The Full Stack Radio podcast, hosted by Adam Wathan, has posted their latest episode - an interview with Taylor Otwell, creator and lead developer on the Laravel (and most of the projects in its ecosystem).

In this episode, Adam and Taylor Otwell have a discussion about strategies they use to write cleaner, simpler code when working with the Laravel framework.

They talk about several of the other packages/products in the Laravel ecosystem (like Valet, Spark and Passport) as well as some of Taylor's thoughts on simplifying code including a few other links to presentations and tutorials on the same topics. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates on when new episodes are released.

Jordi Boggiano, lead developer on the Composer has posted about some of the new Composer patterns that have been introduced into the tool this year, including some you might not even have realized.

Here is a short update on some nice little features that have become available in the last year in Composer.

He includes five of these features in his list (but something tells me these are just some of the more user-facing improvements the project has introduced):

• Checking dependencies for bad patterns
• Referencing scripts to avoid duplication
• Defining your target production environment in composer.json
• Excluding paths from the optimized classmap
• Requiring packages easily and safely

For each item he includes the command (and sometimes optional arguments) that make it work and what kind of results you can expect. There's definitely some handy features in here and not just for the "power users" in the crowd.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode in their DPC Radio series as recorded at the last Dutch PHP Conference. In this new episode they share a session from Tobias Schlitt called "Advanced OO Patterns".

You already know Singleton, Signal/Observer, Factory and friends. But, which object oriented patterns are en vogue in the PHP world and how can you seize their power? This talk gives you an overview on Dependency Injection, Data Mapper and more OO patterns the PHP world talks about right know, using practical code examples.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can follow along with the talk in his slides over on the qafoo.com site.

Seastian Bergmann has added some new features to the Object_Freezer library (you can read more about it here) - some new object-relational behavioral patterns.

The three patterns are from Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture book:

• Unit of Work - maintains a list of objects affected by a business transaction and coordinates the writing out of changes and the resolution of concurrency problems.
• Identity Map - each object gets loaded only once by keeping every loaded object in a map
• Lazy Load - object that doesn't contain all of the data you need but knows how to get it.

Kae Verens has posted another book review today covering APress' "Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (by Kevin McArthur).

This book is absolutely jam-packed with information useful to the medium-advanced PHP coder. SPL is described over a few chapters, and a quick intro to Zend's MVC framework is provided. Of particular interest to me were the final chapters, to do with certificate-based authentication, and a chapter near the beginning describing the upcoming features of PHP6. Great book - I really enjoyed it.

The review gets into detail on some of the chapters and some of the shortfalls that Kae saw about them. Things like:

• The title says "frameworks" but only one is really discussed (Zend Framework)
• The testing/continuous development sections weren't long enough
• The "web 2.0" section was a little sparse
• The only real web service protocol talked about is SOAP.

Overall, though Kae found the book to be worthy of a place on any developer's shelf.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a sample chapter from a new book Packt Publishing has put out called "Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur.

So today you get a double bonus. You get to check out Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur. You also get a great tutorial on SPL!

The sample chapter looks (obviously) at the SPL, the Standard PHP Library - functions included with PHP5 releases to accomplish some pretty cool things.

The IBM developerWorks site has a new article posted that talks about design patterns, five of them in particular, that can help to "accelerate your PHP development" and make your code more maintainable down the line.

As an application developer, you can have a lifelong career without ever knowing what any of the patterns are called or how or when they're used. However, I've found that a good working knowledge of these patterns, as well as those introduced in the developerWorks article "Five common PHP design patterns" (see Resources), allows you to do two things: Enable high-bandwidth conversations and reduce painful lessons.

The patterns they talk about in this "five more" article of the series are:

• Adapter Pattern
• Iterator Pattern
• Decorator Pattern
• Delegate Pattern
• State Pattern

Diagrams are provided for each of them, showing how they flow along with brief code examples (structures really) to show how that transitions over to actual use.

On the Tiger Heron blog today, Tony Freixas has posted a new article talking about the use of two patterns (no, not design patterns) in PHP development - the Bait-and-Switch method and the Shell Game.

Originally, I planned to write about how to configure the Apache server to run both PHP4 and PHP5. With the push toward PHP5 (see Go PHP5), there are now hundreds of articles covering that topic. Instead, I will talk about two IT patterns I use for PHP development on Windows. The patterns are ancient and familiar to most Unix developers, but little used in the Windows world.

He uses something he calls "junction points" to make both of the patterns work and describes a bit about what they are and how to create them. Then, it's on to the descriptions - he covers what each of the patterns is about and includes a method for implementing it. The Bait-and-Switch is mostly about swapping out multiple software versions transparently and the Shell Game uses a shell script to handle the creation of the environment and the execution instead.

On the Tiger Heron blog today, Tony Freixas has posted a new article talking about the use of two patterns (no, not design patterns) in PHP development - the Bait-and-Switch method and the Shell Game.

Originally, I planned to write about how to configure the Apache server to run both PHP4 and PHP5. With the push toward PHP5 (see Go PHP5), there are now hundreds of articles covering that topic. Instead, I will talk about two IT patterns I use for PHP development on Windows. The patterns are ancient and familiar to most Unix developers, but little used in the Windows world.

He uses something he calls "junction points" to make both of the patterns work and describes a bit about what they are and how to create them. Then, it's on to the descriptions - he covers what each of the patterns is about and includes a method for implementing it. The Bait-and-Switch is mostly about swapping out multiple software versions transparently and the Shell Game uses a shell script to handle the creation of the environment and the execution instead.

The results of this week's International PHP Magazine poll have been posted. The question this time asked which, out of the four choices they gave, was the most popular opinion when dealing with objects in PHP.

Coming out on top with 33.3% of the votes is "Folks who follow design patterns religiously are missing the point" - an interesting choice for most of the developers out there. Design patterns can be one of the most useful bits of functionality in an application if used right. The option, however, is a bit vague - do they mean that they only use design patterns in their code or that they use them at all?

There was a tie for second place between the "Other reasons" and "Classes and inheritance are not new to PHP 5" options. Pulling up the rear with only 5.6% of the votes was the last option, "Managing state between pages is very straight forward in PHP".

Be sure to check out and vote in this week's poll (a bit better subject matter) that asks the question "Why Does PHP Suck?".