The PHP Roundtable

We record live from Lone Star PHP 2016 in Dallas, TX. We discuss what DI Containers aren't, tradeoffs to making things easy, how to improve your dev skills, repercussions of depending on Composer, PHP 7.1 features and we give away a white Confoo elePHPant.

The technologies that run the web are constantly changing. We discuss strategies for staying on top of the constant flux with continuous learning throughout your career, having mentors, engaging regularly with your peers, contributing to open source projects, voracious reading, and travel to programming events.

The PHP-FIG has really helped the PHP community get onboard the collaboration train with really great standards like the PSR-4 autoloading standard and the PSR-7 HTTP message interfaces.

Traditional relational databases like MySQL or Postgres are really good at providing many solutions to the problem of persisting state. But these types of database are really horrible at querying highly connected models in an efficient way.

We get an update on status of the project we discussed in part 1 and discuss next steps to take our dance event management app idea to production.

New features of PHP get added via the request for comments process. We chatting with a few RFC authors about what features they are proposing for the next major version of PHP.

Object-relational mapping (ORM) tools are a great way to model relational databases in your codebase. We discuss the benefits that ORM tools can add to our apps, some problems with the ORM model and where the PHP community seems to be heading when it comes to persisting data. We'll also discuss the opposing active record & data mapper paradigms.

We bring room 11 chat room from Stack Overflow to the Roundtable. We discuss security, PSR-6, Magic the Gathering, PHP 7 and kittens.

Immutability plays a huge role in functional programming and many languages support immutability directly; like the readonly keyword in C#. It is possible to create immutable objects in PHP, but the language lacks inherent immutable features for scalar variables and class properties. We discuss how to bring functional programming concepts to PHP and brainstorm some features that could possibly be added to future versions of PHP to offer better immutability support.

Believe it or not, there's a lot more to debugging your PHP code than var_dump()'ing all the things. We discuss how to use debugging tools to help us comprehensively debug our codebase.