Symfony Station Communique - 15 October 2021. A Look at Symfony and PHP News.
Tags: symfony, php, opcache, phpunit
Published: 2021-10-15 15:05:40

This post originally appeared on [Symfony Station](https://symfonystation.com/communiques/f/symfony-station-communique---15-october-2021).
 
Welcome to this week's Symfony Station Communique. It’s your weekly review of the most valuable and essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities.
 
Thanks to the team at [Symfony's blog](https://symfony.com/blog/a-week-of-symfony-771-4-10-october-2021) for featuring our [previous Communique](https://symfonystation.com/communiques/f/symfony-station-communique-8-october-2021) on Sunday!
 
*Please note all links will open in a new browser window. My opinions, if I present any, will be in italics.

##Symfony

###This week

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.

Highlight -> “This week, Symfony continued adding tweaks to fix compatibility with the future PHP 8.1 version. Meanwhile, the upcoming Symfony 5.4 version merged some new features such as basic support for language negotiation and a CssColor constraint to validate that a given value matches any of the formats available to define CSS colors.”

[A Week of Symfony](https://symfony.com/blog/a-week-of-symfony-771-4-10-october-2021) #771 (4-10 October, 2021)


They announced the upcoming SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Winter Edition conference (December 9-10, 2021) will offer two days of online workshops. Seats are limited. Book your seats soon!
 
Announcing [the Workshops of SymfonyWorld Online 2021](https://symfony.com/blog/announcing-the-workshops-of-symfonyworld-online-2021-winter-conference) Winter Conference

 
And they also announced that the SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Winter Edition conference (December 9-10, 2021) will take place a few days after the release of Symfony 6. That's why it's a great opportunity to learn all about the latest Symfony 6 features.

First selected [speakers at SymfonyWorld Online 2021](https://symfony.com/blog/first-selected-speakers-at-symfonyworld-2021-online-2021-winter-conference) Winter Conference

 
Last but not least the [Symfony Security Documentation](https://symfony.com/doc/current/security.html) has been updated.


SymfonyCasts looks at Doctrine Relations and using Foundry.

[This week on SymfonyCasts](https://5hy9x.r.ag.d.sendibm3.com/mk/mr/k1KySlnreCSGjCqfMaXBl9S_dlRXUq7g1Cu_zAoC8oR415IN3kEUypuu_vQGQl-aNfKetRKe3MpMNE1e6g0iTLZNKySUFNhehAKO1z7WPkxbAVhEP5td4aQ0DIJV2WszFEeyvfOluw) 


Matthias Noback observes that “It's an extremely common problem in legacy code bases: a new way of doing things was introduced before the team decided on a way to get the old thing out.” Regarding this code, he asks:

Do you have [an exit strategy?](https://matthiasnoback.nl/2021/10/do-you-have-an-exit-strategy/) 


Do you have a Symfony/PHP application which needs to connect to AWS and use some of its services (S3, Secrets Manager, etc.)? Do you want to avoid pushing credentials to your Git repository or revealing them to any third party (deployment, testing, or code review tools). If so, then follow this guide.

Safe and simple [AWS credential management for your Symfony/PHP application](https://dev.to/nikolastojilj12/safe-and-simple-aws-credential-management-for-your-symfony-php-application-29i)


###This month
 
Mon Code examines mitigating data breaches. As you can't be confident in your security, encrypted data is an excellent way to reduce impact by making data unusable. There are some existing libraries and bundles to use with Symfony and Doctrine that allow you to encrypt and decrypt data on the fly with your database.
 
[Secure your data using encryption in PHP](https://www.mon-code.net/post/131/Secure-your-data-using-encryption-in-PHP)

 
Blackfire was glad to announce the release of their Consumers Monitoring feature, expanding even further the scale of the Continuous Observability available to its customers. Consumers, background jobs, and CLI commands can now be monitored.

[Introducing the Consumers Monitoring](https://blog.blackfire.io/consumers-monitoring.html)

Roberto Manchado says testing a listener using Symfony events is easy. He shows us how much in this article.
 
 
How to [test your listener events on Symfony with PHPUnit](https://dev.to/robertomanchado/how-test-your-listener-events-on-symfony-5bh8)


###Timeless

We are building out the permanent Symfony Station website with Drupal and ran across this article during our research.
 
Why [Symfony Is Perfect For Drupal Developers](https://www.bairesdev.com/technologies/drupal-development-services/)


This article is in French but it is a good review of the developer experience for Symfony and Laravel developers.

Symfony et Laravel : [Retours d’expérience de développeurs PHP](https://blog.link-value.fr/symfony-laravel-partage-experience-developpeurs-php-6fe0e73c5850)


Cet l’article est aussi en francais et looks at Doctrine filters.

Symfony — [Les Filtres doctrines](https://nicolasfz-code.medium.com/symfony-les-filtres-doctrines-a91ffa486f33)


##PHP

###This week

On GitConnected, Travis Weston asks what does goto have to do with loops?

[Loops are just conditionals that repeat](https://levelup.gitconnected.com/loops-are-just-conditionals-that-repeat-71275d4768f2)


Rector shows you how to upgrade your annotations to attributes with their product.

How to [Upgrade Annotations to Attributes](https://getrector.org/blog/how-to-upgrade-annotations-to-attributes)


Brent from Stitcher.io notes that PHP 8.1 adds a feature that might seem like a small detail, but one that I think will have a significant day-by-day impact on many people. So what's this "new in initializers RFC" thing?
 
PHP 8.1: [new in initializers](https://stitcher.io/blog/php-81-new-in-inititalizers)


Nikita Popov describes the concepts behind Opcache in this thorough article.

[How OPcache works](https://www.npopov.com/2021/10/13/How-opcache-works.html)

 
A 10-day newsletter from Brent Roose explores static analysis.

The Road to PHP: [Static Analysis](https://road-to-php.com/static)

 
###This Month

In a new ebook Front Line PHP looks at building modern applications with PHP 8.1.

[Building modern applications with PHP 8.1](https://front-line-php.com/)


On Dev.to Alua TYC mentions that PHP implicit casting is prevalent. But before he examined what it means, he looked at why it happens.

A detailed look into [PHP type casting](https://dev.to/altsyset/a-detailed-look-into-php-type-casting-4m6d)


Tomas Votruba explains that Coding Standard tools are very fast in processing a single file. However, the performance hiccup is in the number of processed files. If you have multiple files, the 2nd file cannot start until the 1st file finishes.

Fortunately, this architecture has a huge potential in performance improvement once we add a parallel run.

Introducing up-to a 16 Times [Faster Easy Coding Standard](https://tomasvotruba.com/blog/introducing-up-to-16-times-faster-easy-coding-standard/)


###This Year

In a 2nd article, Tomas Votruba asks if you enabled parallel run in PHPStan and ECS? You may know the speed gain is brutal. But, on the other hand, there are few hidden costs in developer experience.

Hidden [Productivity Costs of Parallel Run](https://tomasvotruba.com/blog/hidden-productivity-costs-of-parallel-run/)


##Other


The Next Web had an interesting article about Natural Language Processing and its evolution to Natural Language Coding.

[Programming in ‘natural’ language](https://thenextweb.com/news/programming-natural-language-syndication) is coming sooner than you think


Mind Matters News says equating code debt with monetary debt can lead to strategic technology mistakes.

[Code Debt is not Real Debt](https://tomasvotruba.com/blog/introducing-up-to-16-times-faster-easy-coding-standard/)


McKinsey has a new report looking at which technology trends will affect our future the most. The World Economic Forum has an overview.
 
[These are the top 10 tech trends](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/technology-trends-2021-mckinsey/) that will shape the coming decade, according to McKinsey


That's it for this week. I look forward to sharing next week's Symfony and PHP news with you on Friday. 
 
Please share this post. :)
 
Happy coding Symfonistas!

![Photo of Reuben Walker](https://miro.medium.com/max/2100/0*kWSBxA1B_Cw1INEf)

Reuben Walker
Founder Symfony Station
Reuben is also Ringmaster of Mobile Atom Media and its division Mobile Atom Code.