React php is worth checking out. Async stuff like websockets and non blocking redis subscriptions.
What is React PHP?
https://reactphp.org/ probably
PHP 8
61–70 of 273 posts
Re: PHP 8
#62How should one start learning with PHP these days? My experience: hacked together a few PHP scripts over the years to notify me of a website change (5 minute cron job). Before that, I was a very good beginner with VB6 back in highschool. There are a couple of ambitious database-driven website projects I would like to create, but I don't know where to start. I like the KISS philosophy, and I think PHP and MySQL would…
Modern PHPs shining light is the Laravel framework and the ecosystem built up around it. If you're going to start a database-driven website projects in PHP there really isn't a good reason to not use and learn Laravel (or Lumen if you want something more lightweight).
That being said if you're not tied to PHP I'm not sure I'd necessarily recommend it. The obvious alternatives worth looking into are Ruby on Rails or Python with Flask or Django.
Re: PHP 8
#63Php was my first language I learned 15 years ago. On that way I really started to hate it because of all it's quirks. Many of those have been fixed and nowadays I really enjoy it again and it's my goto language for any web project. It really hits a pragmatic sweetspot. It's really easy to deploy and frameworks like symfony give you all the power like rails but without the magic.
Same here, I started at the same time also with PHP. But I never found back to PHP after switching to JavaScript in 2011. If something new comes out it usually runs JS.
One nice thing about php compared to Js is that you are not allowed to write async code. (except you use some extensions) So everything is simpler by design.
Re: PHP 8
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, I started at the same time also with PHP. But I never found back to PHP after switching to JavaScript in 2011. If something new comes out it usually runs JS.
One nice thing about php compared to Js is that you are not allowed to write async code. (except you use some extensions) So everything is simpler by design.
True.
On the other hand, most systems I worked with were async, so they fit really well into the JS model of programming.
Re: PHP 8
#65 0 == 'foobar' // false
Why do the conversion at all? Why couldn't this just be an error? I realise there is also `===` the strict comparison that typechecks arguments, but why not make that the default?
Re: PHP 8
#66How should one start learning with PHP these days? My experience: hacked together a few PHP scripts over the years to notify me of a website change (5 minute cron job). Before that, I was a very good beginner with VB6 back in highschool. There are a couple of ambitious database-driven website projects I would like to create, but I don't know where to start. I like the KISS philosophy, and I think PHP and MySQL would…
Every language I think about is better than PHP (Javascript, Python, Ruby). Personally I will choose Javascript / Node JS platform to start with.
Re: PHP 8
#67Finally, after all these years, Named Arguments! https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-named-arguments
Look, 10 years ago I tried — really tried — to get the PHP team to adopt it. I am glad they finally came around:
https://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg4587...
Excerpt of the proposal:
So why am I saying all of this? Well, PHP up until 4 had a reputation for lots of bad coding style, spaghetti code, etc. With PHP 5 and better OOP, this reputation has lessened, especially with the great libraries out there (Zend Framework, Kohana, symfony, etc.) But there is still a problem. We (or at least I) would want PHP 6's reputation to be even better, and the reputation is largely based on how maintainable and cost-effective the code is, which is written by programmers actually using PHP. Blaming newbie programmers is one thing, and may even have some truth to it (PHP is simple - thus attracts newbies) but it's always good for a language to steer you in the right direction by default, and make it easier to write maintainable code.
PHP has a great opportunity to do this, by implementing a very simple change, turning all current PHP 5 code, and all code that will be written in the future, into maintainable code. Moreover, it won't break any existing code, like some other additions to PHP 6 might do. This one simple tweak will make PHP 6 code much more reusable and maintainable, just like namespace support will potentially make future PHP code more interoperable without having to write Artificial_Namespace_Class, like ZF and PEAR do.
Re: PHP 8
#68Does PHP still has that weird flow where each request is its own process? afair PHP never had an http server baked in, I remember nginx with php etc ...
Yes, each request is handled by its own process. This might sound weird if you're used to other languages, but it's how every language used to work in the good ol' CGI days. PHP doesn't break backward compatibility easily, and I don't think it will ever break this one. Besides, once you get the hang of it, PHP's execution model is highly intuitive and beginner-friendly. You simply don't have to worry about a whole class of concurrency-related problems. Those problems are solved in C, not PHP.
Nowadays everyone uses PHP-FPM (again, written in C) which manages a pool of processes. Once a process is done serving a request, it is cleaned up and becomes available for serving another request. You can tweak the number of processes to control how much concurrency you want, or leave it to PHP-FPM to decide on its own. The process pool is much more efficient than the CGI method of setting up and tearing down a process every time, while preserving much of the conceptual simplicity.
PHP has had a built-in HTTP server since 5.4, but few people use it in production because PHP-FPM is so stable and performant.
Re: PHP 8
#69I wonder what makes the Symfony Demo App not being faster with the JIT compiler (as shown on https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php and https://susi.dev/php8-benchmark-jit-symfony).
Maybe because Symfony already caches things very efficiently/cleverly with OPCache?
Re: PHP 8
#70I got spoiled by PHP as my first language. It was so easy to get going. I was surprised to learn that other languages didn't work the same way, when integrating into a web server. Also it has always been rock solid. A bug in my code brought down only that request for that user, totally did not affect or even slow down responses to other users.
People have attacked its syntax forever. I avoided the worst of it by learning PHP around version 4, when it was moving away from magic quotes and register globals --- and I also had the sense to see that those were unwanted anyway. But I think the main reason that PHP hasn't bothered me is that I try to use it as little as possible. Let me explain.
I consider PHP a glue language, between my database and the user's browser. When you use a lot of glue, things get messy. I try to push things out of the middle layer to the edges, if they will fit. So I try to do a lot of data preparation in the database, through fancy queries, so that the data is mostly ready for the HTML template by the time it is received by PHP. It helps that my database is Postgres. For authentication, I try to lean on Apache, so that PHP would just have to consult the CGI variable REMOTE_USER. So PHP acts sort of like an extension language to Apache (even when I'm using PHP-FPM instead of mod_php). It takes the data from the database and wraps it in HTML. It takes the form submission from the user and hands it to the database (and most server-side data validation is in the database).
The people attacking its syntax sound like they are writing an awful lot of PHP per app. And maybe for some things you have to, but not for CRUD apps, I think. I try to keep the middle layer as thin as possible, and I would do that whether it was PHP, Python, or Perl.