Freek.dev

Collin O' Dell, member of the PHP League, shares how he was able to significantly improve the performance his json5 package using Blackfire profiling.

Back in November I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It's essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP's json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.

...

I always knew that a PHP-based implementation would be slower than PHP's native C implementation, but execution time measured in minutes was completely unacceptable!

So I fired up Blackfire (which I've previously used to optimize league/commonmark) and got to work.

https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201801/optimizing-colinodelljson5-blackfire

Read more

Quick @laravelphp tip:
Use the "wasRecentlyCreated" model attribute to check if your model was created or found ???? pic.twitter.com/HZwdDyqAw4

— Marcel Pociot (@marcelpociot) January 6, 2018

Read more [twitter.com]

Marcel Pociot, creator of the BotMan framework, explains how you can leverage Alexa, BotMan and Laravel Forge to deploy sites with your voice.

http://marcelpociot.de/blog/deploy-your-laravel-forge-sites-with-your-voice

Read more

In an article at Hackernoon, David Gilbertson warns about the dangers of trusting 3rd party packages on npm. He goes into how a package can make unwanted http requests in the browser and how you can protect yourself against that.

It’s been a frantic week of security scares — it seems like every day there’s a new vulnerability. It’s been a real struggle for me personally to pretend like I understand what’s going on when asked about it by family members.

Seeing people close to me get all flustered at the prospect of being “powned” has really put things in perspective for me.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I’ve decided to come clean and tell you all how I’ve been stealing usernames, passwords and credit card numbers from your sites for the past few years.

https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-passwords-from-your-site-here-s-how-9a8cb347c5b5

Read more

Martin Hujer shares some pretty good tips for working with Composer.

Although most PHP developers know how to use Composer, not all of them are using it efficiently or in a best possible way. So I decided to summarize things which are important for my everyday workflow.

The philosophy of most of the tips is "Play it safe", which means that if there are more ways how to handle something, I would use the approach which is least error-prone.

https://blog.martinhujer.cz/17-tips-for-using-composer-efficiently/

Read more

Basecamp recently open source Stimulus, their new JS framework. It aims to make sprinkling some JavaScript on your page here an there very easy.

Stimulus is a JavaScript framework with modest ambitions. It doesn't seek to take over your entire front-end—in fact, it's not concerned with rendering HTML at all. Instead, it's designed to augment your HTML with just enough behavior to make it shine. Stimulus pairs beautifully with Turbolinks to provide a complete solution for fast, compelling applications with a minimal amount of effort.

https://github.com/stimulusjs/stimulus

DHH talks a bit on why and how they created it in this episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast.

Read more

In a post on vuejsdevelopers.com Anthony Gore explains how to get started with serverside rending with Laravel and Vue. Cool stuff!

Server-side rendering is great way to increase the perception of loading speed in your full-stack app. Users get a complete page with visible content when they load your site, as opposed to an empty page that doesn’t get populated until JavaScript runs.

One of the downsides of using Laravel as a backend for Vue.js was the inability to server render your code. Was. The release of Vue.js 2.5.0 has brought server-side rendering support to non-Node.js environments including PHP, Python, Ruby etc.

In this tutorial, I’ll take you through the set up steps for Laravel and demonstrate a simple server-rendered app. Get the code for this here on Github.

https://vuejsdevelopers.com/2017/11/06/vue-js-laravel-server-side-rendering/

Read more

My colleague Brent is currently creating a new package called spatie/async. This one will let you easily do some asynchronous parallel processing in PHP. In a new post on his blog Brent explains why we are creating the package and compares it to a few other solutions out there.

If you're into parallel PHP, you probably heard of Amp and ReactPHP. Our package aims not to compete with those two, as it only solves one tiny aspect of parallelism in PHP. We did however use both the packages to run some benchmarks against. Let's take a look at the results.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/asynchronous-php

Read more

Dayle Rees, author of various popular books on PHP and Laravel, has recently blown new life into his efforts of creating IDE and terminal themes. He created themes for most of the popular apps out there including: PhpStorm, VS Code, Atom, iTerm2, ...

You can preview all the themes on: https://rainglow.io/

I've been using Dayle's Material Peacock for quite some time. Currently I'm digging white based themes and I'm on the GitHub theme.

Read more

???? Sometimes you want quick on-the-fly authorization, without the hassle of registering a policy/callback at the Gate.

Laravel's HandlesAuthorization trait is perfect for this. Simply call the `deny()` method, and Laravel will respond with a 403 HTTP response ???? pic.twitter.com/O36agH2o3u

— Joseph Silber (@joseph_silber) December 28, 2017

Read more [twitter.com]

Kaelan Cooter, software engineer at LogRocket, wrote a good post on the state of JavaScript and it's ecosystem in 2017. I'm very curious to see how WebAssembly will mature in the next year. There seems to be a lot of potential there.

A lot has happened in 2017, and it can be a bit overwhelming to think about. We all like to joke about how quickly things change in frontend engineering, and for the last few years that has probably been true.

At this risk of sounding cliché, I’m here to tell you that this time it’s different.

Frontend trends are starting to stabilize — popular libraries have largely gotten more popular instead of being disrupted by competitors — and web development is starting to look pretty awesome.

In this post, I’ll summarize some of the important things that happened this year in the frontend ecosystem with an eye toward big-picture trends.

https://blog.logrocket.com/frontend-in-2017-the-important-parts-4548d085977f

Read more

Beautiful, organized results in PHPUnit, where have you been all my life?
Composer-install this bad boy, add one line to phpunit.xml, and enjoy the view. ????https://t.co/JJi4tEhWWo pic.twitter.com/4pndct3iZk

— Keith Damiani (@keithdamiani) December 21, 2017

Read more [twitter.com]

Marcel Pociot, author of BotMan, used GitHub and Google BigQuery to look up some interesting numbers about the PHP repos in 2017.

It's this time of the year again - the end of the year is coming up fast, so why not step back and take a look at what we, as a PHP community, have achieved this year?

For these statistics, I used the free GitHub Archive data in combination with Google BigQuery, which lets you process 1TB of data per month free of charge.

So let's take a look at some numbers.

http://marcelpociot.de/blog/2017-12-21-a-php-year-in-review

My team is mentioned in the article too. Pretty proud of this!

As you can see, Spatie - a company doing a ton of open source projects - is on this list 16 times. Well done ???? !

Read more

In an older, but still relevant, post on Medium John Saito demonstrates the effect of different capitalizations.

Can you spot the differences with the messages above? The left side has a few more capital letters than the right side. Big O, little o. Who cares, right?

Well, if you write for an app or website, you should care. A little thing like capitalization can actually be a big deal. Capitalization affects readability, comprehension, and usability. It even impacts how people view your brand.

We’ll get to the juicy stuff in a bit, but first, let’s start with a little more background about capitalization.

https://medium.com/@jsaito/making-a-case-for-letter-case-19d09f653c98

Read more

In an absolutely fantastic post Caleb Porzio, engineer at Tighten Co., goes through his VS Code setup. He goes over his extensions, key bindings, must-have settings, ...

I’m using VS Code as my primary editor these days and am really digging it. My setup is by no means perfect, but I've made lots of little tweaks along the way that you may benefit from. I've set up these nifty categories, so feel free to jump around and try stuff out as you go, or come back later and use it as a reference.

http://calebporzio.com/my-vs-code-setup-2/

I've made the switch from PhpStorm to VS Code a couple of weeks ago and have been using it ever since. I like the speed improvements over PhpStorm, the zen feel, the xdebug experience, ... It just feels lighter (and I mean that in a good way) compared to PhpStorm.

If you want to give VS Code a shot too, go watch the free Visual Studio Code for PHP developers course on Laracasts.

Read more