Introducing the Mezzio Framework

By Matthew Setter

There are copious frameworks available for PHP, including Laravel, Symfony, and CakePHP. However, each of these is designed to build applications with a particular focus in mind. In this article, I will introduce you to one that is focus-agnostic, one which lets you take whichever path makes the most sense to your use case. It’s called Mezzio.

A Case for Functional Programming in PHP

By Lochemem Bruno Michael

Functional Programming constructs do not predominantly feature in PHP parlance despite the language’s aptness for the paradigm. Part of accepting the paradigm’s offerings might require introducing a paradigm-centric perspective of PHP: an effort that portrays the language—whose more prominent features allow for the style to exist in its ecosystem—as an enabler of Functional Programming.

CQRS And Event Sourcing—Software Architecture at a Higher Level, for Everyone!

By Junior Grossi

Implementing CQRS and Event Sourcing in your application may allow you to improve performance, user response time and make fixing bugs a more painless process. Although they are not new topics, they are useful when you need to split responsibility or track what’s happening with your data, not only your code. Let’s understand better how they work and how useful they can be for your application.

PHP Puzzles: Environmental Noise

By Sherri Wheeler

This month, we wrap up our grid maze theme by adding some noise or empty space to our grid that already contains a path from the entrance to the exit. The idea is to approximate an environment map for a tabletop game.

Education Station: Deeper into the Streams

By Chris Tankersley

As I wrote last month, streams are an important feature of PHP used quite a bit without most developers ever noticing. While developers can use them to help optimize read and write operations, they are also useful for working with incoming requests and data manipulation.

The Workshop: Just Use Docker

By Joe Ferguson

If you’ve been putting off learning how to use Docker in your PHP projects, here is your chance: we’re going to start from scratch, and we’re going to cover a lot of ground to take a PHP application from running locally to running in containers, then a cluster, and ultimately in Kubernetes. Let’s get settled in and ready to figure out how all of these container tools work and can improve your quality of life as a developer by streamlining your workflow and building robust, fault-tolerant applications that can run in any supported container ecosystem.

Sustainable PHP: Testing Business Rule

By Edward Barnard

There’s an old joke that runs, “We just got a new project. You two start coding while I go find out the requirements.” This month we talk about evaluating and implementing business rules, thus meeting project requirements. We focus on discerning what’s important and what isn’t, and recognizing interactions that can quickly get out of hand. For our working example, we’ll be evaluating standard poker hands. Well-known card games make great examples because they’re easily understood by non-technical people, and it’s instantly apparent whether something is modeled correctly or not.

Security Corner: Supply Chain Security

By Eric Mann

The recent security breach of SolarWinds was one of the worst the community has seen in recent years. It isn’t due to the used hack’s severity but the impact on almost all of SolarWinds’ downstream customers. Let’s look at if something like this could happen in the PHP ecosystem and what we could do to guard against it.

Community Corner: Interview with Angie Byron, Part Two

By Eric Van Johnson

Now on Drupal 9, the community isn’t slowing down. This month, we continue our interview with Angie Byron, a.k.a Webchick, a Drupal Core committer and product manager, Drupal Association Board Member, author, speaker, mentor, and Mom, and so much more. Currently, she works at Aquia for the Drupal acceleration team, where her primary role is to “Make Drupal awesome.” We talk about Drupal, coding, family, and her journey throughout the years.

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finally{}: Fun with Big Data

By Beth Tucker Long

In years past, scientists had to draw conclusions from whatever small data they could procure themselves. Advancements in data collection, storage, and analysis have revolutionized the data sets now available to scientists—and also you and me.