On the FormaPro blog Maskim has written up a tutorial introducing you to a new feature that's been integrated into the Yii2 framework: AMPQ Interop, a standard structure for the handling of MQ messages (queuing).

Great News! Queue Interop is one step closer to PHP world domination.

Yii PHP Framework is the first of major frameworks that has placed a bet on AMQP Interop. A corresponding pull request “Add AMQP interop based driver.” has been merged to yiisoft/yii2-queue repository.

With this integration, the Yii framework now natively supports many AMPQ packages without having to create a custom interface layer. This includes enqueue/amqp-lib, enqueue/amqp-ext and enqueue/amqp-bunny.

The Symfony Finland site has a new post with a brief look at how the adoption rate of Symfony Flex has picked up with the impending release of Symfony 4 coming next month (November 2017).

With Symfony 4.0 a new standard structure for building applications is being adopted. This is known as Symfony Flex and will be the preferred way of creating applications. Symfony 4.0 is scheduled for release in November 2017, but many projects have already started adopting the new structure.

[...] In six years a lot of things have changed in the web development world, with the rise of front end driven applications, containerised microservices and more. [...] One thing that has not changed for some time is the Standard Edition itself. It has been critiqued for being enterprisey and heavy on configuration. [...] The trend was noticed by the team and in December 2016 at the SymfonyCon Berlin Symfony Flex was announced.

The post also lists out some of the projects that are already embracing Symfony Flex in their project structure including the GraphQL bundle and the PhpStorm Symfony plugin. Symfony Flex also gives developers a way to more immediately work with Symfony 4 when it is released through the same methods as now (with the 3.3 components).

The Symfony Finland blog has posted a practical introduction to Typescript for PHP developers. TypeScript is a free and open-source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict superset of JavaScript, and adds optional static typing and class-based object-oriented programming to the language.

A greenfield project might be a good way to try a technology, if the scope is limited and risk in general is low. For many kicking off a new project or undertaking a major rewrite is not an option, but you can still evolve and apply good ideas and fresh concepts in your work. The value of legacy in web development is understated.

This is an area I've found TypeScript to be very useful for and I think many developers can benefit from taking a closer look at it. TypeScript compiles down to JavaScript & can be adopted gradually, chances are you'll have plenty of code you can use it on.

They then cover five advantages about TypeScript that can help make adoption in your applications easier:

• Low overhead in getting started
• Great tooling for your favourite editor
• Familiar syntax for async programming
• Type Definition files
• Stability and adoption

For each section there's a brief summary of the point and, where applicable, a quick code example or screencast animation showing it in action.

On the /r/php subreddit on Reddit.com JustSteveKing asks the community about Aspect Oriented Programming. Aspect Oriented Programming makes use of cross-cutting concerns (modular functionality) along with encapsulation to make for more modular code.

What are the general thoughts on AOP? Anybody using it? After reading several articles and tutorials on the matter I have to admit it seems to have its plus points. The only thing I am wondering at this point is why is it not a widely adopted as MVC, I mean there must be a reason?

Most of the comments either fall into two categories. Either the commenter has made use of it in a limited fashion (like logging) or doesn't use it at all. There's also a good comment about some of the risks involved in its use and the "magic" that can come with it. Additionally, there are links to other articles for those wanting a good introduction to AOP and what it can do.

Jordi Boggiano has a new post today sharing some of his own insights about PHP version adoption but, unlike some of the raw numbers shared before, his perspective comes from aggregating data from Packagist.

Pascal's number are interesting but I believe they have a bias towards older PHP versions. I would argue that people configuring their servers properly are also those that tend to keep up to date with newer versions, and part of the best practices is to avoid publishing the software versions you are using (i.e. disable expose_php in php.ini). If I am correct here that means early adopters are mis-represented in those numbers. In any case, I do have another biased dataset to present so here it comes! I looked in the packagist.org logs of the last fifty days for GET /packages.json which represents a composer update done by someone.

He notes that the data is biased towards development machines (not always running the same version as their production counterparts) but that it shouldn't skew the numbers too much. He compares two different datasets, one from November 2013 and the other from November 2014, showing a major change in the overall numbers and moving the largest version used up from 5.3.10 to 5.5.9. He also shares some interesting statistics around the requirements developers are putting on Packagist packages...that have basically remained the same over the past year (sadly).

In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell takes a look at some of the current statistics around PHP version adoption - all the way from the ancient 5.0 through the shiny new (upcoming) 5.5 releases.

PHP runs over 75% of all websites whose technologies are known (source: w3techs), which makes for a really REALLY long tail of users who once installed wordpress, phpmyadmin, or some other open source project that helped their business needs at the time. What they don't do is upgrade. PHP's current usage statistics look like this (source and raw numbers are if you want them):

She points out that around half of the results show that sites are running on unsupported versions of PHP (<=5.2) but notes that it's not always their choice. There's lots of factors that play into upgrading these versions that are not always in the user's control (like the speed of distro updates). She covers some of the things that came around in the newer versions of PHP 5.2 and 5.3 including some large performance jumps, especially in 5.4.

In truth, the future is already here for those people on PHP 5.4 and beyond. Keeping PHP upgraded is just part of our regular maintenance workflow, and the language is progressing in regular and manageable steps. If you've been left behind then I strongly recommend that you start making plans for upgrading your platform, or moving to a newer one.

According to this new report on the W3 Techs site, the usage of PHP 5.2 has been passed up by the numbers for the usage of PHP 5.3 (finally).

PHP 5.3 has been released in June 2009, so it took a while to gain that level of popularity. End of support for PHP 5.2 has been declared in December 2010, but is was still the most popular version until now. Version 5.3 will enter the end-of-life cycle in March 2013. Version 5.4, used by only 3.0%, is now considered state-of-the-art.

The numbers have been consistently trending towards intersection with the usage of PHP 5.4 picking up, but no where near the 5.3 and 5.2 numbers. They also point out that PHP version adoption has a history of being slow. Contributing factors to this could be the overall impression of the language and how much "room for improvement" it seems to have.

It's not difficult to predict that PHP as a language will continue to dominate web development in the near future. What will be more exciting is to watch what new versions of PHP will look like.

The PHPClasses.org site has released the latest episode in their "Lately in PHP" podcast series - Episode 24, "Do PHP Developers Need and will Adopt PHP Coding Standards?"

The PHP Standards Group is trying to push new specifications for PHP coding standards. Whether PHP developers need and will adopt these standards was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Arturs Sosins in episode 24 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also talk about some of the comments that Linus Torvalds recently made about the limitations of Github and recent PHP releases (bugfixes). You can listen to this latest episode using the in-page player or you can download the mp3 and listen locally. If you enjoy it, consider subscribing to their feed to get this and future episodes.

In a new post to his blog Marco Tabini has voiced his opinion on the decision made by the PHP development group to set the end of life of the PHP 5.2.x series with the latest release (5.2.14).

n case you missed it, the PHP team has just released 5.2.14, which effectively ends active support for the 5.2 branch. [...] The logic behind this decision is...puzzling.

He mentions the recent announcements of a few large PHP-based projects to officially support PHP 5.2 and how, because of the large jump in functionality from pre-5.2, it might be a good idea to reconsider this (preemptive?) retirement. He adds that making a move like this without consideration to these larger products could reflect negatively on the language itself. Be sure to check out the comments for more views from other members of the community.

Nessa has a new post to her blog today on why she thinks most people are late to the party on PHP 5.3 including a few reasons she sees for the delayed adoption among the developer masses.

As a programmer, I would hold it to any site owner to check their site’s requirements and the offerings of their host before they unnecessarily waste a lot of time and money, but as a system administrator I frown upon shared hosting providers offering software with known compatibility issues just to be able to advertise as the “latest and greatest”. The latest isn’t always the greatest, and it won’t be until the community catches up with what the greatest has to offer.

She notes that her situation, much like many other hosting companies, is that they're "just not ready" to make the upgrade because of some of the hassle it might cause the users. Similar situations happened with the change from PHP4 to PHP5. She also mentions a few specific issues:

• Compatibility issues - several very popular applications don't support some of the 5.3 changes
• There no Zend Optimizer/Zend Guard support
• It's not required for PCI compliance yet