PHP Annotated – September 2022

PHP Annotated Monthly

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to the September installment of PHP Annotated, where we’ll catch up on the most interesting things that have happened in the PHP world over the last month, including curated news, articles, tools, and videos.

News

  • PHP 8.2 RC 3 has been released
    Another RC has been delivered according to the schedule. The next RC 4 is expected on October 13.

    For a detailed list of what’s coming in PHP 8.2, see PHP.Watch or stitcher.io.

    Also, check out the flash newsletter, The Road to PHP 8.2.

  • PHP 7.4.32, PHP 8.0.24, and PHP 8.1.11 have been released
    ❗️These are security releases of currently supported branches. All users are encouraged to upgrade.
  • PhpStorm 2022.3 EAP Is Open!
    Here’s what you can already try as part of the Early Access Program for PhpStorm:

    • Beta access to the new UI
    • Full PHP 8.2 support
    • Quick-fix previews
    • And more

PHP Core

Most of the Core news is covered in detail in the PHP Core Roundup series from the PHP Foundation. You can find all the latest developments of the PHP Core team in the sixth episode of the Roundup series, so we’ll only mention it briefly:

  • 📊 RFC: json_validate #PHP 8.3
    In this RFC, Juan Carlos Morales proposes to add a new function called json_validate() that verifies if a string contains a valid JSON:

    var_dump(json_validate('{ "test": { "foo": "bar" } }')); // true
    
  • 📣 RFC: Improve unserialize() error handling #PHP 8.3
    Tim Düsterhus proposes adding a new UnserializationFailedException, which is thrown when unserialization fails:

    try {    $result = unserialize($serialized);
        var_dump($result);
    } catch (\UnserializationFailureException $e) {
        // unserialization failed
    }
    

Tools

  • play.phpsandbox.io – Try Composer packages right in your browser without installing anything. Brilliant!
  • matthiasnoback/php-ast-inspector – A command-line step-debugger for your Abstract Syntax Tree. How to use it.
  • kladskull/xEroS – A Bitcoin-like blockchain written in 100% PHP. Good for educational purposes.
  • sfx101/deck – A desktop tool to spin up Docker-based local dev environments in a single click.
  • cspray/annotated-container – A dependency injection framework to configure a PSR-11 container with attributes!
  • phparkitect/arkitect – This tool lets you define architectural constraints for your PHP codebase to run them on CI.
  • openai-php/client – A client that allows you to interact with OpenAI API.
    There is also orhanerday/open-ai if you need an alternative way to access OpenAI’s GPT-3 API.
  • WordPress/wordpress-wasm – Run WordPress in the browser thanks to WebAssembly magic.
  • nadrad/h-m-m – Hackers Mind Map – a simple, fast, keyboard-centric terminal-based tool for working with mind maps.

    The interesting thing is that it’s just a single PHP file with literally zero dependencies. Neat!

Symfony

Laravel

Other Frameworks

  • spiral/framework v3.0.0 – A major update of the framework from the creators of RoadRunner.
    It requires PHP 8.1 and brings new filters and validation, job serializers, an error handler, queue and console interceptors, an event dispatcher (PSR-14), injectable enums, a more flexible router, optimized bootloaders, and better performance.
  • Phalcon PHP Framework reached its major 5.0 release.
    Phalcon is a unique framework because it comes as a PHP extension. But according to the roadmap, the team decided to switch to a traditional model, and the next major release is planned to be a PHP package.
    For a detailed list of what’s new in 5.0, check out the Upgrade page.
  • api-platform/api-platform 3.0 – Built on top of Symfony, this mature framework allows creating REST and GraphQL APIs and much more.
  • Appwrite 1.0 – A major stable release of an open-source backend-as-a-service solution that provides APIs required for building a modern web or mobile application.

    Last year Appwrite migrated from nginx+php-fpm to Swoole and experienced a 91% performance boost.

Misc

Video

Conferences

In-person events are in full swing. Check out these upcoming big PHP gigs worth visiting and applying to CFP:

And if you are wondering When is the Next PHP Meetup? – Tomas Votruba has got you covered with his lovely friendsofphp.org meetup aggregator.


That’s all for today, thanks for reading!

If you have any interesting or useful links to share via PHP Annotated, please leave a comment on this post or send me a tweet.

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Your JetBrains PhpStorm team
The Drive to Develop

Roman Pronskiy

Product marketing manager for @PhpStorm, helped to launch @The PHP Foundation.

Twitter | GitHub

Sergey Panteleev

PHP 8.2 release manager, PHP Documentation maintainer.

Twitter | GitHub

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