Weekly updates #01/2022

Hey everyone. This is our weekly thread with news from the Laravel world, our weekly code tips, and other updates.

Since we didn't post these threads the last couple of weeks around Christmas holidays, this — as the first thread of the year — is a special that includes news from all of the previous weeks alongside news from this week.

Ecosystem news

This week's updates from the Laravel world

• 🚀 Laravel Forge has moved to @inertiajs + @tailwindcss and the result is 🤩
• 🛠 A complete toolkit for web scraping using PHP, by @warsh33p
• 🕹 More control over long running processes on Laravel Forge
• 📊 Easily record mail statistics in your Laravel web apps
• 📚 Wanna know how @LaravelLivewire works behind the scenes?
• ✅ More testing tips from the @pestphp expert Luke. This time as a blog post
• 💭 Some thoughts on best practices in web development
• 💬 Little known @beyondcode package that can help you polish the texts in your Laravel apps
• 🎉 New Composer version! It's an LTS release and the minimum PHP version is 7.2.5
• 🤖 You can now easily play with OpenAI using PHP, thanks to @orhan_erday
• 🎁 Free book on design patterns for building web apps with JavaScript and React

Code tips

First week's code tips special: thread

• 🔥 Number markdown lists with 1. rather than the actual number
• 🔥 Use composer why-not to see why a depenedency cannot be installed
• 🔥 You can use first class callables for routes in PHP 8.1
• 🔥 Use skip() when writing tests ahead of time
• 🔥 Annotate data transformations
• 🔥 Compare models using is() instead of directly comparing attributes
• 🔥 Always use strict comparison
• 🔥 You can use Blade::stringable() to define how specific objects should be converted to their string representation
• 🔥 You can use onerror on the image tag
• 🔥 You can supply default values for route parameters
• 🔥 Use partitions for deleting mass amounts of data
• 🔥 You can use generic class-string annotations to hint that an instance of the passed class is returned
• 🔥 From PHP 7.4, you can use the spread syntax to merge arrays
• 🔥 Use the SOUNDEX() function in MySQL to compare strings by how they sound rather than how they're typed
• 🔥 PHP 8.1 enums can be used as model casts
• 🔥 Create model methods for business logic
• 🔥 Custom collections pair well with higher order proxies