The promise of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is really bearing fruit in today’s Web. Of course, we are not talking about internal APIs but of HTTP-based ones that allow us to interact with external systems—whether its saving or searching images in Flickr, getting weather conditions, or transcoding video. For many tasks, if you sign up to use the right APIs, you can build a fully functional application by writing PHP scripts which coordinate the workflow and communications between APIs.

SPOIL Your Users with Great Helper Libraries

Let’s be clear about something up front: Building API helper libraries is hard. So how can we take the necessary evil of helper libraries and give our users a positive experience? How do we make sure our libraries are complete, relevant, and appropriate? We have to SPOIL our users with a great experience. by D. Keith Casey, Jr.

High-Performance PHP APIs

Today’s challenge is to develop high-performance PHP APIs that provide a robust backend for mobile apps. And the principal problem is not only how to optimize the code implementation. I know that a raw SQL query is much more performant than any ORM is. But what about ongoing code maintenance and flexibility? by Simone Di Maulo

Putting the Pieces Together: Building APIs with Aura (and Other) Libraries

Over the past few years, whether folks outside the community acknowledge it or not, PHP has moved from a fractured, rather backward landscape to a more modern, collaborative one focused on building small, fast, reusable tools instead of monolithic, end-all, be-all solutions. This sounds a lot like the HTTP API-driven world we live in…so let’s see if we can build a light, fast, standard API on top of light, fast, modern PHP libraries. by Ian Littman

The API Toolbox

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) make a lot of things possible. But APIs are—not surprisingly—biased towards machines, not humans. Developers tend to be human, and I’ve curated a set of tools designed to help make working in this machine-to-machine world easier. by Tim Lytle

Help Wanted

During php[tek] 2015 there were great talks and, as usual, common themes that bubbled up and generated many side conversations. Two big themes from this year’s conference were mentoring and supporting the open source community. Developers already utilize files in our repositories to explain what a project does or how to contribute; why not have a file that describes the skills and technologies used and what help is needed? by Quentin T. Schmick Jr.

Education Station: Hands-on Dependency Injection in PHP

One topic I’m particularly keen to talk about is Dependency Injection (DI). Why? Well, despite the wide range of benefits it offers, it’s still something that, in the PHP community at least, isn’t as well understood or widely used as it should be. It’s ever present due to implementations in most of the common frameworks, such as Zend\Di and Aura.Di. But I suspect that a good percentage of developers are largely unaware of it. So, over the next couple of months, I’m going to cover what it is as well as how to implement a basic DI in your applications using some of the best DI containers around. by Matthew Setter

Leveling Up: Getting a Date With PHP

At some point in your software development career, you’re nearly guaranteed to run into a problem in which you will need to know when something happened or when it will happen. In this edition of Leveling Up, we’ll be talking about how to get a date with PHP, specifically examining some of the functionality that PHP provides with the DateTime class. by David Stockton

Community Corner: June 2015

An interview with Symfony’s Fabien Potencier, php[tek] and Global Accessibility Awareness Day recaps, and more. by Joe Devon

finally{}: Where are All the Programmers?

We appear to have a mystery on our hands. I’d like to ask you, the reader, to help us solve this. It’s a very simple mystery, mind you. Where are all the PHP programmers? by Eli White