Matt Stauffer has a new post to his site where he's put together an in-depth look at Laravel Echo, a feature included in newer versions of the framework that makes it easy to integrate websockets into your Laravel-based application.

A few weeks ago, Taylor Otwell introduced another branded product within the Laravel line: Laravel Echo. So far, the only coverage it's gotten has been his Laracasts video intro, but I recently wrote it up for my book and wanted to share that with you. What follows is an excerpt from Laravel: Up and Running, heavily modified to make sense in a blog format.

He then gets into what Echo is and the different pieces that make it up: updates to the Laravel broadcast system and a new Javascript package. He suggests some places where using Echo makes sense and how to set up a simple broadcast event in your application (non-Echo to start). This makes use of the Pusher service for real-time event broadcasting. With that in place, he helps you install the Echo dependencies and integrating messages from both public and private channels. He also includes a bit of code at the end to exclude the message from broadcasting to the current user if you ever find a need for it.

The Laravel News site has posted the latest episode of their podcast covering Laravel Echo, Valet and the PHP-FIG "implosion".

In this twenty-two minute episode, we talk about Laravel Echo and new changes to Laravel Valet.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the show for offline listening. If you enjoy the show and want to hear more, be sure to subscribe to their feed and get the latest as they're released.

On the Laravel News site there's a post talking about a feature coming in the 5.3 version of the Laravel framework - Laravel Echo (not a separate system, just an enhancement inside the framework).

Laravel Echo is coming to Laravel 5.3 and is designed to be an improvement over the current event broadcasting system. [...] In this video, Taylor steps through the features by demoing a little to do app. You can see the full source code to the demo on GitHub.

Echo is essentially an improvement on the in-application messaging to provide more real-time feedback between users in the system. In his demo, he makes use of the Vue.js framework heavily and custom broadcasters and Pusher.

In this DevX tutorial, Octavia Anghel shows how use PHP to create images based on the SVG libraries available to any browser.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML specification for producing vector-based graphic content that you can create, modify, and manipulate dynamically from programming languages. Here, you'll explore the most important techniques and libraries for integrating SVG with PHP to create diverse graphic content—from simple shapes to complex graphs.

They show a few different ways to get the job done including a straight 'echo' call with the output, sending a converted SVG document over with a PHP header or including another (or multiple) SVG documents into another and outputting them. They also talk about tools like the phpHtmlLib library, the PEAR::XML_SVG package and the PEAR::Image_Canvas package.

John Lim has posted about an interesting bug he's come across when working with the output of two strings that should look the same:

Someone reported a bug in ADOdb, the open source db library i maintain. I went crazy for half an hour until i realised the problem.

According to him, "if you expect the above code to produce the same values, you are sadly mistaken". His example gives an interesting result for the first echo statement - not echoing the 9 in the first character like it seems would make sense. Check out his post for the code and try it out for yourself.

DevShed continues their look at design patterns in PHP with this last installment of their Memento pattern series - "Using the Memento Pattern with a File Reading Class".

Let me now introduce the topics that I'll be covering in this last article of the series. I'll show you how to use the memento pattern to keep track of some properties that correspond to a file reading class. In this way we'll construct a flexible mechanism for moving back and forth between file lines.

They create both of the needed classes for the pattern to work - the originator and the caretaker class - to handle the reading of the files. The code for both is pretty cut and paste-able, so there's no problem getting your example to work. With those constructed, they tie them together with an example of the design pattern in action - reading and displaying the lines of a text file to the user.

DevShed continues their look at design patterns in PHP with this last installment of their Memento pattern series - "Using the Memento Pattern with a File Reading Class".

Let me now introduce the topics that I'll be covering in this last article of the series. I'll show you how to use the memento pattern to keep track of some properties that correspond to a file reading class. In this way we'll construct a flexible mechanism for moving back and forth between file lines.

They create both of the needed classes for the pattern to work - the originator and the caretaker class - to handle the reading of the files. The code for both is pretty cut and paste-able, so there's no problem getting your example to work. With those constructed, they tie them together with an example of the design pattern in action - reading and displaying the lines of a text file to the user.

Via a post over on digg.com today, there's an interesting little tool called HTML2PHP that could be useful in some certain situations.

The tool takes in whatever text input you have and performs operations on it. For example, paste in some HTML and hit the button to submit it and out the other side pops HTML formatted to echo in PHP (using print). There are other options on the tool - the ability to use printf and echo along with print, to add in newlines, and to add parenthesis (depending on your preference).

It's nothing overly impressive, but if you have a large block of HTML that you need to work with, you might check into it...

Via a post over on digg.com today, there's an interesting little tool called HTML2PHP that could be useful in some certain situations.

The tool takes in whatever text input you have and performs operations on it. For example, paste in some HTML and hit the button to submit it and out the other side pops HTML formatted to echo in PHP (using print). There are other options on the tool - the ability to use printf and echo along with print, to add in newlines, and to add parenthesis (depending on your preference).

It's nothing overly impressive, but if you have a large block of HTML that you need to work with, you might check into it...