On the main PHP.net site they've announced the first stable release in the PHP 7.3.x series: PHP 7.3.0!

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.3.0. This release marks the third feature update to the PHP 7 series.

PHP 7.3.0 comes with numerous improvements and new features such as:

• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntax
• PCRE2 Migration
• Multiple MBString Improvements
• LDAP Controls Support
• Improved FPM Logging
• Windows File Deletion Improvements
• Several Deprecations

You can find out more information about these features and view the Changelog for this release from the announcement. As always, you can download this latest release from either the main downloads page or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries. If you need more information on moving to this new release, check out the migration guide.

As is mentioned in this post on the Symfony Finland site, the PHP-PM project has hit their first stable release, v1.0, that includes some nice tools as well.

Running an application server written in PHP has been feasible for some years. One of the robus mature options for this has been PHP-PM, a process manager. Now the project has reached a major milestone with the release of 1.0.

The PHP-PM team released the first stable release on 8th of January 2018. It builds on the work done for some years and it builds on ReactPHP. ReactPHP is a low-level library for event-driven programming in PHP.

PHP-PM allows creating long running PHP processes that serve applications directly instead of relying an embedded PHP (like with Apache's mod_php) or a web server with PHP process manager (as with Nginx and PHP-FPM).

Updates for this release include the addition of bridges for static handling, PSR-7 integration and version bumps for Symfony components used in the system. You can check out the full list of changes in the release notes if you want to see more. The post also links to other articles with more reading and tutorials covering PHP-PM and how to put it to use (including Docker integration and basic benchmarks).

Jordi Boggiano has posted some excellent news for all of the Composer users out there - the widely popular dependency management tool has officially "gone gold" and has tagged the stable v1.0.0 version of the tool.

Five years ago today, Composer was born. In some ways it feels like yesterday, at least it doesn't feel like five years went by. In other ways it seems like a lifetime ago, and I can barely remember what it was like to write PHP code without having a whole ecosystem at my fingertips.

Jordi talks about one big change that happened recently around the "self-update" feature of the tool. He hopes that more people will use the preview or snapshot channels in their deploys/development so he can get more information about these other options before they get to stable. Finally, to mark the occasion Jordi has put a "gold" copy (on floppy disk none the less) up for sale on eBay to commemorate the release.

In a new post to his site Matthew Weier O'Phinney has announced the release of Expressive v1.0 from Zend. The Expressive framework is PSR-7 based with a heavy emphasis on middleware and the reuse of other components to make a basic framework structure.

A few hours ago, we pushed Expressive 1.0.

This is a huge milestone for the ZF3 initiative; I've even called it the cornerstone. It signals a huge shift in direction for the project, returning to its roots as a component library. Expressive itself, however, also signals the future of PHP applications we envision: composed of layered, single-purpose PSR-7 middleware.

He also links to this post on the Zend Framework blog with more information about the release including what's new in 1.0.0 (hint: not much) and what you can look forward to in the future from the framework. He mentions some of the other PSR-7 frameworks out in the PHP ecosystem right now and some of the reasoning behind the project being created in the first place. He also talks some about how it was started and some of the feedback/contributions they've received since then.

In this post to her site Lorna Mitchell makes an interesting point about relying on libraries/packages that recommend using dev-master as the target of choice when installing via Composer. It started from a Tweet and lead to more discussion. She share some of that and more about her own thinking in this post.

If your project installation instructions recommend requiring dev-master in composer, I may need to reconsider my choice of package. [...] I got a few responses asking me to expand so I thought I would take the opportunity to write more than 140 characters on this topic.

She talks about the types of dependencies she prefers to add to her systems and how, usually, the code that lives in dev-master is not actually what's desired. It could be in any state after all - broken or correct. She points out three places where she'd see this kind of dependency as "okay" but points out that they are rarely seen in a mature project. She ends with a recommendation to users to look for dev-master entries in their own composer.json files and replace them with a release to prevent issues in the future.

In a new post to his site Brian Moon has shared a problem he had with sockets and timeouts and having them perform the same way every time. He walks through the symptoms he was seeing and provides his own solution in the end.

So, it seems that when you try and connect to an IP that is routable on the network, but not answering, the TCP stack has some built in timeouts that are not obvious. This differs from trying to connect to an IP address that is up, but not listening on a given port. [...] After a lot of messing around, a coworker pointed out that in production, the failures were happening for an IP that was routable on the network, but that had no host listening on the IP.

After some testing, Brian figured out that his problem was using localhost for testing and not an actual non-host server. He made the switch and figured out how to set the timeouts low and work with error state checking to make things more stable. He explains a bit more about how the code in his solution works. You can find his solution in this gist on GitHub.

Fabien Potencier has a new post to his site talking about a milestone for the PHP-CS Fixer tool (used to fix code to be compliant to the PSR-1 & PSR-2 standards) - a full, stable 1.0 release.

A few years ago, I wrote a small script to automatically fix some common coding standard mistakes people made in Symfony pull requests. It was after I got bored about all the comments people made on pull requests to ask contributors to fix their coding standards. [...] After a while, I decided to Open-Source the tool, like I do with almost all the code I write. [...] To my surprise, people started to use it on their own code, found bugs, found edge cases, added more fixers, and soon enough, we all realise that using regular expressions for such things is doomed to fail.

In recent months the tool has undergone a rewrite to work with the tokens instead of regular expressions (lead by Dariusz Ruminski) and the 1.0 release of this updated version has been made:

After 13,000 additions and 5,000 deletions, I'm very proud to announce version 1.0 of PHP-CS-Fixer; it is smarter, it is more robust, and it has more fixers. Any downsides? Yes, speed; the tool is much slower, but it is worth it and enabling the new cache layer helps a lot.

As is mentioned in this new post to the project's releases, Mike van Riel and the contributors to the phpDocumentor2 project have released version 2.0 - the first stable release!

We have spent the past two months fixing bugs, adding tests and writing a brand new template. With this release it is now easier than ever to generate your documentation. And as a special party gift we bring you a brand new template, called Clean. Can't wait to see what it looks like? Then come over and see the demo.

He talks about some of the things yet to come for phpDocumentor including more features based on the PHPDoc standard, improving performance and making the existing systems (and templates) more robust and usable. You can find the full roadmap here. phpDocumentor is one of the most widely used PHP-based tools for generating automated documentation from docblocks already in your code.

On the Symfony blog today there's a new post from Fabien Potencier talking about the upgrade path to keep your Symfony projects up to date. He points out that in the pre-Composer days it was more difficult, but thanks to this handy tool, it's a much easier task.

In the old Symfony 2.0.x days, at a time when Composer did not exist, upgrading a project from one minor version of Symfony to the next one was not that easy. [...] Fast forward to the Composer world. Composer is used by Symfony since version 2.1, but as we were the very first adopter, and because Composer and the Symfony ecosystem were not stable yet, it was still awkward. [...] Fast forward to Symfony 2.3. As of Symfony 2.3, the minimum stability level has been raised to stable.

This stability means that all of the libraries and tools that Symfony 2.3 depends on are in their "stable" state as well. Included in the post are the commands to update your Symfony install and what it looks like when the update from 2.3.0 to 2.3.1 happens. He finishes off the post with a few recommendations about how to use Composer to keep things stable (use "stable", define version constraints and run the update without fear of breakage).

The long-awaited version 4 of the Laravel Framework has finally been released (and the site has gotten a facelift as well):

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Laravel attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

Laravel aims to make the development process a pleasing one for the developer without sacrificing application functionality. Happy developers make the best code.

You can find lots of information about the framework and its functionality on the main project site including a forums area with lots of discussion around not only v4 but still v3 for those using it. You can also find some good discussion about the release itself in this thread over on Reddit.