PHP7

I am all for testing. Whether you always write unit tests in advance as Test Driven Development (TDD) advocates call for, write them after, write them alongside, a little of each, I don't care. Tests are your friend. You want tests, and specifically you want good tests.

There's a lot of opinions on what constitutes a "good" test, of course, and much is subjective to the type of code you're working on. However, since the release of PHP 7 I've found that while writing tests... I am never using a mocking library. In fact, I'm going to go as far and say that

You should never use a mocking library in PHP 7.

Before all of you gasp, clutch your pearls, and send ninja hit squads after me, let me justify that position.

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One reason to follow development mailing lists is you sometimes pick up on some very neat tricks. Here's one that I spotted on the PHP Internals list recently to simplify array iteration in PHP 7.

The team over at thePHP.cc recently published an ebook entitled PHP 7 Explained, "Everything you need to know about the next generation."

A few weeks back, I received an email from them stating "As a token of our appreciation for your involvement in the PHP community we would like to gift you a copy of our eBook." Yay, free stuff! Since I'd gotten it free, and it's of timely use to the PHP world, I decided to publish a formal review.

Disclaimer: I was not asked to write a review, although the authors did ask for feedback. The only compensation I receive for this review is the book itself, which was sent without the expectation of a review. Also to the authors, yes feel free to quote portions of this review on the books site as long as it's credited.

OK, well, it took a while, but I've finally gotten my blog off of Drupal 6. :-) Welcome to the new and improved Garfieldtech.com! My blog is unsurprisingly rather bland, as it's, well, a blog. That made updating to Drupal 8.2 using the Drupal migrate module reasonably easy. It wasn't hiccup free, and a few not-yet-updated modules got lost along the way, but it wasn't an epic struggle, either. There were only two major hiccups: