The Symfony Finland site has a new post with a brief look at how the adoption rate of Symfony Flex has picked up with the impending release of Symfony 4 coming next month (November 2017).

With Symfony 4.0 a new standard structure for building applications is being adopted. This is known as Symfony Flex and will be the preferred way of creating applications. Symfony 4.0 is scheduled for release in November 2017, but many projects have already started adopting the new structure.

[...] In six years a lot of things have changed in the web development world, with the rise of front end driven applications, containerised microservices and more. [...] One thing that has not changed for some time is the Standard Edition itself. It has been critiqued for being enterprisey and heavy on configuration. [...] The trend was noticed by the team and in December 2016 at the SymfonyCon Berlin Symfony Flex was announced.

The post also lists out some of the projects that are already embracing Symfony Flex in their project structure including the GraphQL bundle and the PhpStorm Symfony plugin. Symfony Flex also gives developers a way to more immediately work with Symfony 4 when it is released through the same methods as now (with the 3.3 components).

Matt Stauffer continues his series looking at the improvements in Laravel 5.2 with this new post talking about the included rate limiting functionality.

More and more of my work in Laravel lately has been creating APIs. I have a manual rate limiter class I've been using, but I've had a sense that there's a cleaner way to do it. Unsurprisingly, when Taylor set out to write a rate limiter middleware for Laravel, he did it cleaner and better than I had.

Matt briefly introduces the concept of rate limiting and how some optional headers (in the X- family) can be used to let the end user/script know when their requests will be rate limited: X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and Retry-After. He then gets into the example of it in use, showing how to simply add the middleware to the routing and the results in the HTTP response. He ends the post with a bit on customizing the middleware, updating both the times per minute setting and a "block" time limit for when to completely block out the user.

In this new tutorial on NetTuts.com, Jeff Reifman shows you how to build rate limiting into your application to help with issues on your login caused by possible brute force attacks.

Since one of the wealthiest corporations in the world [Apple] didn't allocate the resources to rate limit all of their authentication points, it's likely that some of your web apps don't include rate limiting. In this tutorial, I'll walk through some of the basic concepts of rate limiting and a simple implementation for your PHP-based web application.

He starts with a brief look at how (brute force) login attacks actually work and how that relates to the most common passwords used. He splits out the two main approaches to rate limiting in applications: limit based on failures by username or limiting by IP address. He then gets into the actual code examples, choosing a Yii framework-based application for his illustration. He creates a simple "failed login" database table, shows how to log the attempts and includes a snippet to purge items older than (by default) 120 minutes ago. Finally, he includes the code to check the table and see if the username has too many failures listen and, if so, denies them access.

According to this post (by Cal Evans) on the Ibuildings blog (and this report from the EDC), PHP has come out as one of the top scripting languages on the web today.

In their recently released report "Users' Choice: Scripting Language Ratings", Evans Data Corporation (no relation to the author of this article) gave PHP the highest overall ranking of the languages they included in their survey. [...] Given the wide variety of topics, there is no way PHP will ever score first place across the board, however, that is not a bad thing.

Categories the languages were rated on included ease of use, extensibility, community, availability of tools and memory management. PHP got high marks on most with a few (like client-side scripting) lagging behind. Cal sees it from two angles, though - one to celebrate how far PHP has come and the other to look forward to see what things the language needs to improve on.

Andrei Zmievski has written a new post about a new extension he's worked up (out of curiosity for the technology) - the pecl/bloomy extension.

A Bloom filter is a probabilistic data structure that can be used to answer a simple question, is the given element a member of a set? Now, this question can be answered via other means, such as hash table or binary search trees. But the thing about Bloom filters is that they are incredibly space-efficient when the number of potential elements in the set is large.

The filters allow false positives with a defined error rate - it gives the "yes" or "no" answer based on the content and you, the developer, decide if that answer falls within a rate that's okay for you and your app. The filters also take the same amount of time to look up items no matter how many are in the set.

He includes an example of the extension in use - defining the number of elements, the false positive allowance and adding/searching data and how the responses would come back from the checks.

Damien Seguy has posted the PHP statistics for this month - the results from February 2008 - here's some of the highlights:

• PHP 5 set record of growth : + 2,5%, up to 32%
• PHP 5.2 is the second most popular version, ahead of 4.3.
• PHP 4.4.8's popularity is falling

You can check out the numbers yourself for the month as well as the evolution stats showing how things are progressing. He's also added a new graph this month showing the adoption rate that PHP5 is having in the online world.

On the Experts Round Table website, there's this cool bit of code that works with the SWFHeader library to extract the frame rate information from a Flash file.

The first idea is of course not to reinvent the wheel and search for an already-made solution. I had to find a really good way to extract information from a SWF file. I had two trivial ways to go : (a) find an already-made SWF Header Extractor, or (b) work at the binary level.

At first, of course, I turned to the PHP documentation (http://www.php.net/manual/en/) and found out the LibSWF and Ming libraries as candidates.

Of course, the code is provided for his solution, and it's actually quite simple. The class does the hard work of mapping out the data from the Flash file's header. All he needed to do was to reference that value in the result under the 'fps' array key.

On the Experts Round Table website, there's this cool bit of code that works with the SWFHeader library to extract the frame rate information from a Flash file.

The first idea is of course not to reinvent the wheel and search for an already-made solution. I had to find a really good way to extract information from a SWF file. I had two trivial ways to go : (a) find an already-made SWF Header Extractor, or (b) work at the binary level.

At first, of course, I turned to the PHP documentation (http://www.php.net/manual/en/) and found out the LibSWF and Ming libraries as candidates.

Of course, the code is provided for his solution, and it's actually quite simple. The class does the hard work of mapping out the data from the Flash file's header. All he needed to do was to reference that value in the result under the 'fps' array key.

According to this new post on Andi Gutmans' blog today, the adoption of PHP versions seems to be tipping in favor of PHP5.

PHP 5 was released in July 2004. Since its release two years ago, there has been a lot of talk about its adoption rate and whether it will surpass the PHP 4 installed base. No doubt that it will still take some time for PHP 5 to reach PHP 4's existing installed base. The main reason for this are the numerous PHP 4-based applications that were built over the years, and if it's not broken, don't fix it.

He includes a graph showing the adoption of both PHP4 and PHP5 versions, noting a large increase from the release of the 5.1 version of PHP.

Although I knew many were waiting for PHP 5.1 before upgrading, its release in last November seems to have created a huge increase in PHP 5 adoption. In July over 74% of support tickets were by customers using PHP 5 (and remember we do support both versions).

According to this new post on Andi Gutmans' blog today, the adoption of PHP versions seems to be tipping in favor of PHP5.

PHP 5 was released in July 2004. Since its release two years ago, there has been a lot of talk about its adoption rate and whether it will surpass the PHP 4 installed base. No doubt that it will still take some time for PHP 5 to reach PHP 4's existing installed base. The main reason for this are the numerous PHP 4-based applications that were built over the years, and if it's not broken, don't fix it.

He includes a graph showing the adoption of both PHP4 and PHP5 versions, noting a large increase from the release of the 5.1 version of PHP.

Although I knew many were waiting for PHP 5.1 before upgrading, its release in last November seems to have created a huge increase in PHP 5 adoption. In July over 74% of support tickets were by customers using PHP 5 (and remember we do support both versions).