Tomas Votruba has a new post to his site showing you how you can get typed properties in your code "in a few seconds", a feature coming in the next major version of the language, PHP 7.4.

PHP 5.6 and 7.0 is going to be dangerous since 2019, PHP 7.1 is new baseline and PHP 7.3 is just about to be released in the end of 2018.

Is this the best time to upgrade your code to PHP 7.4?

He starts off by talking about the use of the @var annotation (DocBlock format) and how, while they can be informative, do nothing functionally speaking. He shows how to shift this over to a typed property, forcing the value to be an integer. He also covers current use of "best practices" when it comes to typing properties and how to think about future compatibility. He ends the post with the command you'd need to use - making use of the rector reformatter - to shift all of those @var annotations over to actual typed properties.

Fabien Potencier continues his look at what's coming in the next major release of the Symfony framework (v4) in this new post to his site. In it he talks about changes to the default directory structure that Symfony 4-based applications will use.

Symfony 3 came with a slightly different directory structure than Symfony 2. Symfony 4 will also come with a reworked directory structure. Mostly incremental adjustments to support new features and best practices.

The Symfony 3 directory structure introduced a more standard Unix-like directory structure, with less sub-directories. Symfony 4 keeps going in that direction.

There's six changes he mentions specifically, each with a brief summary of what they'll contain:

• Tests under tests/
• Templates under templates/
• Configuration under etc/
• Source Code under src/
• Temporary files under var/
• Web files under web/

He ends the post with a quick note that, while these will be defaults, all of it is optional and these directories will be created automatically if they don't exist.

In a recent RFC that's been proposed and is now up for voting, the suggestion has been made to drop the var keyword in PHP 7.1 and completely remove it in PHP 8 (made a bit redundant buy the public keyword in classes). Evert Pot, however, disagrees and suggests dropping public instead.

A PHP RFC vote has started to deprecate the var keyword in PHP 7.1 and remove it in PHP 8. At the time of writing, there 23 who say it should be removed, and 18 who say it should not. [...] I’d like to offer a different opinion: I think people should be using var instead of public. I realize that this is as controversial as tabs vs. spaces (as in: it doesn’t really matter but conjures heated discussions), but hear me out!

He goes through an example on one of his own projects, showing how he's mostly removed the public level of exposure from his development (using final and statics instead). He then suggests three common thoughts he sees people having being in favor of dropping var versus public:

• #1: Everyone doing the same thing is good
• #2: It’s ugly!
• #3: The public keyword is useful to convey intent

He also points to one place where he does see the need for a public but also suggests that in that case var would do juts fine too.