Rob Allen has a tutorial posted to his site showing how you can run PHP using the serverless lambda functionality that Amazon Web Services provides.

There are other serverless providers, and AWS Lambda is the market leader, but until recently PHP support could most charitably described as cumbersome. That all changed at the end of 2018 with Lambda’s new runtime API and support for layers.

Let’s look at the practicalities of serverless PHP on Lambda with Serverless Framework.

If you'd like to skip to the "good parts" you can check out this repository of the resulting code. Otherwise, he provides a complete walkthrough of the setup and code required to get the lambda up and running:

• compiling the PHP binary on an EC2 instance (so it will be compatible)
• creating a bootstrap file for handling requests
• setting up the yml configuration for the Serverless framework
• writing the "hello world" function
• deploying to the lambda system

Finally he shows how to call the "hello" function using the command line and the response you should receive.

In a recent post to his site Eduards Sizvos shares an opinion that's believed by many in the development world: stop learning frameworks.

We are developers. We need to stay up to date with technology. Every day, we learn programming languages, frameworks, and libraries. The more modern tools we know?—?the better.

Keeping up to date with Angular, React, Vue, Riot, Ember, Knockout is fun.

But we are wasting our time.

He goes on to talk about time, how important it is to spend on the right things and offers a story of his own where learning specific technologies didn't help in the long run. He then shares some resources (books) to help you learn good concepts instead of specific tools.

Remember – frameworks, libraries and tools come and go. Time is precious. Invest your golden time in transferable skills. Skills that will always be relevant.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney, (former) lead developer on the Zend Framework and Expressive projects, has a new post to his site looking at the future of the Zend Framework and how priorities have shifted.

For the past thirteen years, I've been either consuming Zend Framework or directly contributing to it. Since 2009, I've operated as project lead, and, since then, shepherded the version 2 and 3 releases, added Apigility to the ZF ecosystem, and helped bring middleware paradigms to the mainstream by assisting with the creation of Stratigility and coordination of the Expressiveproject.

[...] In the last three years, I have performed this work under the umbrella of Rogue Wave Software, who acquired Zend in 2015. However, Rogue Wave has recently made a strategic decision to focus its efforts on the Zend Server product of the Zend portfolio.

He also points out that the team largely responsible for the framework and building it over the years (himself, Enrico Zimuel, Zeev Suraski and Dmitry Stogo) will be leaving Rogue Wave and looking for other employment. Don't worry Zend Framework fans - they're going to do everything they can to keep the framework and its ecosystem alive! They're already looking for other sponsors (corporate or otherwise) so let Matthew know if you might be able to help!

Over the past several weeks the Symfony project blog has released a series of posts detailing new features in the 4.2 release of the framework. Here's the current listing of those posts:

• Simpler functional tests
• DivisibleBy constraint
• Autowiring by type and name
• PDO-based lock storage
• Console tables improvements
• SameSite cookie configuration
• VarExporter component

Each post includes a summary of the changes or additions and some example code and configuration showing it in use.

TJ Miller has written up a post for his site sharing a method he's created to verify the compatibility of a package in Laravel based on the version of Laravel installed.

I’ve been working with Honeybadger to build a new set of PHP integrations. I would like to write more about that soon, however, I feel like I’ve stumbled across something that could be useful to others. I wanted to share it as soon as I could.

For the Laravel package, I was aiming for Laravel 5.5 and newer support as it is the latest LTS version. [...] In hindsight, I don’t think that I actually ever tested it against a 5.5 install. I relied on the CI process to make those verifications for me.

[...] As Laravel 5.7 is now out, I needed to add support to both the package’s composer configuration and verification in CI. [...] Now that I am supporting three versions I felt that I needed a more specific way of verifying compatibility with different versions of Laravel.

He shares his initial version of his Travis-CI configuration, running tests on PHP 7.1 and 7.2 with the prefer-lowest flag. In order to make it easier, he updated this based on what he'd seen in other packages: adding a matrix that runs PHP 7.1 through 7.3 against versions 5.5.x, 5.6.x and 5.7.x to ensure compatibility across all variations. His resulting build looks something like this.

On the Laravel News site they highlight a change in the way that the "gates" handling works in the v5.7 release of the popular framework. In this change you can now allow "guest" users into certain parts of your system.

In Laravel 5.6 and below authorization gates and policies automatically return false for unauthenticated users. New in Laravel 5.7, you can now allow guests to go through authorization checks by using a nullable type-hint or setting the default value as null:

[...] By using a nullable type hint the $user variable will be null when a guest user is passed to the gate, and you can then make decisions about authorizing the action. If you allow nullable types and return true, then the guest will have authorization.

The post includes a code snippet showing how to put it to use and the resulting 403 page they would get otherwise. You can find out more about other new features of Laravel v5.7 in this other article.

As is mentioned in this new post from the Laravel News site, the latest product in the Laravel ecosystem - Laravel Nova - is now available for purchase.

We expected a Nova release at Laracon EU 2018 around the same time that Laravel 5.7 is due out. In an unexpected move (and in light of many people wanting to get their hands on Nova early) Taylor decided to ship Nova.

[...] Laravel Nova works with both Laravel 5.6 and the upcoming release of Laravel 5.7, so rest assured that it works with the latest stable version.

So what's Nova? It describes itself as "a beautifully designed administration panel for Laravel. Carefully crafted by the creators of Laravel to make you the most productive developer in the galaxy." It provides most of the functionality you'd expect from an administration panel including user management, model (resource) details, metrics and the ability to extend via custom functionality. The per-site pricing is relatively affordable and has two levels: Solo for $99 and Pro for $199.

On the Laravel News site they've posted an announcement recommending all Laravel 5.6.x and 5.5.x users upgrade to the latest release (5.6.30 & 5.5.42) due to a security issue dealing with the APP_KEY value.

Laravel 5.6.30 and Laravel 5.5.42 have both been released to fix a security issue and is recommended that all users upgrade as soon as possible.

This update also includes changes to cookie encryption and serialization logic. In addition to the upgrade, they also recommend rotating the key if you believe any malicious user (or former developer/employee) had access to it. The upgrade guide has the information you need to make the update to your application.

On the Symfony blog there's a post covering some of the recent improvements in the framework that can help to make creating and updating Symfony projects faster via some recent changes speeding up the Composer installation.

A few years ago, we introduced the Symfony Installer as the fastest way to create new Symfony projects. While Composer took up to several minutes to create a new project, Symfony Installer did the same in less than ten seconds.

The trick was that the installer downloaded a ZIP archive with all the dependencies required by the specific Symfony version you were installing, so it was not necessary that Composer resolved the project dependencies.

However, with the release of Symfony 4 we deprecated the Symfony Installer in favor of Composer, because we wanted to use standard development tools as much as possible. Sadly this made creating new Symfony projects slower and, in some cases, it triggered "out of memory" exceptions while Composer was resolving the dependencies.

The post talks about the changes they made to the Composer installation process, mentioning the two major changes: including a composer.lock to prevent version resolution and removal of all legacy Composer tags. They also share some benchmarks for the installation both before and after the changes showing a jump of at least ten seconds post-changes.

Matt Sparks has posted the next tutorial in his "Building a PHP framework" series to his site today. In this latest article (part seven in the series) he focuses on building the container to handle dependencies.

Part 6 began our discussion of PHP containers. Today, I’ll be going into greater detail of the subject and, along with that, I’ll run down the work done so far on the Analyze container.

A huge debt of gratitude goes how to the folks behind the PHP League Container and others. I’ve learned a ton studying their code.

He then walks through the use of the container he created, Analyze/Container, to create and extract a Carbon instance. He then covers how the container is working behind the scenes to initialize the instance complete with dependencies (and optional arguments).