Maintaining an open-source project is a tough task that requires an enormous amount of time and effort. But the value that open source contributors bring to the community cannot be emphasized enough. It’s huge!
At JetBrains, we rely heavily on open source tools ourselves. And we have been proudly supporting them for over a decade now. Moreover, some of our products are open source too, like the IntelliJ Platform (yes really, you can develop your own IDE if you want!), the Kotlin programming language, phpstorm-stubs, and more.
Open Source Support Program
For all open source project leads and regular committers, we provide free All Products Pack subscriptions, as well as licenses for any team tools they may find useful (YouTrack, Upsource, and TeamCity). You can learn more about this initiative and apply to it on our Open Source Support Program page.
There are currently more than 1500 PHP projects registered in the program, and we provide about 2500 licenses to active contributors. We’d like to say a big thanks to everyone using PhpStorm to develop these open source projects!
We are happy to support the PHP community in other ways too!
Nikita Popov at JetBrains
Nikita Popov joined the PhpStorm team about a year ago. Back then, we did not know how it would go, but it turns out that Nikita and JetBrains are perfectly matched for each other, and we are now in a position to evaluate the results of this venture.
Here are the highlights of what Nikita has been working on:
PHP 7.4
- Typed properties – Together with Bob Weinand and based on the work of Joe Watkins and Phil Sturgeon.
- Arrow functions – Together with Bob Weinand and Levi Morrison.
- Allow throwing exceptions from __toString() – This one fixes the old PHP Sadness #14.
- Deprecate left-associative ternary operator – Fixed PHP Sadness #30.
- A number of deprecations for PHP 7.4 – With Kalle Sommer Nielsen.
PHP 8
Two other areas Nikita has been involved in are introducing new CI pipelines for PHP-SRC (with Joe Watkins) and stubs for internal PHP functions. The first has helped to make builds faster and more reliable. Thanks to all the contributors, the latter will allow type information about arguments and return values to be gathered in PHP 8 through Reflection.
Everyone knows @nikita_ppv is a significant contributor to php-src.
But did you know he's deleted more than four times the code he's added? (Hooray, technical debt collection.) pic.twitter.com/or3mH8niQM
— Scott Arciszewski (@CiPHPerCoder) August 28, 2019
Also, check out Nikita’s What’s coming in PHP 7.4 talk at the PHP Russia conference and the PHP Performance Trivia at PHP.BARCELONA. And you may want to see a new talk at PHP fwdays’20.
But Nikita is not the only member of the PHP community that we support and collaborate with.
Derick Rethans and Xdebug
Xdebug has been around for 17 years already. And ever since then, it’s been a key tool in the PHP ecosystem. It is an essential part of everyday life for many developers because it allows debugging, profiling, calculating code coverage, and other things. Even more mind-blowing is that it has been developed and maintained almost solely by Derick Rethans, who has worked on this voluntarily for more than 17 years!
Xdebug integration was one of the main features of PhpStorm. That’s why, starting from the first beta of PhpStorm, we’ve supported Xdebug and have begun collaborating more tightly with Derick. He has helped us find bugs in PhpStorm, and we have in turn reported issues in Xdebug back, which has been integral to making both tools better.
Over these last ten years, we’ve become great friends with Derick. And now, with his announcement to become an independent developer, we are finally proud to sponsor Derick in his endeavors. We started by covering the costs of developing the IDE specific feature #1388, Breakpoint validation. Obviously, this went very well. So now we are sponsoring Derick’s work regardless of the scope. We are happy that other companies have also signed up for the business package sponsorship.
By the way, Derick hosts the popular PHP Internals News podcast.
Individual Open Source Contributors
There are a number of other open-source contributors that dedicate an enormous amount of effort, time, and energy to building tools and making the PHP ecosystem a better place for all of us.
We have decided that we should try to support these individual contributors in whatever way we can, so we are pleased to announce that we will be donating a significant portion of our ads budget to instead sponsoring individual contributors.
Starting this year we are going to begin sponsoring a few key maintainers of the tools crucial to the ecosystem.
At the moment, we are trying to finalize the details of the GitHub Sponsors program.
This will be an ongoing program, and we plan to reconsider the list of contributors yearly.
Again, we would like to thank each and every one of the open source contributors. Please know that your work is much appreciated!
If you use open source tools in your work, you probably already appreciate what an awesome community we are all part of and what these contributors are doing for it.
A PHP Internals Gathering
This year will be the 25th anniversary of PHP. The topic of a PHP core team meeting has come up a number of times in Internals discussions. And in fact, there actually has been a meeting, but it was so long ago that it’s practically ancient history. This anniversary provides the perfect occasion for the team to finally all get together.
Which brings me to my point. JetBrains would like to host and sponsor a Grand PHP Internals Gathering! The first PHP announcement was made on the 8th of June in 1995, and we are planning to meet on roughly the same day 25 years later.
We’ve already reached out to Internals members, and we’ve received very positive feedback and a number of confirmations of participation. We’re now moving at full speed to plan the event, and we’ll share more details soon. Stay tuned!
Your JetBrains PhpStorm team
The Drive to Develop
