On the Laravel News blog they've posted a tutorial with some helpful tips for improving your routing in your Laravel-based application.

The Laravel router has a great, well-polished API when you first dive into Laravel as a beginner or newcomer to the framework. What follows is not anything hidden or new, but a few tips that should help you when you’re learning Laravel 5.

The documentation is excellent, and the tips that follow supplement and piece together a few parts that will help you get a quick jumpstart on learning how to use routing in your Laravel applications.

The tips include:

• Custom Namespaces
• Route Macros
• Debugging Routes
• Named Group Routes

Each of the tips include the code needed to implement them and a brief summary of why they're useful.

On the Delicious Brains site there's a tutorial that shows you how to use Microsoft's VS Code IDE for PHP development. They focus more specifically on WordPress development but a lot of the environment setup could be used for any PHP project.

If you keep up with the many different text editors and developer tools available, you may have heard of a newer IDE called Visual Studio Code. VS Code is a free, open source code editor that is lightweight like Sublime Text, but offers many of the same features as bigger IDEs like PhpStorm or WebStorm.

In this article I’ll review some features and extensions of VS Code that I really appreciate, and show you how to make the most out of it for WordPress and general web development.

The tutorial walks you through the installation and integration of various PHP development tools including an "intellisense" extension, XDebug support, a Javascript debugger and a few other helpful extensions. Install instructions are included as well as screenshots/screencasts showing the end result.

On the Symfony Finland site there's a new post sharing a tutorial showing how to add a GraphQL API to your application with the help of the overblog/graphql-bundle bundle.

I've been using GraphQL for some API thingamajigs, and it's been working fine. Now with Symfony 4 out, I figured a write-up on how to use GraphQL with Symfony Flex could be useful for someone.

We'll expand on a previous demo app that I built. That app already uses Doctrine ORM as storage, so let's bridge that to a GraphQL API.

He starts by linking to "a quick read" about GraphQL for those not familiar and listing out the basic structure of the application he'll build out. Next comes the installation of the bundle and a debug bundle to help make it easier to locate errors. He then updates the application configuration to add routes and define the schema for the objects in the system. Using the GUI that comes with the debug package, he shows how to access the API and how to create a "resolver" that will relay the information back to the client from the GraphQL API request.

Rob Allen has a quick post for the Twig and Zend Expressive users out there showing how to display errors if you're not using the Whoops error handler.

If you're not using the Whoops error handler with Expressive and are using the Twig renderer, then you are given no information about the problem that occurred, even in debug mode.

He includes the Twig template to output the error message and, if the application is in "debug" mode, show an optional block of extra information. This provides details about the exception thrown and some of the previous errors. The previous errors are looped about output to provide more context around the failure.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has posted a tutorial introducing you to Xdebug, the powerful debugging tool for PHP applications.

It’s been 15 years since Xdebug first came out. We think this is the perfect opportunity to re-introduce it to the world, and explain how and why it does what it does. Xdebug is a PHP extension (meaning it needs to be compiled and installed into a PHP installation) which provides the developer with some features for debugging.

It starts off by explaining some of the functionality that Xdebug brings to your debugging practices and the features that can help make it flow a little easier. It talks about how it differs from some of the IDE debugging tools and services like Blackfire.io. Next up is the example putting it to use and what the resulting errors look like. The post then gets into the integration of Vagrant with PhpStorm, using the profiler and how to force the rendering in Laravel output (it normally overrides the exception output with its own formatting).

On the Hackernoon.com site there's a recent post from Paolo Agostinetto showing you how to debug your PHP application with a different tool that most might use: strace.

Every once in a while it happens that you have a tricky bug, and when it does you risk to lose hours or even days fixing it.

[...] Yet, sometimes there is that one bug that makes you lose your shit after a whole afternoon spent looking for the root cause. In my experience, bugs that I introduce are generally very quick and easy to spot and fix. But the real challenge is finding bugs in other people’s code like third party libraries, PHP extensions or even PHP itself.

He then talks about a time when his situation was a bit different - he was getting 500 errors from his code that weren't being caught correctly by error handling. He found that Apache was out-of-memory-ing but debugging the exact cause (a suspect Doctrine query) would take more time. Instead he turned to strace and, with a bit of hunting in the resulting output, he tracked the issue down to XDebug being enabled (and a setting that was generating a memory leak).

Adam Culp has posted a new tutorial to his site showing you how to set up local debugging inside PhpStorm combining it with the Zend Debugger tool.

Setting up debugging in an IDE with a local development environment has gotten so easy it can be done in a few automated steps. In this post I will demonstrate how to get step debugging functioning with

The Delicious Brains site has a tutorial posted from author Peter Tasker showing you how to debug Javascript and PHP at the same time directly in your PHPStorm IDE.

Since I started with Delicious Brains last July, I’ve become a big fan of PhpStorm. It really is the bee’s knees. I won’t go over the full list of features, but some of the things I find helpful daily are: Cmd+clicking into method definitions, VCS integration and color highlighting of code changes, code bookmarks, and of course, Xdebug integration

In this post I want to expand on what Iain already covered with PhpStorm and Xdebug and show you how to level up your JavaScript debugging skills with PhpStorm.

The tutorial starts with a section explaining why using the PHPStorm debugger could be more beneficial and provide a more integrated workflow. It then starts in on the setup, showing how to set up the extension for Chrome so that it can talk to the IDE for the Javascript side complete with screenshots (and screencasts). With the two integrated the next step is to add a breakpoint in the code and what the results look like when it's executed and thrown.

The post finishes up covering the integration of the debugger with Xdebug allowing for the complete debugging of your application in one place.

Freek Van der Herten has a post to his site with a guide about debugging collections in Laravel applications. He quickly shows how to use the "macro" functionality to gather more insight into what's happening inside.

Lately I’ve been working a lot with collections in Laravel. If you’re not in the know: a collection is a sort of super charged array with a lot of powerful functions to transform the data inside it. The only thing I found a bit of a hassle is how to debug the various steps in a collection chain. Here’s how I improved the workflow.

He shows a simple collection setup with a chain of functions being applied to transform the data inside (ex: filter, map, sortBy). He was able to get a bit more information by using the dd helper Laravel provides but it's not the most "clean" way to just wrap the collection on it. Instead he proposes he use of a "macro" to call the dd function and keep it in the flow of the methods called on the collection (as ->dd()).

In this post to his site Gonzalo Ayuso shows you how to create a logger for your POST requests and their information with a bit of helpful code and Websockets.

Last days I’ve been working with background geolocation with an ionic application. There’s a cool plugin to do that. [...] Basically this plugin performs a POST request to the server with the GPS data. [...] I can develop a simple Silex application with a POST route and log the request in a file or flush those request to the console. This’d have been easy but as far as I’m a big fan of WebSockets (yes I must admit that I want to use WebSockets everywhere :) I had one idea in my mind.

He shows the creation of a simple Silex-based application with just two endpoints (channel that handles both GET and POST) that uses the Guzzle HTTP library to listen on the Websockets port for incoming connections. He then shows how to add the code necessary on the frontend (using express) to send the POST data automatically to the waiting Silex application. He's provided the full working code for the example on his GitHub account as well so you can see it fully fleshed out.