In a recent post to the Laravel News site, there's a post showing how to make use of a PHP package for storing and retrieving global settings that are then store them locally on the filesystem as a JSON-formatted document.

In applications it is often useful to have a way to store some global settings. These settings are not related to a specific model, such as a user, but to the system as a whole. You can achieve this with Eloquent, of course, but I never felt that was the right approach given you are saving non-relational data in a relational system. I found Spatie’s Valuestore package to be the perfect fit for creating a settings repository for an application.

The package will take your settings and store them as a JSON file on the local filesystem. Let’s use the example of having a banner notification at the top of your application. The banner notification is visible on every page and an admin can update the text it contains.

The tutorial walks you through the installation of the package via Composer and how to create the initial Valuestore instance, pointing it to a file on the local disk. It includes sample code showing how to push and pull values from the store including in your Blade templates. The tutorial also shows the binding of the store to the container and how to define it as a global helper.

In a new post to his site Cees-Jan Kiewiet shares details about the latest version of the React/Cache component for the ReactPHP library. In the tutorial he covers the library, what this update brings with it and how he's making use of it.

Recently we, ReactPHP, released 0.5 of our cache package with TTL and other PSR-16 similarities. In this post we'll go over which packages I recently updated and how I am using them in my sites.

He breaks the post up into a few different sections showing the caching in use:

• JSON and msgpack
• Redis
• Fallback
• react/http session middleware
• react/http webroot preload middleware

For each item in the list there's a bit of code showing it in action and some explanation as to what it's doing and how it helps.

Tomas Vortuba has put together a post sharing a summary of what's new in PHP 7.3 using a bit different tactic than just descriptions: via diffs (in about 30 seconds).

No time but eager to hear PHP news? PHP 7.3 is out in December 2018 and it brings 173 changes. Which are the most useful ones?

For each item in his list he provides code snippets showing the change for:

• Comma After the Last Argument
• First and Last Array Key
• Countable for Risky Variables
• Safer JSON Parsing

Each item on the list also links over to the related RFC for the feature that provides more detail on the change.

On the php[architect] site they've posted a full article from their July 2018 issue sharing information about a new kind of data store in MySQL.

Do you work on projects where you begin coding before knowing what your data looks like? Or are you part of the vast majority of developers who have had little or no training in database theory, relational calculus, Structured Query Language, or sets? Could you be working on a project without a database administrator to set up relational tables, indexes, and schemas? Or are you tired of embedding ugly lines of SQL in your pristine PHP code? There is new hope for you.

In the article Dave Stokes (of MySQL/Oracle) covers the new native JSON data type that was added in MySQL 5.7 but enhanced in MySQL 8 as a document store. He shows how to use this new functionality from the command line, what a "document" is and how to install and use the X DevAPI PECL extension to make use of it from your PHP code.

Rob Allen continues his series of posts covering the use of PHP on the OpenWhisk platform. In his latest post he shows how to usr Fractal as the view layer for your application (as installed via Composer). Fractal is a project from the PHP League that "provides a presentation and transformation layer for complex data output, the like found in RESTful APIs, and works really well with JSON."

When writing an API, it’s common to produce an output that conforms to a known media type such as JSON API or HAL, etc. I’m a strong believer that even though I’m writing an API, my application has a view layer. It’s not the same as building an HTML page, but you still need to separate out the code that creates the structured output from your model layer. For a couple of APIs that I’ve written recently, I’ve used Fractal for this.

He starts with some example code showing how to use Fractal to transform data that's come from his datasource. This includes both the script to use the Manager and the class defining the "transformer" for the todo data. He then moves this over and integrates it with an OpenWhisk application, making use of the dependency injection container to create transformer and manager instances. His final example shows this setup in action as the result of a call to fetch all current todo items.

On the Laravel News site there's a tutorial posted looking ahead at PHP 7.3 and some of the changes coming for JSON error handling.

One of the new features coming to PHP 7.3 is better error handling for json_encode() and json_decode(). The RFC was unanimously accepted by a 23 to 0 vote. Let’s take a look at how we handle JSON errors in <= PHP 7.2, and the new improvements coming in PHP 7.3.

They start with an example of how PHP developers would normally check for JSON parsing errors and the typical response when it fails. In the proposed functionality for PHP 7.3 and optional JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR would be added to throw a JsonException if there was an issue parsing the provided data. This also means that you no longer need to manually request the error message, it would just come through as a part of the standard exception. You can find out the full details on the change in the RFC.

The Pineco.de blog has a new tutorial posted that the Laravel users out there will find particularly useful. In their latest post, they introduce some basic Eloquent searching techniques that can be used to easily locate data via currently available Eloquent functionality.

When our app is smaller – for example at the beginning – it’s enough to apply small, handmade solutions. It’s true for database searching as well. It’s not necessary to pull in a package instantly. Most of the time we can use some simple techniques to perform searches in Eloquent.

[...] Searching is a vital part of any application. A good interface helps the user to retrieve the information it needs. So it’s essential to bring a good solution both on front-end and back-end. In this post, we are not covering any UI or front-end related topics. [...] So for now, let’s talk about MySQL and Eloquent only.

In the post, they share a few methods for searching data that don't require any additional service or package. They're mostly just taking advantage of features the MySQL database supports but they're showing how to use them in a Laravel environment:

• simple "where" clauses
• using the fuzzy matching of the "like" keyword
• searching JSON columns by a "path"
• using "sounds like" to find similar values

Each item on the list comes with a few lines of code showing how to use it via an Eloquent model and a brief explanation of what's happening behind the scenes in the database.

In a post to his site Colin O'Dell shows how he used the Blackfire.io service to optimize the colinodell/json5 package he created to parse JSON5 in PHP. Blackfire.io is a performance profiling service (from the folks behind Symfony) that shows where the pain points are in your code. They also have a "developer" plan that you can use to try out the service.

Back in November, I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It's essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP's json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.

Fast forward to this weekend when I received [a] bug report from a user named Antonio [about slowness in parsing large JSON documents]. Yikes! I always knew that a PHP-based implementation would be slower than PHP's native C implementation, but execution time measured in minutes was completely unacceptable!

So I fired up Blackfire (which I've previously used to optimize league/commonmark) and got to work.

He starts off by getting a baseline to work from, executing the parsing on a custom document he created (not quite as large as in the bug report but still large). After locating a few issues he then started in on the optimizations. The first was an issue with the use of mb_substr, the second was around the remainder of the document to parse and the last an optimization for a regular expression. The post ends with a few other micro-optimizations he also made to the package and a check to use json_decode for faster parsing and only kick in the JSON5 parsing when needed.

In a new post to his site Rob Allen shows you how to implement CORS in a Zend Expressive application through the use of a simple middleware wrapper that sends the appropriate headers.

On a recent project, I needed to implement CORS support for my Expressive API. The easiest way to do this is to use Mike Tuupola's PSR-7 CORS Middleware.

As this is a standard Slim-Style PSR-7 middleware implementation, we need to wrap it for Expressive, so we make a factory. [...] We then register this in our AppConfigProvider::getDependencies() by adding to the factories key.

He includes the code and configuration changes required to make it all work and includes example output of a request (with headers) from a curl call to the API. He also includes a section on working with JSON error responses and ProblemDetails for when there are issues related to the current CORS policy definition.

On the Auth0 blog there's a tutorial posted that shows you how to build an application with the Nette framework and easily integrate authentication via their own JSON web token functionality.

Nette is a free, open-source PHP framework designed for building web applications. Nette is a set of decoupled and reusable PHP packages that will make your work easier. And Nette is also known as the quick and comfortable web development framework in PHP because it has the tools that allow you to bang out PHP applications rather quickly.

[...] In this tutorial, I'll show you how easy it is to build a web application with Nette and add authentication to it. Check out the repo to get the code.

The tutorial starts by talking about some of the built-in tools the framework includes and some basic use of each. It then gets into building the application, creating the controller, view and template to output a list of characters from Game of Thrones. From there it moves into the authentication piece, showing the integration of the Auth0 plugin and how to hook it into an application on their platform. There's a bit of configuration to set it up as an authenticator but then the framework and the plugin take care of the rest.