On the Laravel News site they've posted a quick tutorial showing you how to change the path to views in a Laravel-based application.

In response to our post yesterday about Laravel 5.7 Resources Directory Changes, a reader mentioned that they would prefer to have their application views outside of the resources folder.

I thought I’d write up how you can customize the view path; it’s effortless with Laravel!

The change is made in the views.php configuration file, updating the value for the paths setting. You can point it to a single location (like the application path or resource path) or you can set multiple to tell the framework to search for the view in either. The post ends with a mention one thing to keep in mind about generating views and their location (and moving them around).

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.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has made a post on the Zend Framework blog about the release of PHP 7.2 support for Zend Expressive, now in version 3.

With Expressive 3 complete, we were able to turn our sights on another important initiative: PHP 7.2 support across all components and Apigilty modules.

The short story is: as of today, that initiative is complete! If you are using the Zend Framework MVC framework, Expressive, or Apigility, or any of the ZF components standalone, you should be able to perform a composer update to get versions that support PHP 7.2.

The full story is much longer.

He starts with a look at the path to get to PHP 7.2 support including the considerations for not breaking backwards compatibility as much as possible. He then moves on to the approach they took with changes to the Composer and Travis-CI configuration changes to make it easier to run the tests on multiple PHP versions (with multiple PHPUnit versions too). The post ends with a look ahead at four things coming soon including a PSR-7-based zend-mvc v4, work on the documentation and more tutorials/guides to help devs make the most of Zend Expressive.

Barry van Veen has a quick post on his site showing the Composer users out there how they can use a package from a local directory without having to go through the hassle of pushing it and adding it to Packagist.

Suppose you run a website and want to split part of it into a package with its own repository. You start a new repository and check it out on your development machine. But now you want to see how the website and your new package integrate. How to go about this?

This article explains how you can require a package from a local path into your project with Composer. This way you can run a local copy of a repository and test any changes you make. Because the local repo will be symlinked changes are shared in real-time, there is no need for intermediate committing and updating.

He shows how to update your composer.json configuration's repositories section to add an entry with a "type" value of "path". This then points to the location on the filesystem where the package resides. Then it's just a matter of requiring the dev-develop branch and the code will be treated just like any other package. He also includes a section showing how to handle things when symlinking fails, a problem that usually happens on Windows for VM users. Usually it's related to a permissions error for whatever user is running the VM.

Derick Rethans has a new post to his site starting a series of posts about the new features of Xdebug 2.3. In this new post he talks about an improvement that's been made to the output provided by var_dump with more information than before.

One of the new features relates to one of the first things that I added in the original Xdebug: making the var_dump() output "pretty". Xdebug replaces PHP's standard var_dump() function with its own version, as long as the xdebug.overload_var_dump setting is not set to 0. [...] Xdebug 2.3 enhances the overloading of var_dump() with the inclusion of the file name and line number where var_dump() is called at. This has been a long standing feature request.

He provides a few sample screenshots comparing the old and new output formats and mentions another handy setting, xdebug.file_link_format, that makes the resulting filename a link in a browser and lets you customize the format.

Stephan Hochdörfer has a quick post showing how he has PHPunit up and working on an HHVM instance. His problem was that the tests were actually executing using the "php" binary, not the HHVM one.

For quite some time we run the unit tests for our libs and tools against PHP and HHVM, at least that is what I thought up to now. As it turns out I missed a minor detail. [...] What happens now is that Phing is executed via HHVM but PHPUnit will still be executed via the PHP binary because the PHPUnit shell script will look for the php binary in the PATH configuration. Since we run HHVM side-by-side with PHP on our Jenkins build nodes I was not able to point /usr/bin/php to /usr/bin/hhvm - which would be the easiest and cleanest solution. I

He shares the workaround he created, creating a symbolic link between the hhvm and php binaries and then executing the Phing task to run the tests. This is being run via Jenkins and uses it's "WORKSPACE" as a container so the main "php" binary isn't overwritten.

In his latest post Stephan Hochdörfer shows you how to define Phing tasks according to the PSR-0 autoloading format. Phing is a PHP-based automation tool that uses an XML configuration to execute a series of tasks.

Before anybody complains: I know that "as of 2014-10-21 PSR-0 has been marked as deprecated. PSR-4 is now recommended as an alternative." - Anyway I still think this little gem makes sense to be shared because a lot of people are probably not aware of it. I recently found out by accident that it is possible pass a task name in PSR-0 style to the "taskdef" task. In the old days you had to use the Java-like dot-style notation like this and also define the classpath to make sure the class could be loaded correct! This is ok if the task resides in the same project. If the task is located in a dependent package loaded via Composer this can get ugly.

The post is quick but provides two very handy code examples, one showing the old "dot notation" version and the other showing how to make use of the autoloader. The trick is in the classname value and using the full namespace/class name rather than the dot notation.

In his latest post Derick Rethans talks about something that plagues every project, PHP or otherwise, after its grown to a large enough size: dead code. He's been asked why his Xdebug tool finds this code in places where people don't expect, so he figured he'd answer it once and for all.

The explanation for this is rather simple. Xdebug checks code coverage by adding hooks into certain opcodes. Opcodes are the building blocks of oparrays. PHP converts each element in your script - main body, method, function - to oparrays when it parses them. The PHP engine then executes those oparrays by running some code for each opcode. Opcodes are generated, but they are not optimised. Which means that it does not remove opcodes that can not be executed.

He gets down to the opcode level and shows some output from vld on how things are being executed (and what's not). Using a simple "foo" function example, he shows the execution flow and how the "branches" of executions work through the code. In his case, the "dead code" marker is coming from the line with a closing brace from an "if" statement. He points out that it entirely depends on the lines executed as to what is marked as "dead code".

PHPMaster.com has posted the fourth article in their "Data Structures for PHP Devs" series today, this time with a focus on graphs. He introduces some of the basic concepts behind them and covers two common problems that can be solved by them.

n one of my previous articles I introduced you to the tree data structure. Now I’d like to explore a related structure – the graph. Graphs have a number of real-world applications, such as network optimization, traffic routing, and social network analysis. Google’s PageRank, Facebook’s Graph Search, and Amazon’s and NetFlix’s recommendations are some examples of graph-driven applications. In this article I’ll explore two common problems in which graphs are used – the Least Number of Hops and Shortest-Path problems.

He explains graphs mathematically, describing them as a set of relationships between nodes and the "lines" that connect them. There's other things involved including directions and weight, but there's not too much detail on those. Instead he gets right into the problems. First is the "Least Number of Hops" and second the "Find the Shortest Path", each with some explanation and sample code of their implementation.

In his most recent post Anthony Ferrara takes a look at autoloading - mostly asking the question of whether the problems it has really outweigh the benefits.

The real problem that autoloaders solve is to load dependencies. [...] The normal logic that's used to justify autoloading over manual dependency loading in production is that it only loads the classes you need. Therefore you save the parsing costs of classes that you don't need. But surely that additional run-time loading has costs. So I decided to setup a test to see how expensive that additional run-time loading costs us, and to prove whether or not autoloading is worth it in production.

He gives an example of the two methods - using the spl_autoload_register method to define a loader and loading them with a defined file path instead. He found the autoloading version slower than the hard-coded (by quite a bit) but how, when the number of files is reduced, the performance gets much closer. He also briefly looks at two other pieces of file-related functionality: file_exists and require_once.