What’s new in PHP land? - Q1 2020

I co-organise the BrisPHP Meetup and at the start of every meetup I give a quick talk on recent news and other interesting things that have been happening in the PHP world. Recently, we’ve had a lot of progress on PHP 8.0 and lots of frameworks released new versions.

PHP

Let’s start with some PHP Version Stats released December last year by Jordi Boggiano.

PHP Version Usage

We can see PHP 5.6 is still hanging around a bit, bit it has dropped a bit. PHP 7 versions are definitely taking the majority of the market, however with 7.2+ being the only supported versions, there is still a large number of projects on unsupported versions :’(.

PHP Versions Over Time

Here it’s easy to see that PHP 7.4 is picking up just as fast as all previous versions that have been released.

PHP 8.0

There are already lots of other posts about the features in PHP 8.0, but I’m going to list the changes that have happened in the last few months.

Static return type

I use fluent methods a lot and not having the static return type really gets me. Here’s an example:

<?php

interface FooInterface {
    public function doSomething(): static;
}

class Foo implements FooInterface {
    public function doSomething(): static {
        // Do some things

        return $this;
    } 
}

At the moment, we can’t need to use self as the return type, which gives us a fatal error because Foo::self !== FooInterface::self and is not compatible. The static return type lets us benefit from late static binding and makes this work as you would expect.

Take a look at the RFC for more information.

Allow `$object::class`

I also use FQCN’s a lot, to populate exception/log messages and as keys in an array, etc. Since PHP 5.5 we’ve been able to use Foo\Bar::class to get the FQCN, but if you have an instance of Foo\Bar you must use \get_class($foo) instead.

<?php

$foo = new Foo\Bar();

// Works in 5.5+
var_dump(Foo\Bar::class);
var_dump(get_class($foo));

// Works in 8.0+
var_dump($foo::class);

Here’s a link to the RFC if you’re interested.

Stringable interface

Any object that implements __toString() in an 8.0 world will implicitly impliment the stringable interface:

<?php

interface Stringable
{
    public function __toString(): string;
}

This allows you to use the union type string|Stringable when it becomes available in 8.0. The goal is that eventually everyone will explicitly implement the interface but for BC reasons, it will be automatically added during compile time.

Take a peek at the RFC.

Frameworks

Symfony

Symfony claimed a big achievement last year. It has the most contributors out of any backend framework. Not in just PHP frameworks, but any backend framework, in any language.

Backend framework contributors 2019

Laravel

Laravel released version 6.5 with some new features:

Added LazyCollection::remember()
New string helpers
Improvements to the QueryBuilder
Added unless condition to Blade custom if directives

Phalcon

Phalcon released version 4.0.0 in December, with an impressive list of highlights:

PHP 7.2 minimum version
PHP 7.4 support
Removed unsupported code
PSR 7, 11, 13, 16, 17
Rewrote all documentation

CakePHP

December also brought CakePHP 4.0.0 with a matching list of impressive highlights:

PHP 7.2 minimum version
Streamlined APIs by removing deprecated methods
More typing/type hints
Improved error messages
A refreshed application skeleton
New database types
Middleware for CSP headers
Improvements to the FormHelper

WordPress

Version 5.3 of WordPress is now live:

PHP 7.4 support
Date/Time component fixes
Improved block editor
Automatic image rotation
Improved site health checks

Tools

Codeception

December was the month of 4.0, with Codeception also releasing version 4.0 which splits the core into modules allowing each module to upgrade individually and adds support for Symfony 5.

PHPUnit

PHPUnit 9 was released in Februrary which cleaned up a lot of old code. It only only supports PHP 7.3+, uses more strict types and removed a lot of old functions/options that have newer alternatives.

Xdebug

While it might not be 4.0, Xdebug did release version 2.9 in December. The main part of this release was to dramatically speed up code coverage by 250%!. That’s incredible.

PHP