Vladimir Goncharov has a tutorial posted to his Medium.com site showing how to integrate machine learning and computer vision into a PHP application using the opencv library. The php-opencv library is a C-level implementation (via an extension) making it easer to use it directly from PHP.

Now, “Machine learning” is developing very fast, it has already written a lot of articles, including the ones on the medium, and almost every developer would like to start using it in their work tasks and home projects, but where to start and what to use is not always understandable. Most articles for beginners offer a bunch of literature, on the reading of which there is not enough life, “inexpensive” courses, etc.

[...] I was considering writing a php-opencv module by myself using SWIG and spent a lot of time on it, but I did not achieve anything. [...] Then I found the library of php-opencv on the github space, it is a module for php7, which makes calls to opencv methods.

He then starts in on the code making use of the library to read in images, perform face detection, facial recognition, and locating facial marks/landmarks. He also includes a section covering the use of neural networks to improve the quality of images, classify them and the use of Tensorflow models to detect certain kinds of objects. The post ends with a look at getting the requirements installed to use the tool and links to other examples.

On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted a new tutorial showing you how to analyze tweet sentiments using a combination of PHP and machine learning (with the help of the php-ai/php-ml library).

As of late, it seems everyone and their proverbial grandma is talking about Machine Learning. [...] Yes, what about Machine Learning and PHP? Fortunately, someone was crazy enough not only to ask that question, but to also develop a generic machine learning library that we can use in our next project. In this post we are going take a look at PHP-ML – a machine learning library for PHP – and we’ll write a sentiment analysis class that we can later reuse for our own chat or tweet bot.

The post then starts in with some of the basics of machine learning and sentiment analysis and briefly introduces the php-ml library and what functionality it offers. It then outlines the problem they're trying to solve and the solution including what data points php-ml will use to determine the sentiment of a tweet. The author shows how to get the php-ml package installed, how to read in the data set and how to "exercise" the sentiment analysis against the tweets. It describes how the evaluation works and shows the accuracy result of a basic run.

In his latest post Juozas Kaziukenas shares a video of his "From PHP to Machine Code" talk he presented at the PHP UK Conference earlier this year (2016).

I recently gave a talk at a few conferences titled “From PHP to Machine Code”. It explains how compilers and interpreters work in general, where are the performance gains to be found and how I applied all of that to build PyHP. PyHP is a little toy project which showcases the basics of taking source code of a programming language and executing it.

As I mention a few times in the talk, it is completely and utterly useless for practical use, but it’s one of the fundamental skill-sets for any programmer. I think knowing how a bunch of text makes a computer do things at the low level is required knowledge for everyone.

The video of the presentation is embedded in the post or you can watch it directly over on YouTube if you'd like. In it he walks you through the entire process that happens from the time the PHP is executed all the way down to opcodes and bytecodes.

In this recent post to the JetBrains blog they show how to set up and configure the Docker support the latest version includes built in to the IDE.

Docker is an open platform for building, shipping and running distributed applications. It gives programmers, development teams and operations engineers the common toolbox they need to take advantage of the distributed and networked nature of modern applications.

With the new Docker integration plugin for PhpStorm, you can add Docker support to existing projects, view logs, manage Docker containers, and debug PHP web applications from right inside PhpStorm.

They help you get the integration plugin installed and show you where the machine should be located and how to set it up under PHPStorm's deployment options. Next up they include the steps for getting the Docker machine up and running (again, inside the IDE) and managing the containers related to the machine.

On the Dutch Web Alliance site there's a recent post from Michael Rook introducing you to using Docker with PHP. Docker is a configurable system allowing you to script the creation and setup of an environment, piecing software and components together in an easy, reproducible way.

Docker is currently one of the hottest technologies around, because it solves a very specific problem: the ability to easily package and deploy a (self contained) application, without the overhead of traditional virtualization solutions. In this post you’ll learn how to build, run and host Docker containers, integrate with other containers, and see how Vagrant interacts with Docker.

The post walks you through the steps you'll need to get an instance up and running with PHP setup and configured:

• Installing Docker
• Creating and starting a container
• Dependencies: linking containers
• Using Docker & Vagrant

In the end, you'll have a virtual instance and environment with PHP installed. All commands and configuration/code needed is included in the post.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Matthew Setter introduces you to a tool that can help make the setup and configuration of your Vagrant/Puppet development environments a lot easier - PuPHPet.

I can't speak for you, but one of my pet peeves about software development is environments. Whether it's creating and maintaining them for different projects with different needs; ensuring environment parity across a development team, (especially when they're remote); or between environments such as development, testing, and production. Across all of these, it can be a laborious task, especially when done manually. [...] In pursuit of ending this pain and making the entire process as efficient as possible, I set about the task of learning Vagrant & Puppet. [...] However, like most people in the modern world, I'm impatient. Like you, I have a lot going on, plus I was not seeking to become a guru. I felt there must be a way to come up to speed quickly but without becoming an aficionado.

This "better way" cam in the form of PuPHPet, a GUI tool (web-based) that lets you specify the options you want included in the configuration and generates the needed configuration files for you. This tool (created by Juan Treminio) makes it a lot simpler to get up and running quickly. Matthew walks you through a sample configuration and, with screenshots, and show you how to specify options for things like the web server, server software to install and PHP extensions to include.

On JavaWorld.com there's a new article posted about an update Facebook has made to their HipHop virtual machine (HHVM) version that is supposed to execute PHP nine times faster than its normal rate.

Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems.

An engineering manager for Facebook pointed out the goal of the update - "to make PHp run really, really quickly." The HHVM compiles down the PHP code into C and executes it directly, removing the need for the PHP interpreter.

HHVM is the next step for Facebook. Under development for about three years, HHVM actually works on the same principle as the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). HHVM has a JIT (just-in-time) compiler that converts the human readable source code into machine-readable byte code when it is needed. (The previous HipHop, renamed HPHPc, has now been retired within Facebook.)

You can find out more about the HipHop virtual machine over on Facebook.

Allan MacGregor has posted a (high level) introduction to the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) that was created by Facebook to address some of their PHP-related needs inside their platform. It sacrifices some things in the name of speed and less resource consumption.

In early 2008 Facebook began working on HipHop(now HPHP), a PHP execution engine; its original motivation was to convert Facebook massive PHP code base into C++ in order to save resources and increase the application performance. [...] At it’s peak, HipHop PHP code showed up to 6x times better performance than its ZEND counterpart. However, there where several drawbacks to this first iteration of HipHop. [...] At the same time Facebook started the development of the modern version of HipHop, known as HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine), HHVM improves the strengths of HPHPc and corrects many of the critical problems.

He talks some about Facebook's efforts to open source the platform and what the HipHop VM does to make your PHP code execute that much faster. It's all about bytecode, machine code and a JIT (just in time) compiler where the bytecode is parsed during execution instead of before.

Currently HHVM supports PHP 5.4 almost on its entirety, however there are still numerous bugs that prevent some applications from running, for that reason Facebook has set as goal to have the top 20 open source PHP applications running on HHVM. The first popular application to achieve this was Wordpress.

Justin Carmony has shared his success story about the use of Vagarant and PHP as a platform to make setting up and configuring developers' environments simple.

Now-a-days, you have frameworks that need to be setup [as a part of your environment], include paths that need to be changed, modules that need to be installed, web servers that need to be configured for your routing, etc. Then you might not just have MySQL, but Redis, Mongo, Couch, Memcached, Postgres, or any other dozen other servers. Then in Production you might have load balancers, multiple web servers, clusters of databases, and the list goes on. Simply put: web development environments are complex.

He introduces Vagrant and talks a bit about how it helped them with the setup and configuration of two new remote developers they had limited contact with. After some initial quirks, Vagrant made it simple for them to get up and running with new environments in a day.

In this new post Juan Terminio shows you how to set up a new virtual machine (VM) that hosts a Debian system (replacing the setup of his previous tutorial for setup of a Ubuntu system) in VirutalBox.

Previously, I created a tutorial on installing a 32-bit Ubuntu VM with PHP 5.3.x. I’ve since moved on to PHP 5.4.x and Debian, which is universally considered a safer bet for a server OS. This tutorial is what I will point back to in the future when I want to show people how to create a VM, so you should consider the Ubuntu-based tutorial obsolete. In reality, Ubuntu is based on Debian, so the bulk of this tutorial will be very similar to the Ubuntu one, albeit with some minor changes here and there.

He starts with a few reasons to use a VM over the more traditional single development system mentality including keeping the "server" off your desktop and the dev-to-production similarity needs. He shows how to use the VirtualBox software and a Debian ISO to create the VM, complete with screenshots of each step of the way (for both host and guest OSes). He also helps you get a few things installed including sudo, setting up the network, configuring the hosts file and installing some common utilities as well as the MySQL, Apache, PHP and Samba combination (with PHP compiled from the 5.4.x source).