PHP

Cutting through the static

Submitted by Larry on 29 November 2023 - 4:28pm

Static methods and properties have a storied and controversial history in PHP. Some love them, some hate them, some love having something to fight about (naturally).

In practice, I find them useful in very narrow situations. They're not common, but they do exist. Today, I want to go over some guidelines on when PHP developers should, and shouldn't, use statics.

In full transparency, I will say that the views expressed here are not universal within the PHP community. They do, however, represent what I believe to be the substantial majority opinion, especially among those who are well-versed in automated testing.

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Announcing Crell/Serde 1.0.0

Submitted by Larry on 9 November 2023 - 7:39pm

I am pleased to announce that the trio of libraries I built while at TYPO3 have now reached a fully stable release. In particular, Crell/Serde is now the most robust, powerful, and performant serialization library available for PHP today!

Serde is inspired by the Rust library of the same name, and driven almost entirely by PHP Attributes, with entirely pure-function object-oriented code. It's easy to configure, easy to use, and rock solid.

Technical debt is over-used

Submitted by Larry on 22 May 2023 - 6:26pm

The term "technical debt" gets thrown around a lot. Way too much, in fact. Part of that is because it has become a euphemism for "code I don't like" or "code that predates me." While there are reasons to dislike such code (both good and bad), that's not what the term "technical debt" was invented to refer to.

So what does it mean? There's several different kinds of "problematic code," all of which come from different places.

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Using PSR-3 placeholders properly

Submitted by Larry on 26 February 2023 - 10:26am

In the last 2 years or so, I've run into a number of projects that claim to use the PSR-3 logging standard as published by the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG, or just FIG). Unfortunately, it's quite clear that those responsible for the project have not understood PSR-3 and how it is intended to work. This frustrates me greatly, as PSR-3's design addresses a number of issues that these projects are not benefiting from, and it reduces interoperability between projects (which was the whole point in the first place).

Rather than just rant angrily online (fun as it is, it doesn't actually accomplish anything), many of my PHP community colleagues encouraged me to blog about using PSR-3 properly. So, here we are.

Mastobot: For your Fediverse PHP posting needs

Submitted by Larry on 23 January 2023 - 10:13pm

Like much of the world I've been working to migrate off of Twitter to Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse. Along with a new network is the need for new automation tools, and I've taken this opportunity to scratch my own itch and finally build an auto-posting bot for my own needs. And it is, of course, available as Free Software.

Announcing Mastobot! Your PHP-based Mastodon auto-poster.

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Running Lando on GitHub Actions

Submitted by Larry on 30 December 2022 - 4:33pm

At the $dayjob, I am working to have us adopt Lando as a development tool. Lando is a docker-compose abstraction layer that simplifies building standard development environments, such as a bog-standard LAMP stack, and is way easier than raw docker-compose for those cases.

I also wanted to be able to generate test coverage information as part of our Pull Request process. To be clear, test coverage is not the end-all, be-all of good tests, but it is still a useful metric, and can be a useful gate if used properly. Of course, generating test coverage requires running tests; and while most tests should be unit tests that do not require any services, not all are or can be, and many frameworks don't make true unit tests as easy as they should. (cough) So that means building a full dev environment to run tests. There's various tools for that, but I wanted to use GitHub Actions.

Upgrading PHP upgrades

Submitted by Larry on 9 December 2022 - 3:50pm

PHP 8.2 was released on 8 December, to much fanfare. And, as always, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the PHP language is evolving too quickly and breaking everyone's code. More specifically, it was the earlier, twin announcement that PHP 7.4 reached end-of-life on 28 November, as that has, somehow, forced everyone to suddenly rewrite their entire code base in a hurry.

And... while I sympathize with some of the complaints, I am once again left wondering "how?"

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Extrinsic sorting: A benchmark

Submitted by admin on 25 September 2022 - 10:10am

Sorting algorithms are generally old hat to most programmers. They've either analyzed them to death in class, already written many of them, or work in a language where one is provided and they don't need to think about it. Or all three.

For PHP developers, we have a suite of sorting tools available to us: sort(), usort(), ksort(), uasort(), and various other letter combinations. All use Quick Sort internally, which is generally the best performing single-threaded option. Most importantly, many of them let us provide a custom comparison function to use when determining which of two values is larger or smaller.

On the use of Enums

Submitted by Larry on 27 June 2022 - 10:38am

Enumerations are a feature of many programming languages. However, we should perhaps say "many languages have a feature called enumerations." What that means in practice has a lot of language-specific semantic nuance, and trying to use the feature of one language as though it were the feature of another language can lead to all kinds of broken code. (That's true of most language features.)

So how are Enumerations best used in PHP, specifically? Let's have a look at some examples, and see where they should, and shouldn't, be used.

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