On the Pineco.de blog they've posted a tutorial for those out there using Laravel's request and response handling to add in macros to modify the information in the request/response based on custom logic.

We’ve already talked about the power of the collection macros. Now let’s take a look at the request and response macros as well to explore the possibilities that extending their functionality offers.

The tutorial starts by showing the creation of a filter request macro. This macro pulls the information out of the response and removes data that contains null values. Similarly, they show how to create a toSpecialFormat macro on the response, formatting the response as a JSON message rather than normal output.

On the Pineco.de blog they've posted a new tutorial showing how to extend the Collection functionality of Laravel with the help of macros.

Collections are fantastic features of the framework. With the functionality that the collection offers, we can easily handle any need that a dataset requires. But still, in some cases, we may extend with custom functionality.

The post starts with a more general look at what collection macros are and a few code snippets of them in action. To illustrate how to extend them, they create a "some" macro that takes in an anonymous function containing some kind of logic to check the key/value passed to it and return a boolean. The post finishes up by linking to the macro documentation and another package that implements a wide range of additional macros (like "extract", "paginate", "tail" and "transpose").

On the Laravel News blog they've posted a tutorial with some helpful tips for improving your routing in your Laravel-based application.

The Laravel router has a great, well-polished API when you first dive into Laravel as a beginner or newcomer to the framework. What follows is not anything hidden or new, but a few tips that should help you when you’re learning Laravel 5.

The documentation is excellent, and the tips that follow supplement and piece together a few parts that will help you get a quick jumpstart on learning how to use routing in your Laravel applications.

The tips include:

• Custom Namespaces
• Route Macros
• Debugging Routes
• Named Group Routes

Each of the tips include the code needed to implement them and a brief summary of why they're useful.

Freek Van der Herten has posted about a new package that's essentially a stand-alone version of Laravel's own "macros" functionality available via a package: macroable.

We recently released our newest package called macroable. It contains a trait that, when applied to class, can dynamically add methods to that class. This trait is basically a stand alone version of the macroable trait in Laravel. In this post I’d like to show you how you can use it, how it works behind the scenes and explain why we created it.

He then gives examples of how it can be used to add a new simple method (essentially a "named closure") and using the "mixin" functionality to add multiple at once. He wraps up the post with a look at how it works behind the scenes, adding the items to a "macros" list and then looking them up if they're not defined on the class.

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".

Fabien Potencier is back with a new post on his site following up this article about application composition and Symfony 4. In his latest post he compares two approaches to applications: micro versus macro.

Monolith projects versus micro-applications; a never-ending debate. Both ways to develop applications are fine in my book. Symfony supports both. Even if the Symfony Standard Edition is probably more suitable for monolith projects as it depends on the symfony/symfony package.

[...] Silex took another approach where each individual components are required when needed. Does it make Silex simpler, more lightweight, or faster than Symfony? No. Nevertheless, Symfony 4 is going to be more similar to Silex in this regard.

He talks about changes upcoming in Symfony 4 including the move away from the "symfony/symfony" package system and in with a component/bundle driven system. He gets into a specific example around the "symfony-framework" bundle. He then comes back around to the idea of "composition" of applications, adding Symfony dependencies only when needed but still having them work together seamlessly. The post ends with a discussion that was had about going the "bundle-less application" route and, while Symfony 4 will recommend it, the bundle system will still function as expected.

In this post to his site Nicola Malizia briefly helps you understand the Laravel "macroable" trait - what it is and how to can be used in your own code.

If you check the Laravel codebase I’m sure that you can observe that Laravel makes use of traits.

There is one trait in the source code that pulls my attention. I’m talking about the Macroable trait. In case you don’t know, you can define custom responses using macros.

He includes an example of extending the default Response class with a "caps" macro and how it would then be used in the resulting object. He talks about how traits work in PHP OOP code and how they can be used to "inherit" functionality into a class. The "macroable" trait then uses the __call magic method to do its thing, looking for macros that match the function being called.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted another tutorial from author Christopher Pitt sharing another one of his "interesting things" you can do with PHP. In this latest article Christopher returns to the idea of "macros" to help with some pre-processing in PHP applications and, ultimately, creating a new language feature without some of the usual overhead.

Let’s have a bit of fun. A while ago, I experimented with PHP macros, adding Python range syntax. Then, the talented SaraMG mentioned an RFC, and LordKabelo suggested instead adding C#-style getters and setters to PHP.

Aware of how painfully slow it can be for an outsider to suggest and implement a new language feature, I took to my editor…

He starts with a brief refresher on macros to do some pre-processing on PHP scripts and allow you to make custom language features that then get interpreted into valid PHP (often with some interesting eval tricks involved). He starts by building a "base" to add in the C# style getters and setters in a special format inside of a class. He includes the macro definitions to set this up and the result once it is passed through the "yay" precompiler. To get around having to run that precompiler every time manually, he creates a custom autoloader to do the job dynamically. He then takes this logic and packages it up so it can be easily installed as a Composer dependency. With this structure in place, he moves on to the creation of a new language feature - the actual functionality for the getter/setters. He ends the post with a screen capture showing the language feature in use and some of the interesting things you can do with it.

Freek Van der Herten has a post to his site with a guide about debugging collections in Laravel applications. He quickly shows how to use the "macro" functionality to gather more insight into what's happening inside.

Lately I’ve been working a lot with collections in Laravel. If you’re not in the know: a collection is a sort of super charged array with a lot of powerful functions to transform the data inside it. The only thing I found a bit of a hassle is how to debug the various steps in a collection chain. Here’s how I improved the workflow.

He shows a simple collection setup with a chain of functions being applied to transform the data inside (ex: filter, map, sortBy). He was able to get a bit more information by using the dd helper Laravel provides but it's not the most "clean" way to just wrap the collection on it. Instead he proposes he use of a "macro" to call the dd function and keep it in the flow of the methods called on the collection (as ->dd()).

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted from author Christopher Pitt continuing on his look at macros in PHP (part one is here). In this new tutorial he gets beyond the basic example he provided in part one and recreate some expressive syntax from Javascript and prefixing strings.

I was so excited about my previous article about PHP macros, that I thought it would be fun for us to explore the intersection of macros and functional programming. PHP is already full of functions, with object oriented patterns emerging relatively late in its life. Still, PHP’s functions can be cumbersome, especially when combined with variable scope rules…

[...] It’s not significantly more code [to append the prefix in PHP vs Javascript], but it isn’t as clear or idiomatic as the JavaScript alternative. I often miss JavaScript’s expressive, functional syntax, when I’m building PHP things. I want to try and win back some of that expressive syntax!

He starts with a quick install of the yay library used in the first part of the series. Instead of the manual prefixing from his first example, he creates a macro that uses the array_map handling to generate the necessary code once the pre-compiler has done its job. He then expands on this simpler solution and updates it to allow for the setting of the prefix string. It gets a little complex but he walks through each step of the way, explaining the code that's added and what it expands out to. The result is a map method that generates a bit of code that's eval-ed to handle the prefixing automatically.