On the Laravel News site there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to integrate your Laravel application with StatsD for statistics gathering. StatsD is a project from Etsy that runs as a Node.js platform and listens for incoming connections providing statistics to record to the system.

I want to show you some tools and techniques you can use to measure anything and everything that you want in your Laravel applications with StatsD. These ideas are simple and not new; yet, I believe that the simplicity and power are what makes StatsD great.

You can also take the ideas in this article and apply them to any programming language or stack. Instrumenting your code can have a huge payoff as your application scales and can help you gain deep insights.

The post starts off by talking about how integrating new features like this should be as painless as possible and some about what StatsD provides. It then talks about "instrumentation" of your code and how metrics can provide insight into what your code is doing and how well it does it. It shows you how to set up the Graphite/StatsD Docker container and how to install the league/statsd package to help make the connection to the server. The post wraps up with some examples of statistics you might want to measure and the code to increment/decrement values in both normal code and middleware (including controller execution time).

Joshua Thjissen has a post to his site looking at a relatively common operation in PHP code - incrementing values - but gets a lot more in-depth than just a simple overview.

Take a variable, increment it with 1. That sounds like a simple enough job right? Well.. from a PHP developer point of view that might seem the case, but is it really? There are bound to be some catches to it (otherwise we wouldn’t write a blogpost about it). So, there are a few different ways to increment a value, and they MIGHT seem similar, they work and behave differently under the hood of PHP, which can lead to – let’s say – interesting results.

He starts with the most basic situations, updating known integer values, but shows the curious things that can happen when the same operations are done on strings. He digs down into the bytecode that's generated from these bits of code, showing the order of operations when the code is actually executed. He then gets into more detail on each kind of operator, starting with the unary increment operator then moving on to the add assignment expression and add operator. For each he describes the behind the scenes bytcode actions happening and where in the PHP source code its being handled (and how).

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/form/view/type/addnews PHPDeveloper.org: PHP News, Views, and Community In a new post Paul Jones points out some of the new behaviors that the extension is showing in the latest of the PHP 5 seres (version 5.2).

He starts with a code example that would work with a previous version of PHP/PDO that would allow for the binding of a single value to multiple places in the SQL statement. But:

Sadly, this is no longer the case in PHP 5.2.1. For valid reasons of security and stability in memory handling, as noted to me by Wez Furlong, the above behavior is no longer supported. That is, you cannot bind a single parameter or value to multiple identical placeholders in a statement. If you try it, PDO will throw an exception or raise an error, and will not execute the query. In short, you now need to match exactly the number of bound parameters or values with the number of placeholders.

Unfortunately, this is used quite often in Paul's Solar framework, so an update to the Solar_Sql_Adapter::query() method has had to been made to allow for the binding of multiple items automatically. It works by incrementing the bind location (like ":foo") with numbers at the end - simple and effective - and you can still pass an array to it and have it automagically work.

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/form/view/type/addnews PHPDeveloper.org: PHP News, Views, and Community In a new post Paul Jones points out some of the new behaviors that the extension is showing in the latest of the PHP 5 seres (version 5.2).

He starts with a code example that would work with a previous version of PHP/PDO that would allow for the binding of a single value to multiple places in the SQL statement. But:

Sadly, this is no longer the case in PHP 5.2.1. For valid reasons of security and stability in memory handling, as noted to me by Wez Furlong, the above behavior is no longer supported. That is, you cannot bind a single parameter or value to multiple identical placeholders in a statement. If you try it, PDO will throw an exception or raise an error, and will not execute the query. In short, you now need to match exactly the number of bound parameters or values with the number of placeholders.

Unfortunately, this is used quite often in Paul's Solar framework, so an update to the Solar_Sql_Adapter::query() method has had to been made to allow for the binding of multiple items automatically. It works by incrementing the bind location (like ":foo") with numbers at the end - simple and effective - and you can still pass an array to it and have it automagically work.