PHP 8: Making the Choice Between “switch” and “match”

In the constantly changing landscape of PHP, version 8 brought with it an innovative feature: the match expression. Many see it as a streamlined and more effective counterpart to the traditional switch. Let’s explore their distinctions. The traditional switch goes something like this: With PHP 8, the equivalent match looks far more compact: At a … read more …

Embracing Immutability: The Theory Behind Readonly Classes

As the code base of a project grows larger and larger, maintainability, predictability and “clean code” is getting more and more a key strategy for successful projects. While it is totally ok to have “quick and dirty” smelling code for prototypes and MVP’s, things change dramatically for scaling projects in production. In this blog post, … read more …

Towards Powerful PHP Applications: WeakMaps and Their Practical Usage

PHP introduces WeakMap datastructure with version 8.0. This new data structures is capable of containing objects while simultaneously enabling them to be cleared via garbage collection once not needed anymore. WeakMap is a evolution of weak references added with PHP 7.4 and enables the development of collections of references that can be subjected to garbage … read more …

How and When to Use PHP’s Pure Intersection Types

In this publication of my PHP related blog series, I want to address Pure Intersection Types in PHP. In the previous blogs of the series, I addressed different features added to PHP with PHP 8 and PHP 8.1. The first blog was about readonly properties, the second one focused on Enums and the third and … read more …

About Mocking in Unit Tests

Recently at SCAYLE, I wrote a Laravel service that inserts data using Eloquent into a table like this: For people not familiar with Laravel/Eloquent: The HelloWorld model mirrors the database structure and the save method persists data into the database table. So far, so good. Like for any good and responsible project, I wrote unit … read more …

When to use Traits in PHP

Traits were introduced to PHP in version 5.4. While classes were introduced in version 4, class inheritance was – as in Java – limited to single inheritance only from the very beginning. Class Inheritance: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly Class Inheritance is a central concept in object oriented programming and exists in every programming … read more …

PHPAlgorithms 1.0.0 is there

Last year, I announced PHPAlgorithms. Since then, I worked a lot on this repository as part of my personal learning progress on Algorithms and Datastructures. Now, I am proud to announce that we have reached our first milestone – version 1.0.0. With the support of the community, we fixed remaining issues and made this release … read more …

PHP Exceptions and the Stacktrace

The beginning of this week was a little bit more action packed than planned. After a couple of weeks of coding and intensive testing (seriously!), @rauchbar and me were of the opinion that the feature is production ready and could be deployed. But well, shit happens when you least expect it. PHP Stacktrace As developers, … read more …