On his Medium.com site Nicolas Grekas talks about a new RFC that's been proposed to provide a safer method for serializing and unserializing values in native PHP functionality.

PHP serialization/unserialization has several drawbacks. [...] To mitigate these security issues, the unserialize() function handles an allowed_classes option since PHP 7.0. Implementing Serializable has this security-mitigation advantage of allowing authors to filter the allowed classes in the subgraph managed by their objects. This feature is only a mitigation because not all use cases know all the possible classes beforehand.

He starts by listing out some of the issues with both the current implementations of serialization and unserialization in PHP. From there he makes a proposal for some new functionality to help make things a bit more sane:

• a __serialize magic method
• a new S type representing serialized data
• a new __unserialize magic method
• automatic protection around destructors during the unserialization process

He finishes up the post talking about some of the expected benefits of this kind of functionality and a few of the extra considerations that would need to be thought through as a part of the implementation.

In a quick post to his site Sameer Borate looks more in-depth at how MVC routers work to translate the incoming request and point it to the right code for handling.

A MVC Router class or a Dispatcher inspects the URL of an HTTP request and attempts to match individual URL components to a Controller and a method defined in that controller, passing along any arguments to the method defined.

He provides the code for a simple example, matching the path directly from $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] to a key name in a set of routes. Routes are added to the list via an add_routes method and are only matched directly. This is the most basic version of a router with many other frameworks stacking features on top including wildcard matching, optional parameters and regular expression matching.

In a new post to his site Freek Van der Herten covers how some of the changes that happened in Laravel's v5.5 release would impact the packages Spatie shares, some of the more popular PHP packages with a wide range of functionality.

At Spatie we’ve released a auto-discovery facades functionality, LTS releases and how some new functionality replaces (retires) packages Spatie had already released.

Laravel 5.5 is probably the best release yet. But, in all honesty, I think that of every Laravel release. My recommendation is to get your apps upgraded to this version as soon as possible. The reward is that you can make use of all L5.5’s new features and the latest major versions of our packages.

The Laravel News site has a quick post sharing an interesting Javascript library that brings the functionality of Laravel's collections over from PHP to the world of Javascript.

Collect.js is a port of Laravel Collections to JavaScript. It’s dependency free and makes working with arrays and objects easy. [...] It’s almost a one to one map with the Laravel version and it even includes the fairly new Collection Tap method.

There are some differences, however, including the requirement that all comparisons use strict equality versus the looser version PHP allows. The post includes the npm install command to get the library installed, gives a simple example of it in use and links to both the GutHub repo and the NPM page for more details.

The Symfony blog has posted an article showing you how to prepare your applications for a migration to PHP 7 with the help of various polyfill libraries. These libraries make it possible to use PHP 7 functionality in non-PHP 7 applications if the function in use isn't defined.

According to the May 2017 PHP Stats, 53% of PHP developers use PHP 7.0 or 7.1, but only 10% of Composer packages require PHP 7.0 or higher. In fact, 1 in 4 packages still require PHP 5.3, which is used by less than 1% of developers.

[...] Upgrading your development machines is usually a simple task, but upgrading the rest of the infrastructure (servers, tools, etc.) usually requires more resources. This is where Symfony Polyfills can help you preparing the code of your application for PHP 7.

The article briefly explains what polyfills are and how to load in the current Symfony set via a Composer install. There've provided functionality for PHP versions 5.4 through 5.6 as well as PHP 7.0 and 7.1 to ensure you have the most up to date functionality at your fingertips.

Sebastian De Deyne has written up a post to his site spotlighting PHP's list function and showing how it can be used for "array destructuring" and how recent changes in PHP 7.1.x make it more useful.

PHP 7.1 introduced a new syntax for the list() function. I've never really seen too much list() calls in the wild, but it enables you to write some pretty neat stuff.

This post is a primer of list() and it's PHP 7.1 short notation, and an overview of some use cases I've been applying them to.

He starts with a basic introduction to the list function and how it assigns out variables based on an array. He then shows examples of the updates that came with PHP 7.1, allowing you to specify the key from an array to more selectively extract only the value you want. Three "exhibits" are then provided, showing actual use cases for this functionality: basicunpacking examples, creating tuples and handling multiple return values.

If you're relatively new to the PHP language and are just getting your feet wet, the massive amounts of array functionality included in the language could be confusing. This is where this new article on the TutsPlus.com site comes in, showing you how to work with PHP arrays "the right way".

n this tutorial, I am going to make a list of common PHP array functions with examples of usage and best practices. Every PHP developer must know how to use them and how to combine array functions to make code readable and short.

Also, there is a presentation with given code examples, so you can download it from the related links and show it to your colleagues to build a stronger team.

He starts out with some of the basics around using arrays in PHP and then quickly moves into other topics:

• shortening code with functions like list
• using the filtering functions
• walking through array values
• joining arrays
• generating arrays
• sorting the contents of arrays

He ends the post with a look at combining array functions to make it simpler to do things like remove empty values or return just the top three values.

On the Tighten.co blog there's a recent post showing off some of the magic of Laravel macros and how they can make extending the basic framework functionality simpler.

Ever wanted a piece of functionality in a part of Laravel that doesn’t exist? Let me introduce you to Laravel macros. Macros allow you to add on custom functionality to internal Laravel components.

He gives an example of adding a simple "introduce" macro on the Request facade and how to put it to use. He refactors this into something more useful: returning a true/false result when checking the TLD on the current domain. He includes the code to set up the macro in the AppServiceProvider and the addition of an enhancement that adds a "where" clause to a model query when the TLD matches. He wraps up the post giving some guidance on where they should be defined and what components in the Laravel framework are "macroable".

On the Laravel News site there's an announcement about the release of an SDK for the Forge API to make it easier to use the Laravel Forge API to manage your sites and servers.

Laravel Forge announced it’s first official API back in February and we have seen a lot of interesting uses like the F-Bar Mac app. Today, Mohamed Said released a PHP SDK for the API that covers all the features.

The post includes an example of using the SDK to create a new server on your Forge account, providing settings like size, name, region and provider. The post also lists out some of the other methods available in the SDK including:

• revokeAccess
• rebootMysql
• installBlackfire
• installPapertrail

You can find out more about this SDK on its GitHub repository.

The Laravel News site has a new post with an update for those looking forward to trying out Laravel "Scout", the search handling to be released along side the next Laravel framework release. The post announces that Laravel Scout is now open for developer testing directly from the live repository.

Laravel Scout is a driver based full-text search for Eloquent that is going to be available when Laravel 5.3 launches.

The driver is not officially released yet, however, the repository is now live and available for those that want to play with more engines. Taylor said he would be working on docs this week in anticipation of the official 5.3 release and this first release should only be used in testing until it’s officially launched.

If you're interested in more details about Scout, check out this post from Matt Stauffer with details and code examples.