Putting PHP’s M_EULER to Work PHP ships with more mathematical constants than most developers ever use. One of the most overlooked is M_EULER, which is the Euler constant. So, before putting PHP’s M_EULER to work, we need to clear up a confusion with another Euler constant in PHP: M_E. M_E vs M_EULER: Two Constants, Two […]
22
Jun
Jun
Also PHP: A Curated Watchlist for the PHP Ecosystem PHP runs more of the web than most people admit. And yet, when a new developer tool ships — a security scanner, an AI code assistant, a code counter, a refactoring engine: PHP support is often an afterthought, a footnote, or simply missing. Also supports PHP […]
20
Jun
Jun
Five Ways to Write a PHP Type PHP’s type system is grown up. PHP 7.0 started the ball rolling with parameter and return types. PHP 7.4 added property types. PHP 8.3 added the class constant types, though we’ll omit this for now. PHP has quietly accumulated five distinct syntaxes where you can write something that […]
17
Jun
Jun
PHP and AI: What Actually Exists at the Language Level PHP runs about three-quarters of the web, and yet whenever AI comes up in conversation, PHP is the friend who wasn’t invited to the party. The received wisdom is that AI belongs to Python and that PHP developers are limited to politely calling someone else’s […]
04
Jun
Jun
The turbofish meet the elephpant: 🐟 Somewhere, probably on an infinite step of grass, the turbofish meets the elephpant. You’ll need imagination to picture that, for sure, but by November, you’ll probably have it in your reality. So, what is this new fish, and what does it have to do with generic types? Let’s take […]
10
Jun
Jun
How to make emojis in PHP You might want to use emojis both in your online comments and your PHP code. The later, mostly to hander the former, although PHP handles emojis gracefully. That are the methods to make emojis in PHP? Straight in the code PHP supports code savec in UTF-8. And emojis are […]
17
May
May
1-2-3 PHP operators I learnt my PHP on a European keyboard, and it was always a pain to use some strange symbols. When I moved to Canada, I quickly realized that the chosen symbols were actually very easily accessible on the keyboard: it was just my layout that was less practical. Then, I also realized […]
24
Dec
Dec
Exakat on FrankenPHP I learnt about Franken PHP by listening to Kevin Dunglas at the AFUP conferences. This is a PHP application server: it loads the code and runs the application from memory. At first sight, it is made for Webapplication. Load the code once, and then run it upon request. But it also has […]
15
Jun
Jun
PHP 8 attributes in 2023 PHP 8 introduced the attributes, in lieu of the phpdoc comments. They may be added to classes, methods, functions, parameters, properties and class constants and provide a PHP-way to write custom configurations. This is a way to provide contextual information inside the code, and make it available to the PHP […]
02
May
May
PDFF : PHP Document File Format PDFF, or internally named PHP Document File Format, has been at the center of the development of Exakat since late 2021. It comes from a specific problem : describing dependencies, for the static analysis engine to understand and to take advantage of them, without auditing their source at the […]
04
Oct
Oct
I scream, you scream, we all scream for @ @, no scream operator, is a classic PHP operator, meant to suppress error displays locally. It is a staple of PHP code, in use in over 65% of PHP repositories : 2 repositories out of 3. Yet, it is widely recommended avoiding using it. Indeed, are […]