Greetings everyone,

It’s been a while since the PHP Annotated Monthly was online, so hopefully we are back on track. With Brent joining the PhpStorm team we want to experiment with some new things, so stay tuned!

In this edition, we’ll catch up on the most interesting things that have happened in the PHP world over the last couple of months. As always, it includes curated news, articles, tools, and videos.

News

• PHP 7.4.29, PHP 8.1.5, and PHP 8.0.18
  These are security releases for Windows users, due to updates of built-in dependencies. For non-Windows users, they are just regular bug-fix updates.For PHP 7.3, updates are no longer released, even for security problems. If you are still using PHP 7.3 or PHP 5.x versions, consider updating as soon as possible.

  The Symfony team has raised its minimum required PHP version to 8.1 in the upcoming Symfony 6.1 release. The same shift was made for Drupal 10 and Laravel 10.

  Also, the recently released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS comes with PHP 8.1 preinstalled.

• Updates from the PHP Foundation
• Developer Ecosystem Survey 2022
  The annual survey from JetBrains is now open and, of course, there is a section about PHP. This is what the results from last year look like. Take the survey for a chance to win one of the prizes!
• News from PHP-FIG
• PhpStorm 2022.1 released
  It comes with improvements for Blade, WordPress, ArrayShape annotations, and many more. Check out a short What’s New video or read the blog post for the full story.
• Composer 2.3 Release
  This release brings small improvements for users and a modernized internal codebase.

  There was also a vulnerability discovered recently – CVE-2022-24828: Composer Command Injection. An attacker controlling a Git or Mercurial repository explicitly listed by URL in composer.json could use specially crafted branch names to execute commands on the machine running the composer update.

  Make sure your Composer is up-to-date by running composer self-update.

• Craft CMS 4
  A major update of the popular open-source CMS was released.

PHP Core

Most of the Core news is covered in detail in the PHP Roundup series from the PHP Foundation, so we’ll only mention them briefly.

• CanIPHP.com – It’s like caniuse.com, but for PHP features.
• clue/stream-filter – A simple and modern approach to stream filtering in PHP. You can do some crazy stuff with stream filters in PHP, but also practical things, too.
• sfx101/deck – A GUI tool for quick spin-up and configuration of local web development environments, which could be useful for PHP newcomers.
• marijnvanwezel/try – A simple CLI tool to try Composer packages with a single command. Just install it and run: try %vendor%/%package%.
• frodeborli/moebius – Golang-like coroutines for PHP versions 8.1 or above. The author used his own event-loop implementation, and even a custom testing framework.
• Crell/AttributeUtils — Utilities to help ease the parsing and managing of attributes. You might be also interested in koriym/Koriym.Attributes, which can read both doctrine/annotations and PHP 8 attributes with a doctrine annotation interface.
• spatie/visit – A CLI HTTP client that shows responses of any URL in a beautiful way.
• laravel/valet – A lightweight local dev environment for Mac. No Docker or VirtualBox, just native Nginx and PHP. It can be used for any projects, not only Laravel, and since v3 you can use different PHP versions for each folder (project).
• roach-php/core – The complete web scraping toolkit for PHP.
• PHPStan 1.6.0 – Released with support for conditional return types and integer masks.
• flow-php/etl – An ETL (Extract Transform Load) data processing library for PHP with support for async processing via ReactPHP or Amphp.
• igorhrcek/wp-cli-secure-command – One CLI command to secure your WordPress installation.
• williarin/wordpress-interop – A package based on Doctrine/DBAL for easier access to the WordPress database from other PHP applications.
• sj-i/php-profiler – A sampling profiler for PHP implemented in pure PHP (FFI). You can generate flame diagrams, run trace output in top-like mode, and more.
• mrsuh/php-var-sizeof – A function to get the memory size for any variable that promises to be more accurate compared to memory_get_usage(). Requires PHP 7.4 or higher with FFI.
• davidcole1340/ext-php-rs – Bindings for the Zend API to build PHP extensions natively in Rust.
• easysoft/phpmicro – A statically compiled micro PHP interpreter that can be bundled with your CLI tools to distribute them as PHP-agnostic binaries. Looking forward to Marcel Pociot automating the process!

Symfony

Laravel

Yii

Misc

• Comprehensive posts about Docker for PHP developers by Pascal Landau: Docker from scratch for PHP 8.1 Applications in 2022, PhpStorm, Docker and Xdebug 3 on PHP 8.1, and more on his website.
• Posts on naming constructors by Andreas Möller and by Stefan Priebsch.
• How the Middleware Pattern works and can easily be applied in PHP.
• How To Mock Functions That Have External HTTP Requests.
• Writing Readable PHP – A paid course by Freek Van der Herten and Christoph Rumpel with bite size tips that make your code a joy to read for you, your coworkers, and your future self.
• PHP Tricks: Multi-value match() — Did you know you can compare multiple values in a single match expression? Like this:

  function mayFriend(User $u1, User $u2, Group $group): FriendPermission
  {
      return match ([$u1->inGroup($group), $u2->inGroup($group)]) {
          [true, true] => FriendPermission::Allow,
          [true, false] => FriendPermission::WithApproval,
          [false, true] => FriendPermission::WithApproval,
          [false, false] => FriendPermission::Deny,
      };
  }
  

• Interfaces are not class templates.
• Speeding up array_merge().
• All the Dynamic Syntaxes in PHP – Good source for interview questions?
• Solving Open Source Supply Chain Security for the PHP Ecosystem – An interesting post about the initiatives of the folks at Paragon IE. They are now working on a tool called Gossamer to securely update apps and dependencies. Previously, they introduced libsodium to the PHP core, created Paseto, a safer alternative to JWT, and developed other tools.
• Service locator: an anti-pattern.
• ? Xdebug 3: Debugging Unit Tests with PhpStorm.
• ? Learn PHP The Right Way – Full PHP course in 88 videos for free.

Generics

PHP has seen a lot of generics-related activity lately, so we gave them their own section in this post.

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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