March 10, 2020 — Laravel 7 has been a major version that’s been released last week and it comes with the host of features and improvements to the Laravel framework. One of the improvements being the new fluent string operations API. The goal of these API is to provide more flexibility and readablity to the regular string operations in Laravel by chaining array of string manipulation methods.

March 5, 2020 — I’ve discussed about Route Model Bindings of Laravel in length in this article previously. If you’re not aware about the feature, I’d recommend you check that article first and come back here again.

March 3, 2020 — Sometimes, it’s handy if we have an ability to create property and method names from another properties just like what we have in JavaScript. In another words, a property or method name which can be set and used dynamically. For instance, a normal property can be set with a statement in PHP like so.

March 2, 2020 — Constructors are a really important part of the class-based object oriented programming. Through constuctors, a newly created objects initialize properties automatically before it is usable. In PHP, a constructor is a method named __construct(), which the keyword new automatically calls after creating the object. Constructors can also accept arguments, in which case, when the new statement is written, you also need to send the constructor arguments for the parameters.

March 1, 2020 — I use PhpStorm for all my projects related to PHP for years now and I can’t imagine myself going back to another IDE. Period. The amount of features it provides for modern PHP developement is impeccable. There are tonnes of features though, so it’s rather overwhelming if you’ve just started using it and you want to learn all at once.

February 26, 2020 — Working with Laravel Eloquent, we always had this ability to check null fields when builing queries on models. For instance, if you want to check if email_verified_at field is null or not, you’d check it like so.

February 20, 2020 — PHP has introduced an operator called “spaceship opearator” (<=>) with the release of PHP7. What this spaceship operator do is compare two expressions i.e. its two operands, let’s say $a and $b, and returns -1, 0 or 1 when $a is respectively less than, equal to, or greater than $b.

February 18, 2020 — The usual and might be the most used way of cleaning the object is to use the good old __destruct() magic method in PHP. The magic method proves to be good in most of the cases. But there might be some scenario where even the __destruct() method will fail. For instance, a scenario where your PHP script exceeds the maximum execution time, and terminates thusly. And a fatal error would occur called Maximum execution time of 20 seconds exceeded in - on line XX.

February 16, 2020 — Sometimes, you might want to convert some of the request parameters to boolean. For instance, take a checkbox field. Unless and until, it hasn’t been checked it won’t be passed through to the request. In such a case, it would be beneficial to convert such inputs to boolean.

February 10, 2020 — Traits in PHP is a way of re-using the code. Basically, Traits are assistive copy-paste mechanism provided by the language itself. Using Traits, developers can reduce the limitations of single inheritence based languages such as PHP. I have written a dedicated article about it if you want to check it out.