During the production of Laravel Origins, we asked the cast about their thoughts on the current state of PHP and how they feel when other programmers claim that PHP is dead.

Christoph Rumpel demos PhpStorm code snippets a.k.a. live templates.

Next time you're trying to decide between == and === I hope you think of how scary this is #php https://t.co/IYADrTWqsS

Goutte has a great API

Slack, Vimeo, Nordstrom, Huffington Post, Engadget, TechCrunch, SalesForce, eBay, Etsy, Eventbrite, Adobe, 23andMe, Twilio, Intuit, Udemy, Rakuten These companies all have apps for iOS/Android/Apple TV/etc apps that have backends powered by PHP.

Git Blame from within PHPStorm! How did I not know about this?! #PHP https://t.co/jNVgseEOnt

#NewJob I joined @zulilytech mobile API team at their HQ in Seattle! Modernizing #PHP code, migrating to AWS, and helping scale APIs 👨🏻‍💻

How to use #Laravel's new API Resources to follow #JSONAPI spec https://t.co/xPmmfhSuZy #tutorial #php

Building a #jsonapi in #Laravel? I created an example API with features & packages I've found really useful! https://t.co/22ysAP7tvU #php

Laravel Horizon revealed: a dashboard for queue monitoring and job management https://t.co/WfLCnIcaph #opensource #php

If you are using Laravel or Symfony for comparing http status codes eg $status_code = Response::HTTP_NOT_FOUND you might find this library helpful $status_code = Http::NOT_FOUND - it's a little shorter, and the whole RFC description of the status code is in the docblock so you don't have to google what it means.

Grafika is an image processing library for PHP. It can be used to resize, crop, compare, and add watermark on images. It can also create texts, geometric shapes, and apply filters. Its built on top of Imagick and GD.

RT @baileylo: A little article I wrote about PSR-7, function naming, and convention https://t.co/DF2ssHj1EK #php

#php has gotten a lot of awesome new features, but is it scaring off beginners? https://t.co/jzAcAcZgJd /by @baileylo

The issue is that doctrine is keeping the objects in local memory because the daemon is basically a php long-running process. In order to allow the objects used by the job to get updated, you need to $em->detach() the objects. But you'd also have to have cacade={"detach"} on all relationships that object has as well. So the best thing is to just call $em->clear() at the end of your job. This will detach all objects from doctrine and it will get a fresh copy of all the objects from the database for the next job run.

With long running processes you can get a 2006 MySQL server has gone away error. This adds a class that calls Doctrine's DBAL Connection's $conn->ping() to see if it's gone away, if so close the connection and let DBAL automatically open a new connection on the next query attempt. This is talked about in the Doctrine's Github repo here. Here's some pseudo code on how to do it:

<?php

namespace Acme\Doctrine\ORM;

use Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager;

class ConnectionSaver
{
    /**
     * Ping the DB server, if connection is lost close it and DBAL will
     * automatically reconnect on the next DB call.
     */
    public function checkDatabaseConnection()
    {
        /** @var \Doctrine\DBAL\Connection */
        $conn = app(EntityManager::class)->getConnection();

        try {
            $ping = $conn->ping();
        } catch (\ErrorException $e) {
            $conn->close();
        }
    }
}

Then inside the command handler you just inject the class and call checkDatabaseConnection() function.

<?php

namespace App\Listeners\Commands;

use Acme\Doctrine\ORM\ConnectionSaver;

class FooHandler
{
    public function __construct(ConnectionSaver $connectionSaver) {
        $connectionSaver->checkDatabaseConnection();
    }

Interesting presentation from one of the Doctrine core team members.

In this Talk, we are going to dive into Doctrine 2 ORM’s feature set. We’re going to see the advantages and disadvantages of each functionality, with a particular focus on use-cases that each functionality attempts to solve, which features should be used with care (or avoided completely) and which ones should be used even more.

Say you're building an API, you need to convert the objects you send in the response to JSON representation (removing certain properties like passwords, and modifying others like dates) you can use JSMSerializer to define how that happens automatically. But where JSMSerializer really shines is how it can deserialize data into PHP objects. Maybe you you are consuming a JSON feed, you can use this to convert each object in the JSON feed to an object. You do this by registering "handlers" for each object type. You can do all this configuration via annotations, XML or YAML (which you'll be familiar with if you've used Doctrine). It also includes an event system, which you can use to hook into modifying the data before serialization or right afterward it happens.

Several php packages to easily integrate Doctrine 2 into your next Laravel/Lumen project. The 'orm' package includes a ServiceProvider to add Doctrine to your project and configure it. The 'extensions' package includes several extensions including timestampable, softdeletable, etc. The 'migrations' package add ability to use Doctrine's migration package instead of laravel's migrations so that you can easily take advantage of auto migration generation based on entities. The 'ACL' package includes traits to add roles and permissions to user objects to easily integrate with Laravel's new ACL.

This video tutorial goes over [one way] you can add the ability to give user's roles and specify which permissions those roles have. You would have to build upon this further to include additional features such as role inheritance or user-specific permissions (overrides).