I’ll be the first to criticize PHP from a language design perspective. But, PHP does possess compelling aspects that have contributed to its popularity today.
Last week, a Symfony Live event was held in Paris. For those of you that are not familiar with Symfony, Symfony is a PHP framework which provides the tools to build an application. Symfony powers numerous popular applications such as the Drupal CMS, the leading open-source CMS, and serves billions of impressions per month.
What differentiates Symfony from other software creation templates is that Symfony is a community. The Symfony community emerged as an open source project where web application was developed to fit user’s needs. This community has since evolved as international conferences are being held to discuss the latest web application developments. The most recent Symfony conference, know as “Symfony Live,” was held in Paris. This conference included talks and workshops, as well as announcements on the latest Symfony updates and tools.
Some of the major updates announced at the conference were the new mailer and HTTPClient. We are excited about both of these components, as they will bring welcomed benefits in terms of not only developer experience (DX) but also efficiency.
Other talks and updates given at the conference included:
*most slides are written in French*
In real life, (not that I am familiar with a fake one,) Binary search, is a surprisingly useful algorithm.
An example of how this algorithm can be applied is studying for the SAT. Imagine you bought 5000 index cards, alphabetically sorted, with vocabulary words on them. Then, just as you were about to start studying, you got an alert that the definition for “sisyphean” was incorrect. You would know how to quickly remove it from the deck, while most “normal people” would sit there sifting through all 5000 index cards!
A binary search could be applied to cut the deck in half. Once you select the half where the “s” words are, you could continue this process until you find your card. On average you would spend O(log n) finding your card vs. O(n) for someone that had to scan the whole deck sequentially!
Have you ever tried anything other than JavaScript or Typescript for front end and what was the result?
I tried Scala.js a couple of years ago, before TypeScript was popular. The results were mixed, at best. My experience was not recent, but, if I recall correctly, my two biggest stumbling blocks were tooling support and interop with standard JavaScript libraries.
On the tooling side, the major challenge was that scala.js needs to be compiled via the JVM based Scala compiler in order to produce JavaScript. That made integrating with JavaScript build tools like Gulp or Grunt fairly difficult. On top of that, I was sort of stuck writing scala.js in Eclipse since it had the best Scala plugin support. What that meant is that I had to give up IntelliJ’s awesome web development capabilities.
Integrating with third party libraries is a struggle for all of the “compile to JavaScript” solutions. A few years back, scala.js had a pretty rough integration story. Scalajs still relies on typed “facades,” Write facade types for JavaScript APIs to for integration. The problem faced is that there is not “any” type of Scala where you can skirt needing actual type information.
These two issues highlight how well TypeScript is implemented in regards to tooling and 3rd party library support. Today, (2019) I think it that TypeScript is really the only effective option for compiling to JavaScript.