Plans for this period

This sprint was focussed on getting to grips with new developments in PHP. I’ve heard a lot of good things about emerging standards and to having been focussing my study on other topics to I felt now would be a good time to get a handle on what’s been happening.

Activity

My activity around building my skills in PHP was focussed on a few sources:

These, in turn, pointed to other useful resources (which I’ll cover under highlights).

Highlights

There are a few things which really stood out as important from these sources.

Standards

The PHP Framework Interop Group (or PHP-FIG) have established a range of standards to help improve intra-framework consistency and performance. These standards are known as PHP standards recommendations (or PSRs) and cover an increasing range of things:

  • PSR-0 and PSR-4 provide a standard for autoloading classes. Why two? Because PSR-4 is an ‘improved autoloading standard’
  • PSR-1 and PSR-2 cover coding standards and style respectively to two issues which I feel are very important. Note: if you’re using PhpStorm you can easily set it up to auto-format your code to comply with these PSRs

These standards don’t just apply to framework developers, they provide solid guidelines which will improve the code quality and consistency in development teams that adopt them.

Composer and packagist

Together these provide an excellent way of finding, publishing and managing code. Packagist is where you find (or publish) the packages and Composer is how you install and manage them (similar to NPM, Bower and NuGet). I found these both really nice to work with and there are a lot of great packages to choose from, including:

  • League/Csv provides a lovely way to interact with .csv files. This is going to be incredibly handy for a project I’ve got coming up
  • Guzzle is a great HTTP client
  • Monolog is a brilliant logging package which will allow you to send PHP logging information just about anywhere _including via JavaScript to the browser console _

PHP Data Objects (PDO)

Having encountered PDO I can’t imagine using anything else to interact with a database. Here’s why:

  • PDO provides a single interface to many different database management systems
  • Using PDO statements and **bound parameters **allows you to _safely inject foreign input into queries _without worrying about SQL injection
  • It provides a broad range of methods to use when retrieving results (fetch(), fetchAll(), fetchColumn() and fetchObject()) which accept constants that allow you to specify how you want the results. For example, fetch(PDO::FETCH_OBJ) will return an _object _whose properties are database column names

That’s not all

There’s a lot more really good stuff happening in modern PHP, including:

  • New language features include: namespaces (which can be imported and aliased), interfaces, traits (think interface with implementation), generators (simple iterators), closures and anonymous functions (which will be familiar to you if you’re from a JavaScript background)
  • PHPUnit (the unit testing framework for PHP which to having looked into it further to I’m certainly using it routinely from now on)
  • Xdebug for debugging and profiling
  • the Command Line Interface to which provides a really nice way to run scripts without firing up a web server
  • the built-in web server which provides a really nice way to fire up a web server without using Apache

Outcomes

What I’ve learned during these months has significantly changed the way I write PHP, making it more efficient, consistent and generally improved. Well worth the 29 hours effort.

Plans for next sprint

I’ll be kicking off the next sprint on 1 June and will spend the next few days identifying what it’ll cover. I must say, another month or so on modern PHP is very tempting.