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    Category: php

  1. PHP Learning Path from O'Reilly

    01 October 2015

    I'm very excited to announce that some of my content is featured in the PHP Learning Path from O'Reilly. The Learning Paths are a good way to buy a bundle of content from different people on related topics, and the introductory pricing is always a good deal! Their newest offering …

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  2. New in PHP 7: null coalesce operator

    30 September 2015

    Not the catchiest name for an operator, but PHP 7 brings in the rather handy null coalesce so I thought I'd share an example.

    In PHP 5, we already have a ternary operator, which tests a value, and then returns the second element if that returns true and the third if it doesn't:

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  3. Joind.in at the PHPNW Hackathon

    25 September 2015

    image1It's PHPNW time again, and that means hackathon! This conference has a strong tradition of hands-on building as well as the usual talks you'd expect to see, and next week will be no exception to that as there's a hackathon on Friday night before the main conference on Saturday and Sunday. If you're at the event then make sure you sign up for your hackathon ticket, it's always a good experience.

    Joind.in is one of the featured projects and I'm one of the maintainers, so I'll be at the hackathon and I'm hoping that we'll get quite a few things done during the evening. Joind.in is an ideal project for events like this since it's easy to get started with it, and we have a development platform virtual machine (that we'll have already downloaded onto USB sticks so no conference wifi delay) so you can be up and running in no time. We also have a specific label on our bug tracker for items that we think are manageable for people who don't already know the system, so chances are that if you want to, you'll be able to contribute to an open source project with something finished by the end of the night.

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  4. SOAPFault When Switching PHP Versions

    04 August 2015

    I'm working on an update to my PHP Web Services book and with PHP 7 likely to release before the book even makes it into print, I'm testing all my example code across PHP 5.6 and PHP 7 ... which today gave me a weird problem with a very, very simple SOAP example.

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  5. Test Your PHP Application on PHP 7

    24 July 2015

    PHP 7 is coming, which is nice, but what does it mean for the majority of PHP developers? PHP as a community is notoriously slow in adoption, some of us are still waiting for 2012's new shiny to be available as standard on our hosting platforms. However with the performance benefits and a few really nice new features, PHP 7 is well worth everyone's attention, and it's actually quite easy to get started so here's my quick howto.

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  6. New Screencast Series: Git Fundamentals

    22 July 2015

    git-fundamentals-screencastimage1If you're a web developer looking to improve your git skills, then I have just the thing for you. I love it when a project is finished and "out there" and I'm pleased to announce that my new screencast course Git Fundamentals For Web Developers is now available. It's mostly PHP but you'll find Python and Node examples in there as well just to show off some of the tricks that work best for different disciplines. The course is structured around specific tasks or problems that we face in creating and deploying web applications, and my best advice on how to solve them. Mostly, I just want you to be able to be awesome at what you do already without your source control tool getting in the way :)

    Edit: If you're reading this before July 25th 2015, use code CFSCON5 to get a massive 50% off!

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  7. PHP 7 Benchmarks

    06 July 2015

    If you know anything at all about PHP7, you probably know it's fast. But did you know how fast? The alpha is out and looks very robust, so I decided I would create a new set of benchmarks to include it. Graphs first, disclaimers later :)

    This graph shows the time it takes for each version of PHP to perform the same task, on average, with oldest PHP on the left and moving forward in time.

    php-70-alpha-benchmarks

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  8. PHP 5.4 and Short Tags

    03 July 2015

    PHP 5.4 isn't exactly new; in fact the opposite is true! PHP 5.4 is end of life, but as our adoption rates show, as a community, PHP people aren't especially good at upgrading! I'm getting lots of questions now because some of the hosting providers, notably including Acquia's …

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  9. Recover Bitly Bundle Data

    26 May 2015

    For some years I've been creating a bundle of links covering articles I recommend for various topics in the Zend Certified Engineer Exam (if you can here looking for the bundle itself, it's at {filename}/zce-links-collection.rst). This was done using bitly's bundles feature, which I thought was a great way to share links. In fact I had 10-15 bundles that I had created from collating all the links in a particular training course or talk, so that people didn't have to try to write down URLs as I went along. Unfortunately they sunset their bundles and then removed them completely, and I missed the announcement (it all happened quite quickly, they'd seen some abuse of the feature, it's free, all totally reasonable) BUT they also didn't respond to my support questions about how to recover the data.

    It turns out, it's an undocumented feature on their API, so here is everything I know about recovering your bundle data, including the script I used to rescue my own data.

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  10. PHP7: Easiest Upgrade Yet

    19 May 2015

    With PHP7 looking increasingly stable (relatively speaking, it's still pre-alpha so it's VERY early days and anything could happen!), and work going well on the GoPHP7-ext project to get extensions converted, I have been thinking about the migration guides we'll need to help people upgrade their existing applications. To this end, I took the simplest project I currently have (http://api.joind.in) and gave it a whirl on PHP7, using Rasmus' PHP7 dev box. The result:

    Total lines of code change needed to make the @joindin API work on PHP7: zero

    — Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane) May 14, 2015

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  11. PHP Quick Stack Trace in Exception Handler

    07 April 2015

    PHP and frameworks built from it have many great tools to assist with debugging (I particularly like XDebug) but sometimes you can find yourself in a situation where the "helper" features aren't all that much help ... in my case this was a framework totally determined to output HTML from my commandline script and to only show me 5 lines of stack trace, which wasn't enough for my complex application. I had to look up how to generate a nice stack trace inside an exception handler so here it is in case I want it again some time (future me, you're welcome!)

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  12. ZCE Preparation Pack

    02 February 2015

    tl;dr version: the ZCE Preparation Pack is now available from Leanpub https://leanpub.com/zce costing $30.

    I've been running a preparation course for the Zend Certified Engineer exam for many years now.  Once upon a time it was possible to buy a pack of sample exams and I …

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