to help come up with better estimates. I hate estimating, but it is an unfortunate part of software development. We cannot come up with schedules without estimates. My boss wants to know I’m not wasting his time when I say something will take 40 developer hours. I want to make sure my team is doing things in the best possible order and not waiting until the very end to deliver a big feature.

The Workshop: Describe Your Tests with Kahlan

By Joe Ferguson

This month we’re covering a full-featured unit and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) test framework named Kahlan. Kahlan is similar to RSpec (Ruby) and JSpec (Java) using BDD style syntax where you describe the behavior your application should have.

Education Station: Producer-Consumer Programming

By Edward Barnard

Producer-consumer programming is an excellent technique for offloading work from your main application. You can scale resources to meet increased demand. You can smooth out spikes by placing your backlog in a queue. You can set aside long-running tasks such as thumbnail generation. We’ll develop a simple CakePHP application that produces and consumes via a free CloudAMQP (RabbitMQ) account. Although we use CakePHP, the principles are universal to any modern PHP framework.

Security Corner: Professional Paranoia: Thinking Like an Attacker

By Eric Mann

One thing security professionals in every field have is a cultivated sense of “professional paranoia.” They invest time in understanding and thinking like a potential attacker. As a result, there are fewer ways an attack can surprise—or successfully breach—an application.

Community Corner: Finding the Perfect Development Job

By James Titcumb

We are lucky to work in an industry that is in high demand. Never before has the need for programmers been higher in our world driven by the internet and revolutionary technology. Entrepreneurs are churning out startups, not just in Silicon Valley but all over the world. While the demand for developers does indeed fluctuate through both time and location, we are lucky to have a broad range of choices when it comes to the specialized work we can do.

finally{}: The Seven Deadly Sins of Programming: Pride

By Eli White

Programming is an art, programming is a skill, programming is a job, programming is a lifestyle. With all of that comes joy but also pain. In fact, programming itself can mirror life, and therefore comes with all positive and negative aspects of that. There is a multitude of bad habits that we as programmers can have that end up self-sabotaging ourselves and our code. Today, I want to talk about the sin of pride.