The PHP Roundtable

We spend much of our time as developers managing the state in our applications. There are many different approaches and philosophies attributed to reading, mutating and storing state. The Event Sourcing pattern is an approach to managing application state. If we think of any given state of our app as a frame in a video, Event Sourcing allows us to scrub through past states of the app. Today we discuss what Event Sourcing is and how we can start integrating it into our PHP apps.

The demand for DevOps skills is growing more and more in modern web development. But all the hype and demand is met with myriad DevOps tools. Staying abreast of how these tools can help make our jobs easier can be daunting. So today we take a closer look at one of these tools called Docker which takes a microservices-architecture approach to managing your servers.

HTTP/1.1 will eventually be replaced by HTTP/2 so it's important for us PHP nerds to know all about the latest version of the HTTP protocol that's already running some of the internet's biggest websites. We discuss the things we need to know to start using HTTP/2 in our next PHP app. We also go briefly off topic to discuss the status of PHP 7.1 and the ramsey/uuid lib.

If you've ever gotten a number of weird looking characters in your database or on your website like, "�" and didn't know why, then this episode is for you. Those bizarre characters called "mojibake", rear their ugly heads when we don't account for a consistent character encoding. Today we discuss what character encoding is, how to accommodate for it in HTML, PHP & your database, and how we can ensure we'll never encounter an unexpected alien character in our web apps again.

We record live from main stage at php|tek in St. Louis, MO. We discuss speaking at conferences and recent events in PHP-FIG.

Async? Isn't that like AJAX in Javascript or something? Most PHP developers encounter asynchronous code for the first time in Javascript, but not many are aware that PHP can do async too. We discuss asynchronous programming in PHP and how we might be able to implement it in our own projects using various libraries. We also take a look at how async features could be added to PHP core to support async natively.

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. We discuss PSR-0 through PSR-13 and the process they go through to become standards. We also discuss where the FIG came from and the possible big changes coming to the organization soon.

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. Graph databases like Neo4j and OrientDB excel at highly connected data. In fact, graph technologies are the backbone of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. We discuss how to think about our data using the graph model and what tools we can use in our PHP projects to interface with them. We also discuss the considerations we'll need to make when deciding whether or not to use a graph database in our next project.

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.