The PHP team is pleased to announce the second testing release of PHP 8.0.0, Alpha 2. This continues the PHP 8.0 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki. For source downloads of PHP 8.0.0 Alpha 2 please visit the download page.Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system.Please DO NOT use this version in production, it is an early test version. For more information on the new features and other changes, you can read the NEWS file, or the UPGRADING file for a complete list of upgrading notes. These files can also be found in the release archive. The next release will be Alpha 3, planned for 23 Jul 2020.The signatures for the release can be found in the manifest or on the QA site.Thank you for helping us make PHP better.

[This post is heavily inspired by Christopher Skene’s 2017 “What is best practice in web application deployment.” Three years is a long time for best practices in devops land, however, so it’s time to again update our thinking.] “Best practices” are often talked about in the tech world, but rarely is it acknowledged that they can and do change over time. All “best practices” are nothing more than a distillation of the challenges of a given situation to a usually optimal set of trade-offs.

In our guide to PHP 5.6, we look at release and EOL dates, notable features, performance comparisons, and security vulnerabilities.

100% done

I’m happy to announce that my latest book “Advanced Web Application Architecture” is now complete.
With ~390 pages it has become a well-rounded book full of useful design patterns and architectural principles built around the notion of object-pure code, that will help you create decoupled applications that are testable by definition, and support a domain-first approach to software development.

Use this link to get 10% off the price: https://leanpub.com/web-application-architecture/c/RELEASE_DAY

“This book helped me to improve myself and I recommend it to any developer who wants to learn how to solve problems in a better way.” — Iosif Chiriluta

“Matthias has a knack for distilling decades of experience into simplified rules of thumb. Explained with practical examples, the rules in this book are accessible to developers of any level of experience. I expect to recommend this book for many years to come.” — Ramon de la Fuente

A second round of book club sessions

In the past few months we’ve been having some really interesting sessions with early-access readers of the book.
With the book fully finished, I decided to plan another round of sessions starting in September.
To join these sessions make sure to select the package “The Book + 6 Book club sessions” when buying your copy of the book.

“This book is a most welcome simplification of modern web application architecture concepts, making the topic accessible for a wide audience. By guiding the reader through classic web application scenarios and applying a couple of simple rules and principles while staying very pragmatic, the author achieves what most others don’t – making the core idea so simple that it is near impossible for the reader to get it wrong. The only architecture book I would recommend even to my junior colleagues.” — Ondřej Bouda

Print edition

For those who prefer a paper book there’s also a print edition available via Lulu.
This includes a free copy of the e-book.
You’ll find instructions for obtaining it inside the book.

The making of

Back in April 2019 I started working on this project.
It all started with the family visiting friends in France while I stayed at home, alone, with a bunch of post-it’s.

From this first brainstorm session I created a preliminary table of contents:

The rough outline was there, but I started working on the setup first.

So far I’ve only used Leanpub’s Markdown-based publishing process.
They first convert the Markdown manuscript to LaTeX, then to PDF, html, EPUB and MOBI.
I thought it would be nice to have more control over all the build artifacts, so I worked on my own LaTeX-based setup.
This was a silly decision.
I didn’t keep track of all the hours that went into this, but it has probably taken me about 50 hours to get it right.
Of course, I keep running into little things that don’t work.
But I do have a fully automated local book writing process now.
Being able to add all kinds of other generated artifacts is really helpful.
For instance, I can edit the book cover in Gimp and it will be automatically resized for the different e-book formats, and also flattened for the print cover.
The same goes for the diagrams: if I modify them using the Draw.io desktop editor, they will be automatically prepared for inclusion in the manuscript.
Cool!
But also: very costly.

With the technical stuff out of the way, the writing process was great in the beginning, but seemed to last for ages in the end.
I’ve spent a total of 208 hours of actual writing (including writing the code samples and creating the diagrams).
I generally aim to get everything right the first time (of course), but revising

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 962 bytes)

Byte-sized functional programming: Pure functions encourage small code

Larry
6 July 2020 – 5:13pm

Long recognized as the leader in integrated development environment (IDE) for PHP, PHPStorm from JetBrains is a full-featured IDE that can both enhance the development environment as well as reduce the development life-cycle.

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 15109 bytes)

This episode is sponsored by
Ring Central Developers

The post Interview with Nils Adermann and Jordi Boggiano appeared first on Voices of the ElePHPant.