The Symfony Finland blog has posted a practical introduction to Typescript for PHP developers. TypeScript is a free and open-source programming language developed and maintained by Microsoft. It is a strict superset of JavaScript, and adds optional static typing and class-based object-oriented programming to the language.

A greenfield project might be a good way to try a technology, if the scope is limited and risk in general is low. For many kicking off a new project or undertaking a major rewrite is not an option, but you can still evolve and apply good ideas and fresh concepts in your work. The value of legacy in web development is understated.

This is an area I've found TypeScript to be very useful for and I think many developers can benefit from taking a closer look at it. TypeScript compiles down to JavaScript & can be adopted gradually, chances are you'll have plenty of code you can use it on.

They then cover five advantages about TypeScript that can help make adoption in your applications easier:

• Low overhead in getting started
• Great tooling for your favourite editor
• Familiar syntax for async programming
• Type Definition files
• Stability and adoption

For each section there's a brief summary of the point and, where applicable, a quick code example or screencast animation showing it in action.

Tom McFarlin has continued his series covering internationalization in WordPress applications with this latest part of the series. In the previous part of the series he introduced some of the basic topics and terms. In this new tutorial he gets more into functionality creating the plugin he'll use in his examples.

Given that WordPress powers roughly 25% of the web and that the web is not local to your country of origin, it makes sense to ensure that the work that we produce can be translated into other locations.

To be clear, this does not mean that you, as the developer, are responsible for translating all of the strings in your codebase into the various languages that your customers may use. Instead, it means that you use the proper APIs to ensure someone else can come along and provide translations for them.

He then walks you through the download of the latest WordPress version (a Subversion checkout) and the creation of the plugin structure. He provides sample code to define the plugin and shows how it should look in the "Plugins" listing. He helps you add in the menu item with internationalized strings for the link text. They help you add a simple screen for the plugin and help you style the page a bit. The post ends with a brief mention of object-oriented programming but points out that OOP introduces other, not necessarily related, topics that could detract from the WordPress-related content (and so will not be used).

On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted a tutorial from author Nicola Pietroluongo that wants to help demystify regular expressions with a few more real-world examples. He doesn't teach the foundations of regular expressions here and instead opts for a more "cookbook" approach with lots of little examples.

A regular expression is a sequence of characters used for parsing and manipulating strings. They are often used to perform searches, replace substrings and validate string data. This article provides tips, tricks, resources and steps for going through intricate regular expressions.

He starts with some basic tips around creating good regular expressions for your application: knowing the scenario you're matching, planning the requirements and implementing the match itself. His example expressions include matching for:

• simple passwords matching a policy
• valid URL matching
• HTML tag patterns
• finding duplicated words

Each example comes with the regular expression itself and an explanation of how it's doing the matching, breaking it down into each piece of the regex puzzle and how it relates to the match overall.

On the UserSnap blog Luciano Mammino has provided a guide to building fast applications in the cloud using PHP and several tools and techniques. He offers a list of six rules to follow to make building the applications fast (and fast applications).

In this post Luciano highlighted some of the most common principles you should consider while building high performing web applications (specifically on the backend part). The following concepts discussed here can be applied to any language and framework. Though this post will cover some concrete examples, design patterns and tools that are mostly used in the PHP ecosystem.

His list of rules includes tips like:

• Avoid premature optimization
• Defer the work you don’t need to do immediately
• Use cache when you can
• Prepare your app for horizontal scalability when possible

Each point comes with a paragraph or two of explanation as to why it's an issue to watch out for and some tips to help prevent it as well as tools that can help.

The SitePoint PHP blog has kicked off a new series of posts today with the first tutorial about building an application with OOP and the Slim framework. In this starting article they focus in on bootstrapping the application and introducing some of the basics behind MVC and OOP.

At a certain point of my development as a PHP programmer, I was building MVC applications by-the-book, without understanding the ins-and-outs. I did what I was told: fat model, thin controller. Don’t put logic in your views. What I didn’t understand was how to create a cohesive application structure that allowed me to express my business ideas as maintainable code, nor did I understand how to really separate my concerns into tight layers without leaking low-level logic into higher layers. I’d heard about SOLID principles, but applying them to a web app was a mystery. In this series, we’ll build a quiz application using these concepts. We’ll separate the application into layers, allowing us to substitute components: for example, it’ll be a breeze to switch from MongoDB to MySQL, or from a web interface to a command-line interface.

They start off with a bit about why "MVC is not enough" and how they'll be applying domain modeling as a part of the application. There's also a brief mention of the concept of a service layer and how it will fit into the overall structure. Then it's on to the code: getting Slim installed (via Composer) and starting in on the interface/service classes for the Quiz. They walk you through entity creation for the Quiz and Question instances and a mapper to tie them together.

Stanislav Malyshev has a new post to his site talking about his proposal for a filtered unserialize change and why he sees it as a practical next step.

I have recently revived my “filtered unserialize()” RFC and I plan to put it to vote today. Before I do that, I’d like to outline the arguments on why I think it is a good thing and put it in a somewhat larger context. It is known that using unserialize() on outside data can lead to trouble unless you are very careful. Which in projects large enough usually means “always”, since practically you rarely can predict all interactions amongst a million lines of code. So, what can we do?

He touches on three points that would make it difficult to just not use it this way (on external data) including the fact that there's not really any other way to work with serialized data in PHP. He suggests that by adding filtering to the unserialize handling of the language it can protect from issues around working with serialized external data.

Is this a security measure? [...] Yes, it does not provide perfect security, and yes, you should not rely only on that for security. Security, much like ogres and onions, has layers. So this is trying to provide one more layer – in case that is what you need.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new book review from editor Bruno Skvorc about the "Practical Design Patterns in PHP" book from author Brandon Savage. The review talks both about some of Bruno's impressions of the content in the book and a bit about self-publishing too.

This review of Brandon Savage’s Practical Design Patterns in PHP will include my own opinions and impressions about both the book, and the aspect of self-publishing. Many thanks to Brandon for giving me a review copy. "Design patterns are about common solutions to common problems. [...] They are concepts, not blueprints; ideas, not finished designs. [...] They add clarity to an otherwise difficult situation."

Bruno starts off with a look at the actual content of the book: its coverage of each of the patterns (17 in all), ones that he sees as missing and some of his "gripes" with the examples provided. He also talks about Brandon's choice around models being where primary functionality lives. He finishes the post talking about what he calls the "curse of knowledge" (for example, mentioning other advanced topics without knowing of the reader understands them) and the thoughts around self-publishing and some of the issues he has with it.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted part two of their series looking at using Phake for automation in your applications. In this second part they take some of the basics they shared in part one and apply them in some more practical examples.

In part one, we covered the basics of Phake and demonstrated ways of executing tasks with it, covering groups, dependencies, and arguments. In this part, we’ll look at some sample real world applications of Phake. Note that the following examples are largely based on things that I usually do manually that need some sort of automation.

He includes three different task examples, each with the code to make them happen (and descriptions of what it's doing):

• Uploading Files to Server with a Phake task
• Seeding the Database
• Syncing Data

You can find out more about Phake on the project's GitHub page (including grouping, aborting and describing tasks).

In part four of his "Becoming a PHP Professional" post series Bruno Skvorc looks at the topic of "professional teamwork" , more so as it relates to a bit more practical things.

Last time, we discussed social aspects of teamwork, and how working in a team can both benefit and harm you. There's loads to take into consideration when working with other people, and lots to be gained. This time, let's talk about practical aspects of teamwork, particularly virtual teams or, in other words, teams with remote members.

He covers a three main topics (several that only relate to non-colocated teams):

• Time Zone Difference and Broken Bottleneck in Teamwork
• Organic Solutions (the importance of a technical lead and filter)
• Inorganic solutions (technology to make life easier and remote workers more productive)

Kevin Schroeder has an interesting post to his site about how Google is finally acknowledging PHP exists and how it's "exploding on Google App Engine"...but it's only happening just now.

How is it that one of the most despised programming languages in the word is running (as Google claims) up to 75% of the web? Many nay-sayers will say “oh it’s just WordPress” or “oh, it’s just PHPbb”. But in doing that they are completely missing the point. [...] In the article Venture Beat says “PHP is moving to the Enterprise very quickly”. This is not true. PHP IS in the enterprise and has been for a long time. People just either don’t know it or refused to admit it.

He talks about the things that PHP does, including something interesting - it exposes the focus on the theoretical (the "ivory tower" as he puts it) and puts the focus back on the practical, real-life world of just getting things done. He suggests that Google's reasoning behind taking so long to get PHP up and running on the App Engine was just someone with "their blinders on" to the world of the practical that PHP fills so well.