In a new post to his site Ben Ramsey finally gets around to posting about a library of his that's not only already widely used but has already been around for a few years - his ramsey/uuid library for generating UUIDs.

It seems quite absurd for me to introduce ramsey/uuid, a library that saw its 1.0.0 release on July 19, 2012, and is now at version 3.4.1, having had 35 releases since its first, but what’s even more ludicrous is that I haven’t once blogged about this library. I mention it only in passing in my “Dates Are Hard” post. So, allow me to introduce you to perhaps a familiar face, an old friend, the ramsey/uuid library for PHP.

He starts with some of the original beginnings of the language back when Composer usage was just first taking off. He'd found other UUID implementations in PHP but none that rivaled the features found in library for other languages. He then briefly explains what a UUID is and what the RFC defines them as. He talks about the name change on the package (from the "Rhumsaa" namespace to "Ramsey") and an issue he received where UUIDs were colliding...as well as how he corrected it. He wraps up the post looking at some of what's coming for the library and what kind of improvements he'll be making in v3.4.1 and beyond.