An Interview with PHP 5.5 and 5.6 Refcard Author Luis Atencio

Today we're releasing our What's New in PHP 5.5 and 5.6 Refcard, authored by DZone MVB Luis Atencio. Luis has been a Staff Software Engineer focusing on Java and PHP at Citrix Systems and we spoke with him to talk a little bit about his background and the PHP Refcard. 

What's New in PHP 5.5 and 5.6

This Refcard provides a detailed treatment of new features, up-to-date best practices, and tutorials on how to make the most of modern PHP. 

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DZone: Could you tell us a little bit about your professional background and how it contributed to your writing of the PHP 5.5 and 5.6 Refcard?

Luis Atencio: I have been working at Citrix as a software engineer in both Java/PHP for about 8 years now. Also, I have a Masters Degree in Computer Science, an author of PHPArch magazine as well as my one blog site: http://luisatencio.net, with many topics on PHP.

DZone: Briefly explain why this Refcard is a must-have resource for developers working with PHP. 

Luis: As developers we see ourselves flooded with information. The community, especially PHP, is such a fast-pace community that keeping track of all of the platform changes and new bells and whistles can be challenging. This Refcard can be used  as quick go-to reference for everything PHP 5.5 and 5.6. 

DZone: What do you think are the most common problems developers face when dealing with PHP?

Luis: This is difficult to answer. I've met a lot of PHP developers, and the typical scenario is that they would not use any other language to work with. Which I think is a bad approach. I think there are many great languages out there, each with their own strengths. So, the only way I can answer with some common problems where I think there is room for improvement. 

• There are a lot of PHP calls that are redundant or kind of do the same things. There are other native functions that are very specialized. I think the language should be a bit tighter and instead of solving every task, provide the mechanism to write extensible code. 
  
• I would also like a consistent way to acquire external third-party code. Some are packaged via extensions, others via userland code in the form of libraries. Making this consistent will remove a lot of the confusion.
  
• Better editor tools. One thing I wrestle with is that to perform unit tests I need to manually install a tool like phpunit and configure my editor to use it. Even the better payed IDEs work this way. It would be nice to have this out of the box.
  

DZone: Tell us about an interesting project you are working on now.

Luis: We are building a learning system for Citrix. Our first project was based on Moodle. And while that had some good things, we faced many challenges. So we decided to modernize it into a completely new architecture based on the Laravel MVC framework.

DZone: Please recommend some more resources for readers looking to learn about PHP.

Luis: Aside from PHP.net (the leader when it comes to PHP), I recommend subscribing to phparch magazine. There is a lot of great content in there. 

DZone: Anything else you’d like to add?

Luis: I think the future of PHP is bright and, with the competition from HHVM, it will be even better. The newly introduced language platforms are really compelling and I am looking forward to using it even more.

DZone: Thanks Luis!