The php[architect] podcast, hosted by Eric van Johnson and John Congdon, has posted their latest episode today: Episode #7 - Know Your Tools.

Eric and John dive into the Know Your Tools issue for the month of February 2018.

Topics mentioned in this episode include the contents of the February article, mentions of Drupal, Symfony and Scout as well as a mention of the upcoming php[tek] conference. They also interview Ed Barnard, the author of the magazine's "Education Station" column. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when new shows are released.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has posted a tutorial introducing you to Xdebug, the powerful debugging tool for PHP applications.

It’s been 15 years since Xdebug first came out. We think this is the perfect opportunity to re-introduce it to the world, and explain how and why it does what it does. Xdebug is a PHP extension (meaning it needs to be compiled and installed into a PHP installation) which provides the developer with some features for debugging.

It starts off by explaining some of the functionality that Xdebug brings to your debugging practices and the features that can help make it flow a little easier. It talks about how it differs from some of the IDE debugging tools and services like Blackfire.io. Next up is the example putting it to use and what the resulting errors look like. The post then gets into the integration of Vagrant with PhpStorm, using the profiler and how to force the rendering in Laravel output (it normally overrides the exception output with its own formatting).

NetTuts.com has posted their own "what you must know" about the recently released (major) upgrade to the PHP language - PHP 5.4.

PHP 5.4 is here; the next major step forward since version 5.3 – keeping PHP 6 (full Unicode support) on hold for now. The latest enhancements significantly improve its elegance, while removing deprecated functionality, resulting in a dramatic optimization of the runtime (up to 20% more speed and memory usage reduction).

They hit all of the highlights:

• Traits
• Built-in CLI Web-Server
• Shorter Array Syntax
• Array Dereferencing
• $this In Anonymous Functions
• <?= is Always On
• Binary Number Representation
• Callable Typehint
• Initialized High Precision Timer

Code examples are provided where relevant.

The DevTheWeb.net blog is back again with the second installment of "Things You Probably Didn't Know About PHP" - some lesser known facts about the popular web language (part one is here).

Some of the things on his list this time include:

• Using the type matching equality operators (like "===" versus just "==")
• Returning multiple values by reference
• Chaining method calls
• Returning the value of print_r as a string
• Using the mysqli functions instead of just mysql

The International PHP Magazine has conducted a poll on its website over the past week, this time asking "You Did Not Know That...", asking developers which of the true statements about PHP they didn't know about.

The options this time were:

• The trailing '?>' in PHP is Optional
• You can embed other programming languages in PHP
• Objects can be made to look like arrays by using Standard PHP Library
• require is faster than require_once
• Anything Less than 5.1.0 is Silly
• All

There wasn't a whole lot of difference in the results of this poll, but the most all-inclusive of the list was the one selected the most - "All". Following that, was that the trailing closing PHP tag is optional, then a tie for third between the "embed other languages" and "Less than PHP 5.1.0" options.

Be sure to cast your vote in their latest poll that asks readers that they're really looking for in their frameworks.

The International PHP Magazine has conducted a poll on its website over the past week, this time asking "You Did Not Know That...", asking developers which of the true statements about PHP they didn't know about.

The options this time were:

• The trailing '?>' in PHP is Optional
• You can embed other programming languages in PHP
• Objects can be made to look like arrays by using Standard PHP Library
• require is faster than require_once
• Anything Less than 5.1.0 is Silly
• All

There wasn't a whole lot of difference in the results of this poll, but the most all-inclusive of the list was the one selected the most - "All". Following that, was that the trailing closing PHP tag is optional, then a tie for third between the "embed other languages" and "Less than PHP 5.1.0" options.

Be sure to cast your vote in their latest poll that asks readers that they're really looking for in their frameworks.