Alan Storm has a new post to his site that takes an in-depth look at Laravel's autoloader and how things have changed with the release of Laravel 5.

Last time we finished up our look at Laravel 4.2’s autoloader implementation. Like a lot of features in Laravel, (or any framework), once you pull out the microscope sharp edges begin to jut out everywhere. However, unlike many other framework teams, the Laravel core team is willing to make shifts in their platform and application architecture. If you’re familiar with the internals of Laravel 4, looking at the internals of Laravel 3 may be a little disorienting. Similarly, the recent release of Laravel 5 presents some new wrinkles at the system level.

In the post he compares some of the differences based off of things found in a previous look at Laravel 4.2's autoloading system. He lists out the autoloaders initialized during the autoloader phase, four of them, including the use of the PhpParser library and Composer-only autoloading. He also includes a section at the end about some other smaller autoloading changes in the Composer configuration in both the "autoload" and "autoload-dev" sections.

The Three Devs and a Maybe podcast has released their latest episode, #50! In the Big Five-Zero hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann talk about a wide range of topics including web unicorns, application composition and the state of CodeIgniter 3.

This week we celebrate the 50th episode of the podcast in style, by... not even remembering it is the 50th episode till half way through (whoops). We start off discussion with our differing views on working from home, web unicorns and running shoes. Leading on from this, we bring up a couple of news topics that have been making the rounds in the PHP world recently - along with a proposed Unix command-line series that Mick is keen to do. We then move on to some of the great feedback we have received from you guys this past week, and somehow this leads to Edd rambling on about the Unix philosophy/application composition again. Finally, we discuss the state of CodeIgniter 3, how Git works under-the-hood and Objective-C/Swift's memory management model.

Other topics mentioned in this episode include:

• Let's stop creating alcoholics in PHP
• the 404 Name Not Found Podcast - Danny Weeks Comment
• the Symfony 3.0 roadmap
• Pointers and dynamic memory - Stack vs Heap - YouTube
• Double Free - OWASP
• A practical Git introduction

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the full mp3. If you enjoy the show, consider subscribing to their feed too.

The SitePoint blog has posted a new tutorial by author Thien Tran Duy showing you how to send emails with Swift through a Phalcon-based application via Gmail.

Today, sending emails is considered the basic functionality of any web application. Usually, an email is sent to notify the user of some kind of activity that has taken place on the website, such as when he registers the account, updates information, or when new friends have been found. In this short tutorial I’ll show you how to send emails via Gmail quickly from within a Phalcon sample application. You can download the full source code from GitHub. We'll be building functionality which lets us send a confirmation email, and reacts to the click of said confirmation email.

The tutorial walks you through the entire process from start to finish, complete with code examples. It helps you set up the Phalcon project, modify the configuration, set up models and create the basic controller. You'll need to either install Swift via Composer or by just adding the files to the vendor directory though. The script uses this library to send the message, store the hash in an "email_confirmations" table and verify it once the user returns.