On the Cloudways blog Saquib Rizwan has continued the series showing how to use Laravel to build out an application the performs various kinds of notifications. In this latest article Saquib

In my previous articles, I helped you create a Laravel email sending system and a Contact Us form.

In this article, I will highlight another amazing feature of Laravel through a very basic Laravel notification system. Using this system, I will send a notification to the user by sending them an email and integrate Slack to setup the system for sending notifications on a Slack channel.

They start with setting up a new Laravel application, creating a "users" table and setting up the database. These instructions are for the Cloudways service but they give you an idea of what needs to be set up at least. Next is the code to set up the User model and to create a new notification for a "visit" to the page. First up is the email notification then comes the Slack notifications. Both use built-in functionality with the "Notifications" package in the framework to make the sending work.

Lorna Mitchell has a quick post to her site sharing a method she uses for handling incoming web hooks requests in PHP and the process her code usually uses for parsing the incoming message.

An increasing number of applications now offer webhooks as an integration, often in addition to an API. The classic example, familiar to most developers, is the GitHub webhooks which can notify your other systems such as CI tooling that a new commit has been added to a branch.

[...] Whether it's your source control, updates from your IoT sensors, or an event coming from another component in your application, I have some Opinions (TM) about handling webhooks, so I thought I'd write them down and include some code as well, since I think this is an area that many applications will need to work with.

She talks about the receive/respond workflow she recommends: immediately storing and acknowledge the data and then responding out of band (asynchronously). She includes a bit of example code that reads in the raw input from the incoming message, saves it and then responds back with a 200 response code back to the waiting service. She then talks about the out-of-band processing the message could use, evaluating the contents and acting on them as a result.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has written up a post that talks about why a string is called a "string" going back through the history of the term and discovering its origins.

Why is a string called a string? Have you ever given this some thought? We never use such a word in contexts other than programming for a set of letters sticking together, and yet – in programming it’s as pervasive as the word “variable”. Why is that, and where does it come from?

To find out, we have to tackle some related terms first. History lesson time!

He starts with these related terms including "font", "uppercase" and "lowercase". He talks about the printing process and how the "stringing together" of the series of characters might have been how customers using the press were charged. He then shifts over to the academic world for background there relating to a series of numbers and letters used in decision problems. The term caught on and showed up in several other academic papers over the years ending up eventually in programming language definitions and examples.

Matt Stauffer has a new post to his site sharing some of the new features and updates to Laravel that were announced at Laracon US 2017. This is the second post in his series covering what's new in Laravel 5.5.

He was updating the post as the items were announced (live-blogging) and now the post has the complete list:

• Frontend presets
• New routing options
• Blade::if
• Renderable mailable
• Renderable Exceptions
• Responsable interface
• One-off Notifications
• Validation improvements
• TrustedProxy package brought internally
• Migrate:fresh
• New database migration trait
• WithoutExceptionHandling middleware
• Dusk improvements
• Package auto-discovery
• Vendor:publish menu
• Auto-registered console commands
• Job chaining
• Better missing model handling in jobs

As you can see the list is quite long and filled with both updates to current functionality and with new features. Check out the full post for information on each - some come with descriptions and other with commands/code to show them in action.

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

• Symfony Blog: Introducing the new Symfony Documentation

• Master Zend Framework: Can You Create Apps in Zend Expressive as Easily as With Laravel?
• IBM Developer Blog: Get Started With CouchDB Using PHP and Guzzle
• Chris Tankersley: My Docker Setup
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Can We Use Laravel to Build a Custom Google Drive UI?
• Matt Stauffer: Routing changes in Laravel 5.3
• Evonide.com: How we broke PHP, hacked Pornhub and earned $20,000
• Matt Stauffer: Customizing pagination templates in Laravel 5.3
• Peter Petermann: Composer – What You Should Know
• CloudWays Blog: Josh Lockhart Discusses Slim Framework And Photography
• Laravel News: Taylor Otwell - Community Experiences Contributing To Laravel
• Peter Steenbergen: How to use PHP solarium in a Laravel project
• Freek Van der Herten: Validating SSL certificates with PHP
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Hassle-Free Filesystem Operations during Testing? Yes Please!
• Matt Stauffer: Image dimension validation rules in Laravel 5.3
• Laravel News: Laracon US Day 2 Live Blog
• Laravel News: Laracon Live Blog Day 1
• SitePoint PHP Blog: Can We Have Static Types in PHP without PHP 7 or HHVM?
• Loïc Faugeron: Mars Rover, Event Sourcing package
• Joseph Silber: The new Closure::fromCallable() in PHP 7.1
• TutsPlus.com: New Features in Laravel 5.2
• Symfony Finland: Symfony2 turns five, Symfony 3.2 continues the momentum
• Alejandro Celaya: Creating a content-based Error Handler for Zend Expressive
• Laravel News Podcast: LN 22: The Laracon Interview Episode
• Voices of the ElePHPant: Interview with Steve Grunwell

On the TutsPlus.com site there's a tutorial recently posted sharing the basics of middleware in Laravel applications - reusable pieces of code that operate on the request and response during the execution of your code.

In this article, we'll dive deep into the Laravel framework to understand the concept of middleware. The first half of the article begins with an introduction to middleware and what it's actually used for.

As we move on, we'll cover how to create custom middleware in a Laravel application. After creation of your custom middleware, we'll explore the options available to register it with Laravel so that it could be actually invoked during the request processing flow.

The tutorial starts by explaining what middleware is and how it functions in the flow of the Laravel application (as well as possible uses). It then starts in on the creation of custom middleware designed to redirect mobile users to the "mobile site" for the service. With the test for that in place the post then shows how to apply the middleware to the application on a route.

On the Master Zend Framework site Matthew Setter has written up a tutorial showing you how to create a Zend Expressive module to help organize your application and keep related files all in one place.

I've been reflecting recently on the things that I commonly have to do when I begin building Zend Expressive applications. Of the list that I created, I found that one of the most common — and uninteresting — of them is setting up the rendering of static page content. [...] To solve this, I've usually manually created modules to handle the rendering of static page content. These module's usually had little more than a PageAction class that returned an HtmlResponse object, whose body was a rendered template file.

[...] If you're in a similar position to where I was and want to collate the logic into a reusable module, then follow along with me in this tutorial I'm going to step you through how to create a module which you can reuse across any Zend Expressive project.

He starts by briefly describing a "module" in the context of a Zend Expressive application and how they relate (or don't) to the modules in Zend Framework v2. He then starts in on the module creation, showing how to set up the environment, change the Composer configuration to autoload correctly and describes what the end result should look like. From there the tutorial starts on the code required for the classes covering the basics of the class, exception handling, configuration and the creation of a factory to make a module instance.

In a post to the bitExpert.de site Stephan Hochdörfer explains why he thinks that using code over configuration in a DI container is a better approach than static configuration definitions.

In my recent talk on introducing Disco - the DI container with the damn coolest name(tm) - I talk about why I believe that using XML or any other non-code configuration (YAML, JSON, ...) is not a good idea. This stirred some twitter discussion recently which led to this blog post.

Just for the record, for a very long time I was part of the XML camp - just browse my collection of old talks to see for yourself. I praised XML a lot as being the only true DI configuration format.

He then goes through some of the main issues he sees with using something like XML for the dependency container's configuration:

• An XML editor won't give you code-completion for PHP classes or methods.
• Refactoring won't work properly in an XML configuration file.
• An XML editor is not capable of doing proper type checks.
• XML is just too verbose.

For each item he provides a brief explanation and an example of XML where it helps to illustrate the point.

On the Laravel News site today they have a post announcing a new member of the Laravel family that was announced at the current Laracon conference: Laravel Horizon.

The moment everyone in the Laravel community has been waiting for has finally arrived! Laravel Horizon is software to “supercharge your queues with a beautiful dashboard and code-driven configuration.”

[...] Laravel Horizon is designed to make it easy monitor your queues from a web interface and receive notifications when things go wrong.

They list out some of the key features including auto-balancing, code-driven configuration, queue monitoring and a notification system. They briefly describe each of these features and what they see as the "most awesome part" - that the entire thing is open source and 100% free.

Recent posts from the PHP Quickfix site:

• exakat 0.12.4 review - Exakat
  #exacat, #release, #scanner, #v0.12.4

• Symfony Core Team Updates (Symfony Blog)
  #symfony, #core, #team.update
• GitHub - awesomite/chariot: Just another routing library
  #routing, #library, #humanfriendly
• Detecting Problems With -fsanitize — Derick Rethans
  #fsanitize, #mongodb, #timelib
• Laravel v5.4.29 is Released with Two New Blade Directives - Laravel News
  #laravel, #blade, #directive, #addition