In a recent post to the Hackernoon site, Sergii Shanin shares his take on the "PHP is dead" conversations and posts out there with the expected "Viva le PHP!" (long live PHP!) following it.

The fracas over Gutenberg and WordPress is the latest installment in the death of PHP. Take a deep breath everybody. Let’s ignore the trolls and take a look at what Mark Twain, Fidel Castro and PHP have in common?—?and more to the point, why PHP is still a reasonable choice for startups and small businesses.

t looks like ‘PHP is dead’ blog posts started cropping up in 2011 (let me know if you find older ones). If you search around Medium and the coding bootcamps that are popping up like mushrooms, the only common denominator is that everyone hates on PHP or simply ignores it. Apparently, it’s impossible to code in PHP with an oiled beard and ironic t-shirt while drinking overpriced coffee.

He shares two of the most wide-spread myths about PHP - that it's slow and that it can't scale - and dispels them. He then goes through some types projects where PHP "shines" including content driven websites and e-commerce sites. He shares some the "business sense" around choosing PHP, the perspective senior PHP developers bring to teams and projects, and the seeming "nine lives" of PHP.

In a post on his Medium site Joey Masip Romeu shares some suggestions about how you can organize your business logic in a Symfony application with some simple namespacing and service definitions.

I want to talk about namespacing services in Symfony, specifically Symfony3.

These are exciting times, Symfony 4 is just round the corner?— -coming out on November 30th? - ?so this blog post might be irrelevant soon! Nevertheless, concepts are still the same so let´s get into it!

He offers three "rules" that he and his team at SlowCode have defined to help with their own organization:

• using a folder for logic services
• using a folder for the domain name
• using . for folder separation and _ for word separation

Code and configuration examples are provided for each suggestion helping to illustrate the point. He ends the post mentioning public and private services and how they're changing in upcoming Symfony releases.

On the QaFoo site they've shared a post with a helpful refactoring matrix that can help you determine the best approach to handling changes to your legacy code.

When you are beginning to consider refactoring your big legacy codebase towards a new software design, then it is not uncommon to feel helpless after estimating this to be a huge terrifying 2-5 years project.

To help solve the problem of not knowing where and how to begin, we have had great success using a decision matrix to decide how each part of the legacy code should be changed in such a refactoring project.

They start with the two main factors that should influence your decisions: the rate of code change and business value of the code. This builds out the matrix and the best way forward for each option. They go through the four approaches, what they would involve and how it relates back to the rate of change/business value factors. The post ends with links to a few other articles pointing you in the right direction for starting the refactoring process.

Frank de Jonge has a tutorial posted to his site showing you how to use partitioning for concurrency in optimizing the business logic processing in your PHP applications.

With new ways of dealing with problems, new problems emerge. When the solution space evolves, so do the problems we deal with. One could say we only exchange one type of problem with another.

[...] Such constraints might steer you towards a synchronous solution, but a deeper understanding of a given domain might allow for an alternative approach. The need for synchronous processing is not always as final as it may seem. Sequential handling may only be a requirement within a certain context. A context may be defined by anything related to a single user, group, or even a process.

He talks some about concurrent processing versus sequential processing and how, sometimes, pure versions of either aren't exactly the right fit. Instead he proposes a system where multiple streams could be used with synchronous handling keeping with the concurrency between the streams. He illustrates his point with a "silly chat application" with the requirement that users all get their emails in order. In his proposal he starts with a standard single thread/multiple workers scenario but points out that this may lead to messages being out of order depending on the processing time for the worker it ends up on. He refactors this into a system that uses the parallel processing instead, including the PHP code that's required to make it work.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial from Christopher Pitt showing you how to "start a business" with Laravel Spark, the recently released scaffolding product that takes care of a lot of the typical "business" handling for online products.

I am really excited about Laravel Spark. By the time you read this, there will probably be a multitude of posts explaining how you can set it up. That’s not as interesting to me as the journey I’m about to take in creating an actual business with Spark!

The idea is simple. I have created a Pagekit module which you can use to back up and restore site data. The module makes it easy to store and download these backups, and restore them on different servers.

He starts off with some of the background behind the product and getting Spark set up with some additional functionality (like additional user fields and gathering billing information). He then creates the functionality allowing for the actual storing of the backups and API functionality that integrates with it. The post wraps up with his look at adding the code needed to download the backups and return them back to the user.

In this post to thePHP.cc site Sebastian Bergmann looks at validation data, both in the sense of user input and the contents of objects you're application is currently working with.

Validating data seems to be one of the most important tasks of an application. After all, you cannot trust data from external sources. So let us have a look at how to efficiently implement data validation.

He gives an example of a user profile with requirements on the data it should contain. He focuses on the email address property as it's one of the easier options to validate (or is it). He walks through the usual progression from controller injection to setter injection of the value but wonders when the validation should happen to keep the Profile object from becoming invalid. He points out that simply having a validate method perform the checks isn't enough as it may not always be called correctly, leading to potentially invalid objects. Instead he recommends an alternative - using a validator object/tool in the setters of your object instance as the values are set. This prevents the object from getting into an unknown state and provides immediate feedback to the developer when something's wrong.

The PHP Roundtable podcast has posted their latest episode hosted by Sammy Powers and featuring guests Michael Kimsal, Gary Hockin, Yitzchok Willroth and Matt Stauffer. In this new episode they talk about the "Business of PHP".

We discuss freelancing as a PHP developer, managing client expectations, niches, good customer service, project scope & scope creep, hourly rates vs value based pricing, and whether or not to run a SaaS.

You can catch this latest episode either through the in-page video player or by heading over to YouTube and catching the video there. If you enjoy the roundtable, be sure to subscribe to their feed.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted showing you how to set up a simple small business website using the BoltCMS tool. This recent article will walk you through the full installation, configuration and setup for a simple site including database interactions.

As the web continues to mature and the demand for the efficiency of content delivery increases, more and more slim and trim CMSs are coming into the fray. Developers (front-end and back-end) are branching away from the heavy-hitters like WordPress and Drupal, and into the likes of more streamlined, tailor-made solutions. Bolt CMS is one of these CMSs, and prides itself on being a dream for designers, developers, and content editors alike.

He starts with a brief overview of what the BoltCMS has to offer and some of the technology that powers it. He then goes through each of the steps to get the application up and running:

• Requirements, setup and installation
• Main configuration and theme set up
• Splitting up files into templates
• Introducing and creating content types
• Retrieving content from database records

Each step along the way includes the code, configuration changes or template updates you'll need to make to end up with a simple site allowing you to view a page of content and list/add related testimonials.

In a new post to the SitePoint Business & Marketing blog Chris Ward asks an interesting question that applies to both the business side and development: do you need an API?.

API stands for ‘Application Programming Interface’ and as the name implies, creating one is a technical process. This article will talk very little about how to create an API as there are a myriad of methods to undertake that. This article aims to focus on the business side of APIs and supply advice for non-technical folk. [...] You may be a forward thinking individual inside of an organizational structure that doesn’t share your views. How can you convince others around you that having an API may be good for your business?

He talks about three of the main kinds of organizations out there that usually have APIs including government, civic and science organizations and most other online services that integrate them into their core services. He also tries to help you answer the question for your own organization by listing some of the positives it can provide as well as some of the negatives that could balance them out. He ends the post with one final recommendation if you do choose to implement an API: "Don't reinvent the wheel".

The Laravel News has posted their latest interview in their "Artisan Series" today spotlighting Mitchell van Wijngaarden. Mitchell is a "developer, business owner, and has a great accent."

The interview answers questions about:

• How he got into web development
• When he first found Laravel and why he started using it
• His development company
• What a typical day for him entails
• Why he's big into BDD (behavior-driven development)

...and more. Check out the full post for the answers to these and more questions.