On his site, Daniel Gomes has written up an article that makes a suggestion about working with objects in PHP. In it, he suggests performing a deep copy of them rather than just cloning them into a new variable.

As you know, PHP has a well-known clone keyword that shallow copy all of the object’s properties. So under the hood what it does is to create a new Object with the exact same values of that object properties – unless you change its behavior by implementing the __clone() function in your class.

This behavior seems what we expected. However, it might give “weird” results if the object that you are cloning contains properties that are objects.

He gives an example of this "weird" result when cloning an object that has a model property containing an instance of a CarModel class. He shows the hash IDs for the objects (different), the model properties (the same) and how changing one changes the other. This could lead to some unintended consequences so he suggests a deep copy instead using a handy library. He finishes the post with example code using this library and the resulting hashes/value differences.

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.

In a post to his site Kevin Smith wonders "what's so great about OOP?". In it, he goes back to the basics of OOP (object-oriented programming) and keeps it simple, avoiding more advanced OOP-related topics.

One of my core responsibilities as a senior software engineer is mentoring the junior engineers and interns at work. [...] Recently a question came up with our new interns while talking through the design of a feature: What is object-oriented programming? How is it different from what we're doing now, and why should we write code that way?

I wanted to find a fundamental explanation to send them for later, but nearly everything I came across immediately jumped into SOLID or design patterns or advanced concepts of some kind.

He starts from the beginning, where most PHP developers cut their teeth with the language: procedural programming. He provides some (non-OOP) examples of this, making use of simpler functions rather than objects and methods. He then moves on to compare this with OOP. He talks about how it's more than just a different syntax (a shift in thinking really). He refactors his previous example to use objects and methods. He finishes up the post answering one of his original questions: what's the real benefit of OOP over procedural programming.

On the StackOverflow blog there's an interesting post that looks at the differences in programming languages between countries based on their current state, either a developing country or a wealthy one (or somewhere in between).

Here at Stack Overflow, we’re interested in using our data to share insights about the worldwide software development community. [...] This leads us to wonder how else programming technologies may differ between rich and poor countries, and how that affects our picture of the global software development industry. In this post, we’ll explore these differences, and show that’s it’s useful to segment the software development industry into high-income countries and the rest of the world.

All the analyses explored here were performed on 2017 so far (January-August), on the 250 tags that had the most traffic during that time.

They investigated some of the major programming languages and platforms (including PHP) and found some interesting negative and positive correlation results. The post then covers how they split the list of countries in two (wealthy vs developing) and show results of the technologies they use. They include graphs for each of the points they make and link over to their StackOverflow Insights site where you can gather statistics for evaluation of your own.

In a new post to the Exakat blog there's a proposal to replace uses of arrays with classes to make scripts more efficient and handle resources better behind the scenes.

Ever since I started using PHP, arrays have always been my friend. They are versatile, they have a wide range of functions, and they are easy to use. I kept using them versions after versions, and even with PHP 7.2, I still rely on them a lot. Over the years, classes have also made their way into my toolset. They have a different usage : classes are for complex data structures, for business logic. Simple data structures get an array. Until we tried what seemed impossible : a moving from an array to a class.

He mentions some of the recent changes in PHP 7 that make the use of classes over arrays a bit more advantageous. He then gets into how to take advantage of these efficiency benefits in moving from arrays to classes. He uses an example from his own work in the Exacat engine, how he performed the replacement and a small caveat he found when working with functions requiring array input. He ends the post with some of the other benefits from making the move including performance enhancements, readability and reduced memory usage.

Adam Wathan has a new post on his site about a different way of thinking he's coming around to about methods, affordances and abilities.

In one of my current projects, I needed to be able to broadcast email announcements to all of the users in the system. If you've read about enough patterns and principles, there's a decent chance you saw [the line allowing an Announcement to perform the "broadcast" operation] and immediately thought to yourself: "What?! An announcement shouldn't be able to broadcast itself!"

I used to think that too, but over the last few years I've started to think differently.

He talks about "do-er" classes that normally would take in something like an announcement and perform the operation to broadcast it. He suggests that this comes from a misunderstanding about the point of methods: abilities versus things you could do with an object. He goes on to give some examples of double standards with DateTime handling, the complexity it could introduce and how, despite it sounding like an immediate action, the "broadcast" method could just be deferring to a background queue anyway.

In a post to his site Stefan Koopmanschap takes a look at the technical term "command" and tries to clear up some of the confusion around its use and how it differs from the idea of a "controller".

A couple of weeks ago while walking towards lunch with Jelrik we were having a bit of a discussion about the use of the term Command. Not long before that, Jelrik had asked a question about naming of Commands in our Slack channel, which led to some confusion.

He starts off by defining what a command is and why it's called a "command" instead of a controller (hint: it "just works" with the Symfony Console). He then gives an example of a command in a Symfony bundle structure and how a CLI "controller" can extend the Command and automatically be integrated into the command structure.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new tutorial from author Christopher Pitt on an interesting topic that could come in very handy in the right situations: finding differences in images with PHP.

I recently stumbled across a fascinating question: how could I tell whether an image had changed significantly? As PHP developers, the most troublesome image problem we have to deal with is how to resize an upload with an acceptable loss of quality. In the end I discovered what many before me have – that this problem becomes relatively simple given the application of some fundamental mathematical principles.

He starts off by talking about images as "bitmaps", basically a collection of pixels composed in a grid. He also mentions images as sets of vectors, but in PHP the bitmap approach is simpler and more understandable. He includes some code showing the breakdown of an image into its RBG colors values and what the data represents. He then moves into measuring the distance "in three dimensions" with a bit of geometry and applies them to a simple State class. This class breaks down the image given into RBG details then, eventually, compares the other image based on the euclidean distance between the points on the original and the ones from the new image. He filters some of these results through a standard deviation view to weed out problems with almost identical images.

Jeff Madsen has a quick post to his site with the "untold story" behind Eloquent's save and create in the Laravel framework.

Over on Laravel Quick Tips we've been looking at a few of these functions and their uses, and I thought it might be helpful to collect all of them together in a single (I hope) coherent post.

Without further preamble, let's get to it. I'm going to use the basic User object and table that ships with a default installation of Laravel so you can follow along if you like.

He starts with the difference between "new" and "create", pointing out the one fundamental difference: one saves, one does not. He then looks at some of the other new/create functions (like findOrNew, firstOrCreate, updateOrCreate), what each of them does in the background and a quick snippet of code showing.

Derick Rethans has posted the next part of his series looking at the new an improved MongoDB drivers for PHP in this post to his site. This time he focuses on the updates to cursor behavior from the previous versions.

We released a new version of the MongoDB driver for PHP (the mongodb extension) near the end of last year. In a previous blog post, I covered the back story of the how and why we undertook this effort. And in another post, I spoke about the architecture of the new driver. In this episode I will discuss changes in cursor behaviour.

I recently found the following comment added to the driver's documentation, on PHP.net, which read: "I noticed that ->sort is missing from the cursor. Seems like the old driver has more functionality."

The new driver certainly allows for sorting of results of queries, but no longer by calling the sort() method on the cursor object. This is because cursors are now created differently than in the old mongo extension.

He starts by talking about how the legacy driver handled its cursor functionality and when it actually performed the data lookup (hint: not until used). In the newer drivers the cursor request is made when the object is created. Because of this change, actions like "sort" and "skip" have to be sent as options on the query instead.