Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about why the title of this article, I feel, is entirely wrong (though I used to believe it). I’m writing about this because I’ve had a sordid history with frameworks and want to share where I’ve landed.

PHP 7.4 brings typed properties, arrow functions, coalesce assignment operators, and more. PHP 7.4.0RC4 was released on October 17th. There’s still plenty of time as the current planned date for general availability of 7.4 is November 28th, 2019, according to the PHP 7.4 timetable.

Design patterns provide useful approaches for solving common problems in application design. Dependency injection is a powerful one, but it is also challenging to understand and apply. In this article, we’ll cover what it does and how to use it properly.

PHP extensions are primarily composed of additions (functions and classes) to the PHP userland. Considering the PHP virtual machine is built in C, it holds that extensions are generally idiomatic C-based syntaxes. C++, a syntax-base with C-linkage capability, is an eligible extension-builder language and quite robust in its offerings. In particular, C++ 11 and newer […]

If you’re not familiar with the phrase “object-oriented programming” or haven’t done it before, this article is for you! We’ll start from basic principles and build upon them until you have a decent foundational grasp of what object-oriented programming is, why you should consider doing it, and how to do so.

While not commonly seen in the wild, PHP exposes powerful interfaces empowering applications to manipulate large streams of data directly. Both stream wrappers and filters allow developers to interact with objects too large to fit in memory or which might be ephemeral in nature. Combining these stream interfaces opens up even more possibilities for the […]

In Episode 24 Eric, John, and Oscar discuss some of the articles in the September 2019 issue “Master of Puppets”. Topics History of PHP, celebrating “25 Years of PHP”, and the Impact Awards at php[world] Using Puphpeteer to automate Chromium browser tasks and testing. Code style, and refactoring legacy code. Code editors from VIM (and […]

Despite the promise of a “paperless” office, we still need to create documents that print and render nearly-identically across devices and operating systems. PDFs have filled this niche nicely for end-users, but if you need to generate PDFs with PHP programmatically, the options are overwhelming. How do you choose? In this series, we’ll investigate the solutions at our disposal and the pros and cons of each.

PHP was released in the fall of 1994, making 2019 the 25th anniversary of PHP! We’ve certainly come a long way from the early days of the web. I’m not sure how many people reading this were around back then, but I was. Things were not pretty back then.

This month we study the Singleton Design Pattern, but with a twist. We start with a correct implementation but get it wrong by refactoring. We’ll examine the PHP generated code, each step of the way, to understand what went wrong. We’ll observe at least two reasons the Singleton Design Pattern is now considered an anti-pattern. We’re preparing to learn useful variations next month by seeing precisely how it works under the hood.