The final day of 2016 has come and gone and with it came the end of active support for the PHP 5.6 series of releases. This also marks the end of active support for anything in the PHP 5.x major release and pushing on with PHP 7. In this post to thePHP.cc blog Sebastian Bergmann talks about what this means for you and the tools you use.

The active support by the PHP project for PHP 5.6, the final release series of PHP 5, ends today. What is "active support"? And what does it mean for you? To answer this, you need to understand PHP's release process.

He starts with the release schedule and when it shifted from the "consensus based model" over to an official process, introducing more formality to the whole process (in 2012). He mentions two key terms to the process: "active support" and "security support". PHP 5.6 has moved past active support and is now in the the security support phase with only security fixes to be released from here on out. Sebastian then talks about what this means for your current code and, if you're still running on PHP 5.6, what you should do to come up to speed with PHP 7.x. He lists some of the projects that are moving into the world of PHP 7 only including PhpSpec 4.0, Laravel 5.5 and Symfony 4.

In this new post to his site Freek Van der Herten shares a new package he's worked up to help generate and maintain the status of menus in a Laravel application. While this example is Laravel-centric, there's also a framework-agnostic package that can be used in any application structure too.

Virtually every website displays some sort of menu. Generating html menus might seem simple, but it can become complex very quickly. Not only do you have to render some basic html, but you also have to manage which item is active. If a menu has a submenu you’ll also want the parents of an active item to be active. Sometimes you want to insert some html between menu items.

There are some packages out there that can help generating menus, but most of them have a messy API or have become victims of feature creep. Thanks why we decided to create our own modern menu package that has a beautiful API to work with.

He spends the rest of the post introducing the package, starting with the generation of a basic menu (and something a bit more complex). He also shows the use of the isActive method call to mark something as "active" but the package will handle that automatically for you if you'd like to keep it simple. He ends the post with a listing of the components that make this menu handling work (three of them) and some of the "modern PHP" functionality that they use.

David Sadowski has posted an overview of some of the PHP frameworks out there to help you build REST APIs. Among those mentioned are things like Frapi, Laravel and Slim.

A number of articles on websites strive to give directions which framework(s) should be chosen whereas in fact there is no “one fits all” solutions for different purposes or technologies. Therefore, herewith a compiled list of some most popular and actively developed PHP REST API frameworks worth consideration and further evaluation on your project basis.

For each tool on the list, he includes a brief summary of what they are, some of the features they provide and a link to find out more about them. It's not really so much of a comparison post but more about putting them out there and letting you figure out which is the best.

The devReview.com website has put together The Big List of as many of the PHP frameworks out there they could find:

For the start of a new year, it was time to clean out the list of PHP frameworks. A few have fallen by the wayside, but many new ones have been added. It seems that patterns and MVC is still all the rage, but less are professing to being Rails clones, though the inspiration of convention is still strong. There are a wide variety of framework types. From full stack (cakePHP, Symfony) to components (eZ), a bit of both (Zend) and minimalist (LightVC, TinyMVC, Pluf).

Requirements to be on the list include that the framework must be PHP-based, have a recent code release in the last 12 months, needs to be available in English and not including frameworks that can be considered content systems themselves.

As of the time of this post, there are around 50 active frameworks listed - everything from CakePHP and the Zend Framework out to eZ Components and Prado. Links for each include their project homepage and some reviews the site has done.

In a new post to his blog today, Felix Geisendorfer talks about view coding - specifically working with a menu and determining which element is active.

One of the challenges many of us have faced before and will face in future is building a menu. Now this of course is very simple assuming that we're just shooting for a static <ul> with some <li>'s containing the links. However the tricky part is to figure out what is the active menu item. I had some code doing this in the past but tried out a new flavor of it today which I call the MacGyver menu for CakePHP as it's a little dirty yet powerful and easy to maintain.

In his included code, he creates a simple navigation from an array of titles/links and, with some sorting, a regular expression and a CSS class, the selected item can be highlighted simply.

In a new post to his blog today, Felix Geisendorfer talks about view coding - specifically working with a menu and determining which element is active.

One of the challenges many of us have faced before and will face in future is building a menu. Now this of course is very simple assuming that we're just shooting for a static <ul> with some <li>'s containing the links. However the tricky part is to figure out what is the active menu item. I had some code doing this in the past but tried out a new flavor of it today which I call the MacGyver menu for CakePHP as it's a little dirty yet powerful and easy to maintain.

In his included code, he creates a simple navigation from an array of titles/links and, with some sorting, a regular expression and a CSS class, the selected item can be highlighted simply.

The MySQL Performance Blog takes a look today at a more PHP-related topic - persistent connections in PHP and whether or not they are the devil (well, okay, so maybe not quest that bad - just a little evil).

The reason behind using persistent connections is of course reducing number of connects which are rather expensive, even though they are much faster with MySQL than with most other databases.

They go on to talk about:

• issues with the number of active connections that could come up
• the use of too many connections at once
• why persistent connections are disabled in the new mysqli extension

Their conclusion? Persistent connections are not evil. In fact, they're very good, when used in the right context and for the right kinds of queries. There's also a small push for an even newer MySQL driver for PHP by the MySQL team - the "mysqlnd" driver.

The MySQL Performance Blog takes a look today at a more PHP-related topic - persistent connections in PHP and whether or not they are the devil (well, okay, so maybe not quest that bad - just a little evil).

The reason behind using persistent connections is of course reducing number of connects which are rather expensive, even though they are much faster with MySQL than with most other databases.

They go on to talk about:

• issues with the number of active connections that could come up
• the use of too many connections at once
• why persistent connections are disabled in the new mysqli extension

Their conclusion? Persistent connections are not evil. In fact, they're very good, when used in the right context and for the right kinds of queries. There's also a small push for an even newer MySQL driver for PHP by the MySQL team - the "mysqlnd" driver.

The Zend Developer Zone has information about a case study as performed by IBM and Zend showing the performance of the Zend Core for IBM (DB2 9) to services - you ready for this? - 10,000 active database connections.

The PHP application used for this study is a DVD store application that simulates users logging into an online catalog, browsing the catalog, and making DVD purchases.

The solution presented in this paper demonstrates how Zend Core for IBM with IBM DB2 9 performs, scales, and offers the best total cost of ownership. This is showcased by scaling-out Web servers as users to the online store increase. The single DB2 data server manages this without requiring the addition of CPU and memory using its unique connection concentrator feature, which manages and balances the workload on the data server. This solution is able to efficiently service tens of thousands of simultaneous connections to the database using this powerful feature.

They've included complete information on all of the testing and infrastructure they used to achieve this impressive feat. There's even graphs and images for those skimmers out there looking to glean what they can.

The Zend Developer Zone has information about a case study as performed by IBM and Zend showing the performance of the Zend Core for IBM (DB2 9) to services - you ready for this? - 10,000 active database connections.

The PHP application used for this study is a DVD store application that simulates users logging into an online catalog, browsing the catalog, and making DVD purchases.

The solution presented in this paper demonstrates how Zend Core for IBM with IBM DB2 9 performs, scales, and offers the best total cost of ownership. This is showcased by scaling-out Web servers as users to the online store increase. The single DB2 data server manages this without requiring the addition of CPU and memory using its unique connection concentrator feature, which manages and balances the workload on the data server. This solution is able to efficiently service tens of thousands of simultaneous connections to the database using this powerful feature.

They've included complete information on all of the testing and infrastructure they used to achieve this impressive feat. There's even graphs and images for those skimmers out there looking to glean what they can.