40 \ December 2018 \ http://www.phparch.comCommunity Corner
Community Review 2018
James Titcumb
The final days of 2018 are looming on us, and I wanted to take a look back on some
of the things, good and bad, that happened in and around the PHP community this
year.New Conferences
As a speaker, I’ve been to a few confer-
ences around the world—the usual ones
have been a blast such as PHPBenelux
in January, PHP UK in February, DPC
in June. While I couldn’t be there in the
USA there was php[tek] back in May,
CoderCruise in August and, happening
as I type this, php[world] in Washing-
ton.
While some established conferences
went away, we’ve seen our fair share of
new conferences pop up too. Five new
regional conferences popped up in the
United States. Time will tell if these
become as established as their prede-
cessors but it shows there are people
in the community willing to organize
one. Another exciting event is Grumpy-
Conf—a small-scale conference focused
on professional development organized
by Chris Hartjes, who previously orga-
nized TrueNorth PHP.GDPR
How could we forget the EU’s GDPR
introduction as well, which caused
waves—not just within the PHP
community, but in businesses all over
the world. This law heralded a big step
towards a focus on privacy and data
ownership, and while some non-EU
organizations decided to block access
to EU citizens, many embraced the
changes in legislation and took it as an
opportunity to look at how we handle
customer data better with consider-
ation for privacy.PHP-FIG
The Framework Interoperability
Group (PHP-FIG) has had a busy year
too, accepting three brand new PSRs.
PSR-15^1 was accepted way back at the
start of the year, and defined a stan-
dard on how middleware and request
handlers should behave by defining
their interfaces opening the door for
better framework interoperability.
PSR-17 was also introduced which
recommends a standard for factories
which create PSR-7 compliant HTTP
objects for a bit more consistency.
Finally, PSR-18 proposes a standard for
clients to make HTTP requests such
as HTTPlug, Guzzle, and so on. FIG is
more active than ever too, with ongoing
discussion around phpdoc tags, coding
styles adapted for PHP 7, security
disclosures, and more.It’s worth remembering the original
aim of the FIG is to suggest things
primarily for the benefit of its
members (hence naming them PHP
Standards Recommendations.) It
is not meant to set PHP Standards
Enforcements for the wider PHP
community.PHP Internals
PHP internals has looked positive
these days as well, which is an upturn
for the history books. I’ve not heard of
any drama coming out of the internals
mailing list, and the RFCs are coming
through thick and fast. Notable nods
go to the almost unanimous acceptance1 PSR-15:
https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-15/of Typed Properties^2 as a new feature
proposed for PHP 7.4 with 70 ayes and
one no, and a proposal to introduce a
preloading ability^3 for PHP 7.4, which
at the time of writing has 48 ayes and
not a single no. It seems like everyone is
on the same page these days!HHVM
A few months ago, we also learned
that HHVM decided to drop support
for PHP code to focus on their Hack
language. I’m of the opinion they made
the right move, and I think the positive
impact the HHVM team at Facebook
made on the PHP language, by encour-
aging the development of PHP 7.0 and
beyond, was by far the most significant
contribution they could’ve made, for
which I’m very grateful.PHP Versions EOL
Talking of PHP versions, it’s worth
remembering PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0
security support will end by the close
of 2018, and active support for PHP 7.1
will cease by the time you read this on
1st December—so it really is time to get
working on those upgrades to PHP 7.2
if you’re not already there. The release
goal of PHP 7.3 in mid-December
means new features such as exceptions
parsing JSON and trailing commas on
function calls will start making their
way into code very soon.2 Typed Properties:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/typed_properties_v2
3 preloading ability:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/preload