June-2017.php

Summer is on, June is over, and it's time for yet another summary of a month passed. This month's focus will be on PHP and Laravel, with an emphasis on performance, but many of the tricks are also useful if you work with other technologies. There's also a gem about database encryption.

I've had a hard time finding a proper plugin to provide proper syntax highlighting and folding capabilities when working with JavaScript, but Vim-vue seems to meet most of my needs when working with Vue components, finally!

The entire symfony.com frontend was refactored. This provided a lot of useful insights that was documented in a post on refactoring the symfony.com frontend. This process also formed the basis for the new Symfony frontend component, a Webpack wrapper and asset manager Webpack Encore which will be introduced in a coming version of Symfony.

StyleCI founder Graham Campbell has an interesting post on the architecture of a Laravel package. Besides the Laravel specifics it also contains some interesting points on advanced composer usage.

Performance is always an interesting topic. Chris Fidao from the awesome Servers for Hackers released a new section dedicated to Laravel Performance. The focus is on low-hanging fruits, and I believe most people will find something they can do right now to improve the performance of their application. Even though the emphasis is on Laravel, most of the tips are around object caching that can be used on any PHP projects, and different database optimisations, that can be used in any project where a database is in use.

Olav van Schie also has a performance focus in his Make your Laravel app fly with PHP OPCache. Again, even though the title says Laravel, OPCache optimisations can help improve performance on any PHP project, and the article gets a bit deeper into how to set up your OPCache settings.

The last article of the month focuses on security. Scott Arciszewski from the Paragon Initiative has a very interesting article about Building searchable encrypted databases. He both talks about the implementations of database encryption, both good and bad, and how to setup your database to make it possible to search your encrypted data in a performant way, without lowering your security.