pronskiy March 16, 2015 at 03:14

PHP Digest No. 58 - Interesting news, materials and tools (February 22 - March 16, 2015)

We bring to your attention the next selection with links to news and materials.

Enjoy reading!

News and Releases

Xdebug 2.3 - The release includes both fixes and new features: forced error display , conversion of warnings to errors , var_dump overload and others. PHP versions below 5.4 are also discontinued.
Yii 2.0.3
HHVM 3.6.0 - We wrote about new features earlier . LTS release with support until March 2016.
Joomla! 3.4
An experimental JIT implementation for PHP from Zend is presented - One of the main authors of PHPNG , Dmitry Stogov, announced the implementation of JIT . Some synthetic tests noticeable significant productivity gains, and for specific cases, for example, count of the Mandelbrot, showing 30 fold growth and leads to the realization C .
gRPC - the new PRC framework over HTTP / 2 - Google introduced its high-performance open source RPC framework, grpc . Libraries are available for all popular languages, including PHP.
PHPCI updated to version 1.6
PhpStorm 9 EAP Launched - An early version of PhpStorm 9 is now available for download. I recommend taking a look at least for the sake of the inline debugger.

Php

Scalar Type Hints - The saga of typing hinting for scalars continues. Three proposals are pending:
1. RFC: Coercive Types for Function Type Arguments
2. RFC: Dual Mode Scalar Type Declarations - Strong and Weak Typing
3. RFC: Basic Scalar Types - a compromise in case both of the previous ones fail
For the second option, it was proposed to change the way of setting the type of typing - instead of declare()using a special callback. Voting on the second proposal ends tomorrow. In the meantime, stocking up with PHP popcorn .
RFC: Exceptions in the engine - Almost unanimously, the proposal to implement ordinary exceptions in PHP 7 instead of fatal errors was accepted. It will also be possible to catch parsing errors. In addition, a new hierarchy has been introduced so that code using trapping of all exceptions catch(Exception $e)does not accidentally catch fatal errors and parsing errors. A new base type has been introduced BaseException, which is directly extended by types EngineException, ParseExceptionand actually Exception.
RFC: Consistent Function Names - One of the most common claims against PHP is the inconsistency of function naming and parameter sequences. It is proposed to rename functions, and to implement aliases for old names. An impressive list of renaming candidate functions is attached.
RFC: Strict Argument Count On Function Calls - The sentence assumes that the interpreter should give a warning when the function is called with more arguments than the specified signature. Post in support .
RFC: Anonymous Classes - Voting has started on a proposal to implement anonymous classes in PHP.
RFC: Easy User-land CSPRNG - It is proposed to add a simple cryptographically robust pseudorandom number generator in the form of functions random_bytes(int length)and random_int(int min, int max).
RFC: Generator Delegation - It is proposed to implement a syntax that allows generators to delegate Traversable operations to objects and arrays.yield from
RFC: Generator Return Expressions - Necessary for the previous sentence change - support returnin generators.
RFC: Reclassify E_STRICT notices - It is proposed to get rid of the E_STRICT error class - to transfer some to other classes, and remove irrelevant ones.

Instruments

Webiny Framework - Another PHP framework and review post .
klermonte / zerg - A small library for parsing structured binary files.
wapmorgan / HttpServer - Http-server fully written in PHP.
briannesbitt / Carbon - A handy wrapper for date and time functions in PHP.
jbroadway / urlify - Library for generating urls (slug), supports transliteration. Port URLify.js from Django.
Dashbrew - Build a Vagrant box with a convenient, configurable environment for developing PHP applications.
maknz / slack - A library for sending and receiving messages from Slack .
Boris - Great REPL for PHP.
cartalyst / converter - A library for converting values from various measurement systems.
FastRoute - The fastest router from Nikita Popov has been updated. In version 0.4.0, the ability to register a route with several methods with one call is added.
Graphene - Graph database in PHP + MySQL.
phrep - Macro preprocessor for PHP.
mcordingley / Regression - A library that implements basic regression analysis algorithms.
bound1ess / adviser - CLI tool for checking PHP projects for readme / license / contributing files, correct settings for the Git repository and Composer manifest, support for PSR-2, SemVer, etc.