Architecture

No app/Http/Kernel.php. That is the first thing you notice in the Laravel 11 preview, and the first thing every comment thread asks: where did my middleware go. The skeleton is the loudest change this quarter, louder than any feature. An app/ directory that is almost empty, no folder of middleware stubs, a pile of service providers collapsed into one, config files trimmed. The middleware did not go anywhere. It moved into the framework. The mechanism exists exactly as before, only the file does not, and bootstrap/app.php gets a small fluent API to reconfigure the stack when you actually need to. ...

An email confirming an order that does not exist. A colleague showed me this one last week, together with the mirror bug: an order that exists and never got its email. The code was the obvious kind. Commit the Doctrine transaction, then dispatch to the AMQP transport. Two systems, two writes, no shared transaction. Publish after commit and the process can die between them, event lost. Publish inside the transaction and the broker gets an event for data that may still roll back. Both orders are wrong, and under real load this fires weekly. ...

A static array with the comment “cache, cleared per request”. It went to production on RoadRunner last month, and the memory graph turned into a staircase. PHP had one superpower nobody advertised: the request died. Every leak, every forgotten static, every open transaction was erased when the process shut down. Shared-nothing was not architecture. It was amnesia, and amnesia forgave us everything. RoadRunner and Swoole take it away. The worker lives for thousands of requests, and the class of bugs changes on the first day. That “per request” cache became a cache per worker lifetime, and the supervisor killed the process when it ran out of memory. A logger kept the request id in a property, so entries from user B carried the id of user A. And the best one: an exception in the middle of a Doctrine transaction left the connection with the transaction open, and the next request on that worker silently joined it. ...

Three lines of YAML in a file two directories away, for one integer that one service reads. That was the first thing I converted when I started moving a project’s service config from YAML into attributes, to see where the line is. public function __construct( #[Autowire('%env(int:IMPORT_BATCH_SIZE)%')] private int $batchSize, ) {} Now the class tells you everything about itself. Same with #[TaggedIterator] for collecting all implementations of an interface, and #[AsDecorator] for wrapping a service. These are local facts. A local fact belongs next to the code it describes. When I open the class, I want to stop searching. ...

Two readonly keywords for two properties in a two-property class. That is what an immutable Money looks like in PHP 8.1: final class Money { public function __construct( public readonly int $amount, public readonly string $currency, ) {} } PHP 8.2 is at release candidate stage, and the feature I am waiting for is this one. The keyword moves up and says it once: final readonly class Money { public function __construct( public int $amount, public string $currency, ) {} } Every property is readonly, and the class refuses dynamic properties on top. Cosmetics, yes. But cosmetics that make the right thing the short thing, and that changes what people actually write. ...

Forty lines of $request->get() before the first line of real logic. That was the controller nobody wanted to touch, and the Symfony 6.1 upgrade was my excuse to open it. An action that reads ten request fields by hand does two jobs. It translates HTTP into data, and it runs the use case. The first job is boring and repeated in every action, which is exactly why it should not be written by hand ten times. Symfony has argument resolvers for this since 3.1. People just do not use them for their own types. ...

FCALL update_if_newer 1 user:42 17. One round trip, a name instead of a SHA, and it survives a restart. Redis 7 came out last week, and Functions are the feature I care about. Everything EVAL scripts should have been. The problem they solve is real. Take compare-and-update: set a value only if the stored version is older. From PHP it is three round trips and a race between them. WATCH/MULTI works but is ugly and retries under contention. A Lua script does it atomically in one trip, and that is why we all wrote Lua scripts. But scripts are anonymous blobs. The application carries the source, sends it on every deploy, and debugging starts with “which SHA is this”. Functions fix the operational part: the library lives in Redis, has a name, has a version. ...

One row in orders had status 'canceled', with one l. Nobody knows how long it sat there. The enum found it on the first day. PHP 8.1 enums are six weeks old, enough time in one project to say something practical. The first candidate was obvious: order status. For years it was a class with string constants, Order::STATUS_PAID, Order::STATUS_SHIPPED. Constants look safe, but nothing stops a function from receiving 'payed'. The parameter type was string, and string accepts everything. ...

'payed'. One letter, half a day of debugging, a few years ago. The string walked straight through OrderStatus::isValid(), because someone had added it to the constants list “for compatibility”. Every project I touched has that class: a bag of string constants, an isValid() helper, and a prayer. The type system never knew these strings were special. PHP 8.1 came out yesterday. Point release on paper, and it brings the feature I wanted since forever. Enums. ...

“MySQL server has gone away”, first thing in the morning, on a worker that had no traffic all night. That was week one after we moved a project from FPM to RoadRunner. For all these years FPM managed our database connections. Not with clever code. By dying. Process ends, connection closes, transaction rolls back, session variables reset. Nobody thought about connection lifecycle, because there was none. Move the same code to RoadRunner or Swoole workers and the topic is back. A connection lives for hours now. Two things go wrong, and both showed up within a week. ...