PHP Latest Trends in 2019

When people talk about PHP, they can’t help but mention the W3Tech statistics. PHP is popular and is known to be used by 78.9% of all the websites worldwide. To this day, the use PHP tends to be slowly deteriorating when it’s compared to its 85% usage globally just 2 years back. PHP is popular thanks to long-lasting projects like #WordPress and Drupal that is known to be around for almost a decade now, and much appreciation to local programmers that continue to take care of the PHP code itself which tends to be rare in world of programming languages, because we have seen most of programming languages primarily owned by commercial companies or some normally do exist without any organization around them.

So what are the latest trends seen so far on the use of PHP that may serve as a very great tool for Magento ecommerce agency, and an ecommerce development company that specializes on web hosting, let’s look at a few developments;

Laravel

Laravel is a web application framework with a more descriptive, elegant syntax. Web development has to be a satisfying experience; this is why Laravel takes out the pain in the process of web development with its simple, expressive, fast routing engine, multiple back-ends for session and cache storage, intuitive database ORM, database agnostic schema migrations, robust background job processing and real-time event broadcasting. Laravel is accessible, powerful, and provides tools required for large, robust applications.

PHP Parser

A parser is useful for static analysis, manipulation of code and generally any other application dealing with code programmatically. A parser constructs an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the code and thus allows dealing with it in an abstract and vigorous way.

There are many ways of processing source code. The token stream for example is a lesser level than the AST, which has different applications and do allow the analyzing of the exact formatting of a file. However, it is much harder to deal with token stream especially for more analysis that are complex.

PHP might not be a language especially suited for fast parsing, but processing the AST is much easier in PHP than it would be in other, faster languages like C. Consequently, the people most probably wanting to do programmatic PHP code analysis are incidentally PHP developers, not C developers.

Features: The main features provided by this library are Parsing PHP 5 and PHP 7 code into an abstract syntax tree (AST), and note that invalid code can be parsed into a partial AST, while The AST contains accurate location information.

Some useful features like dumping the AST in human-readable form, converting an AST back to PHP code. Also experimentally, formatting can be preserved for partially changed ASTs. In PHP Parser, you can also use infrastructure to traverse and modify ASTs, make resolution of namespaced names, do an evaluation of constant expressions, convert an AST into JSON and back.

Other Uses of Parse: Apart from the parser itself, this package also gives support for some other related features; support for pretty printing, which is the act of converting an AST into PHP code. In addition, it also supports for serializing and unserializing the node tree to JSON, and dumping the node tree in a human readable form.

Symfony

Symfony is a PHP framework for web applications and serves as a set of reusable PHP components. Symfony is used by thousands of web applications around the world like BlaBlaCar.com, Spotify.com and other popular PHP projects including Drupal and Magento for CMS and open source e-commerce development platforms respectively.

Latest Functions On Symfony 4.3: A new twig function called parent form () in Symfony 4.3 returns the parent form view or null if the form view already is the root form. Now this function is more preferred than just accessing the parent form using ‘form.parent’. If you are using the ‘form.parent’option, it may produce some miscellaneous results, for example when a child form is named parent.

Another function added to Symfony is; including HTML contents in help messages. The contents of the help message that can be defined for form fields are escaped by default to prevent security issues.

Tracy

Tracy is known to be a devoted tool to make debugging PHP code for calm developers an effortless task. With a more pleasant design, logging, profiler, and inclusive with some supplementary advanced features like debugging AJAX calls or CLI support, it’s a nice tool to juggle with.

The Tracy library is an effective helper for everyday PHP programmers. It helps you quickly detect and correct errors, log errors, dump variables, measure execution time of scripts/queries, and detect memory consumption.

Installation: The recommended way to is via Composer: composer requires tracy/tracy. Alternatively, you can download the whole package or tracy.phar file.

Tracy Compatibility With Browsers: For Tracy 3.0 recently developed version of PHP 7.1-7.3, you can use Chrome 49+, Firefox 45+, MS Edge 14+, Safari 10+ and iOS Safari 10.2+, while Tracy 2.6 of PHP 7.1 – 7.3, works on Chrome 49+, Firefox 45+, MS Edge 14+, Safari 10+ and iOS Safari 10.2+ with only MS Edge 14 making it the only distinct factor differentiating from Tracy 2.5, its not compatible, rather a corresponding MS Edge 12 matches the Tracy 2.5

Usage: Activating Tracy is easy. Simply add these two lines of code, preferably just after library loading (like require ‘vendor/autoload.php’) and before any output is sent to browser:

use Tracy\Debugger;

Debugger::enable();

The first thing you will notice on the website is a Debugger Bar.

(If you do not see anything, it means that Tracy is running in production mode. For security reasons, Tracy is visible only on localhost. You may force Tracy to run in development mode by passing the Debugger::DEVELOPMENT as the first parameter of enable() method.)

Debugger Bar: The Debugger Bar is a suspended panel that is usually present in the bottom right corner of a page, easily moved with a mouse, but does remembers its position after a page reloads. Other useful panels can be added to the debugger bar, you can find more useful ones in Add-ons or you may as well create them yourself.

It’s easy to implement a custom panel, just execute interface Tracy\IBarPanel using two process either by getTab and getPanel, both returning HTML content to be displayed. Subsequently, registering via Debugger::getBar ()->addPanel (new Custom Panel()); is everything you will need to do.

Visualization of errors and exceptions: Of course, we all know how PHP reports errors: it does bring out something like these in the page source code: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘}’ in HomepagePresenter.php on line 15

SecLists

SecList is a security tester’s companion used for a collection of multiple types of lists during security assessments, collected in one place. List types include usernames, passwords, URLs, sensitive data patterns, fuzzing payloads, web shells, and many more. The goal is to enable a security tester to pull this repository onto a new testing box and have access to every type of list that may be needed.

PhpSpreadsheet

PhpSpreadsheet is a library written in pure PHP and providing a set of classes that allow you to read from and to write to different spreadsheet file formats, like Excel and LibreOffice Calc.

PHPExcel Vs PhpSpreadsheet : PhpSpreadsheet is the next version of PHPExcel. It breaks compatibility to dramatically improve the code base quality (namespaces, PSR compliance, use of latest PHP language features, etc.).

Now that most people are using PhpSpreadsheet, there will no longer be a need for PHPExcel and hence all additions for PHPExcel, that includes it patches and new features, should therefore be channeled to support PhpSpreadsheet master branch.