Top 5 PHP Improvements That Have Been Rediscovered

Posted by shaumik maurya on May 1st, 2019

Whether you love it or hate it, fact remains that around 80% of the Web is dependent on the use of PHP. Usage of this programming language has been on the increase ever since 2010. It is far better than what many often perceive and if you are working in a team, it is especially useful for numerous back-end APIs. Moreover, it also allows creation of responsive front-ends on top of all other application platforms.

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 In a bid to develop a robust back-end API for all applications, PHP programmers have rediscovered and utilized a number of technologies in accordance with their development project while also improving upon them.

 Let us take a look at some of these practices and techniques that all programmers are likely to find extremely helpful.

 PHP Specification Request- PSR

 PSR PHP Specification Requests are a set of standards devised by the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (FIG). Its main purpose was the standardization of logger interface, coding style, coding standard, and auto-loading. Members of the PHP-FIG community include the likes of Drupal, Symfony, and Zend among others. A slightly modified version of PSR-2 is normally followed as the conventional coding standard.

It is always helpful when someone follows and writes a clean code with the widely accepted coding standards. It also allows making the PHP code an open-source one a far easier process. An enhancement of the process is the use of PHP Code Sniffer integrated with the website IDE for code evaluation while the programmers continue working further.

Composer and Packagist

Composer is a dependency management tool used in PHP. It allows site owners to define the libraries that their business project is dependent on. Composer makes use of simple JSON declaration of dependent project in the composer.json files. The related libraries get downloaded in the vendor folder. Getting started with the use of Composer is pretty easy. Moreover, the open-source packages are listed in packagist where site owners can search for the relevant packages for their business.

Say a business wants to work on PayPal. If you think that someone might have submitted a wrapper library for Paypal Rest API, you can search for the relevant library. You can even choose to submit the same, make it open-source and allow it to be used by others. With Composer, working with dependency and managing versions of the dependent library becomes an easy task.

Vagrant, A Virtual Development Environment

Vagrant serves as a virtual development environment. It works as a virtual machine on the main machine of the developer with all of the relevant software stack serving as config. Basically, it creates a portable and reproducible development machine that can be shared by all developers. In a way, it aids in eliminating the "Works on my machine" syndrome.

Another great help of the Vagrant system is that it reduces the time required for setting up and running a machine. If you want your PHP programmer to get started on the development project from the very first day itself, this is the very best option for you to go with. They will not be required to spend time on installing the correct version of development softwares such as X-Debug, MySQL, and PHP.

Use of X-Debug in debugging

Debugging in PHP was one of those elusive aspects that never showed up when in most demand. However, with the correct use of X-Debug on the machine, the debugger can be run and made to inspect how the code executes along each line. A correct mix of X-Debug, a good IDE that supports debugging and a client browser plugin such as easy Xdebug on Firefox that is necessary for the effective development of the website. Having proper knowledge to set it up is thus very essential in this regard.

PHPUnit allows Automated Testing

Once you have tested your code and it has passed with flying colors, you can be confident that things will not fall apart on the production environment. A writing test serves as a verification for what the code is supposed to do while also being an animated documentation of the program code. While it allows development time to be saved in the long run, the PHP programmers are already aware of the related things that break due to the changes being made when a code is featured or fixed. The use of PHPUnit for test on any program code allows the programmers to know whether all the features are performing the way they are meant to.

Overall, the year so far has been a great one for PHP with lots being made available for learning and exploring. Many things have been experimented upon as PHP programmers look to raise their technical knowhow to an altogether different level as far as the use of website development tools is concerned.

James Patrick Winson is a professional PHP Programmer, specialising in all forms of website and web-based application development using this framework. He is also a professional blogger. Through his numerous blog posts and articles, James aims to educate individuals about the various features and aspects of development using the numerous PHP frameworks available in the market. For further clarification to queries regarding the frameworks, feel free to get in touch with him on his Facebook and Google+ pages.