PHP News For August 2019

Here’s a condensed list of things that happened in PHP world during August.

PHP 7.1.31, 7.2.21, 7.3.8 Released

Earlier this month, PHP team announced the availability of PHP 7.1.31, 7.2.21, 7.3.8. Please note that PHP 7.1 is on security fixes only and it is recommended to upgrade to PHP 7.2.

P++ RFC Rejected

There were several discussions on internals mailing list about having a superset version of PHP, PHP++/P++. Many of the PHP community members gave their thoughts and feedback with regards to this. Some suggested taking a look at Rust’s model.

A RFC regarding P++ was put up but was unanimously rejected. This was because the internals team thought that it was not a feasible attempt. Internals team suggested that it would be better to have such improvements released in PHP 8.

I believe that this is a sound decision by the internals team as their resources are very limited. Having a separate P++ would cripple the development speed of PHP and is a huge risk that might not pay off well.

Laracon US

This took place in late July but its videos are recently made available online. You can view them on this Youtube playlist.

As part of Laracon US 2019, there were several key announcements by Taylor Otwell. These are Laravel 6 and Laravel Vapor.

Laravel 6 Announced

Not much is known for now but Laravel 6 will start using semantic versioning.

Laravel Vapor announced

Serverless platform for Laravel applications. Its underlying infrastructure is managed by Amazon Web Services.

It costs $39/monthly to use this platform. This cost does not cover your project’s infrastructure costs. Hence, a starter application might cost at least $60/monthly (serverless + mini database).

Personally, as a user of Pivotal Web Services, I think this is a good attempt at instilling competition in the market. However, overall, I am against the idea of using serverless for web applications. Serverless should only be used for cron or small jobs that run in the background.

This is because running a “hot”-served web application on serverless platforms is still very expensive.

PHP 7.4 RC scheduled

PHP 7.4 is currently in its final phase of beta and is scheduled to have a Release Candidate on 5th September 2019. PHP 7.4 will have new exciting features such as Typed Properties.

I am excited about PHP 7.4 and hope it’ll bring new fantastic features to the table.

Conclusion

It has been an exciting month of August for PHP. If there’s any big things that I missed out, feel free to mention them in the comments below! Do tell me how you feel about these news too!

Author: Woo Huiren

Currently a student at National University of Singapore. I contribute to opensource projects - primarily PHP and Angular related. I write about PCF and PWS related stuff too.

Leave a Reply