Architecture

Six lines of getter and setter ceremony around one strtolower. PHP 8.4 is in release candidates, and property hooks delete exactly that: class Customer { public string $email { set => strtolower(trim($value)); } } Assignment stays assignment, $customer->email = $input, and normalization happens on the way in. For this exact case, one value, no dependencies, I am convinced. The property remains a property. Where I get careful is everything past normalization. A setter method is ugly, but it announces itself. setEmail() in a call stack tells you code ran. $obj->email = $x looks free, and with hooks it is not. Put validation that throws into a hook, and every plain assignment becomes a possible exception, invisible at the call site. Put a side effect in, and you have built magic the next person discovers through a debugger at midnight. We spent years removing __get and __set from codebases for this exact crime. Hooks are their respectable cousins, better typed, analyzable, and the temptation is identical. ...

Every client reconnects at once. That is what a deploy means now on one project of mine, since Reverb made WebSockets a first-party Laravel feature this spring and order updates go to the browser instead of polling. The code was the easy part. A classic PHP app is stateless between requests. An FPM worker takes a request, answers, forgets. Capacity planning is requests per second. A WebSocket server is the opposite animal: thousands of open connections that mostly do nothing, but each one holds memory and a file descriptor, and each one is state that dies with the process. Your quiet realtime feature has a thundering herd built in. Plan for reconnect storms, raise descriptor limits, and make the client reconnect with jitter, never on a fixed timer. ...

The diff of a Laravel 11 upgrade on one mid-size API this week is mostly deletions. Almost empty app/, configuration in one fluent bootstrap file, the slim skeleton I wrote about in January now real. It feels great. Now look at what survived untouched. The use case class that wraps an order state change in a transaction. The listener that must fire only after commit, because it queues an email about a row that must exist. The cache invalidation that follows every write to a heavily read table. The decision that validation lives in a request class and business rules one layer deeper. None of this is skeleton. None of it got smaller. ...

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. ...