Phalcon Framework

We are an open source web framework for PHP delivered as a C extension offering high performance and lower resource consumption

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 2.0.2 released

The development of Phalcon has been accelerated since we released 2.0.0. More and more contributors find Zephir very easy to understand and work with, and as a result it is time to release Phalcon 2.0.2. This version includes many features, bug fixes and improvements in terms of performance:

Added `stats()` methods to Beanstalk

Fixed segfault when a docblock does not have annotations #10301

Fixed wrong number of parameters passed when triggering an event in Mvc\Collection

Now Mvc\Model checks if an attribute has a default value associated in the database and ignores it from the insert/update generated SQL

Readded Http\Request::hasPut() (#10283)

Phalcon\Text: Added method reduceSlashes() - Reduces multiple slashes in a string to single slashes

Phalcon\Text: Added method concat() - Concatenates strings using the separator only once without duplication in places concatenation

Added conditional on Session adapter start() to check if the session has already been started

Added status() function in Session adapter to return the status of the session (disabled/none/started)

Implementation of subqueries as expressions in PHQL

Performance improvements focused on PHP 5.6

Subqueries

One of the most requested requests by the community is now available in Phalcon 2.0.2. Now, you can take advantage of subqueries as shown below:

$phql = "SELECT c.* FROM Shop\Cars c WHERE c.brandId IN (SELECT id FROM Shop\Brands) ORDER BY c.name"; $cars = $this->modelsManager->executeQuery($phql);

Models must belong to the same database in order to be used as source in a subquery.

Default Database Values

Now in the case that a column has a 'default' value declared in the field of the mapped table, this 'default' value will be used instead of inserting 'NULL':

$robots = new Robots(); $robots->save(); // use all `default` values

Update/Upgrade

This version can be installed from the master branch, if you don’t have Zephir installed follow these instructions:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master cd ext sudo ./install

The standard installation method also works:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master cd build sudo ./install

If you have Zephir installed:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master zephir fullclean zephir build

Note that running the installation script will replace any version of Phalcon installed before.

Windows DLLs are available in the download page.

See the upgrading guide for more information about upgrading to Phalcon 2.0.x from 1.3.x.

Comming soon

In the future 2.0.x series, we will be concentrating our efforts on requests from the community:

Eager-Loading in PHQL

Optional string empty values in the ORM

PHQL custom functions

Case Statements in PHQL

Aliases for namespaces in PHQL

Later on, we will be planning the features to include in Phalcon 2.1, for now:

Complete deprecation of PHP 5.3

Unification of Phalcon\Mvc\Model\Validation and Phalcon\Validation

Thanks

Thanks to everyone involved in making this version as well to the community for their continuous input and feedback!

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 2.0.1 released

Today we're releasing Phalcon 2.0.1, this version fixes bugs and adds new features in the 2.0 series, the following is the CHANGELOG:

Fixed random segfaults in installations using PHP <= 5.5 caused by inline caches

Added missing Phalcon\Debug::listenLowSeverity

Added new theme in Phalcon\Debug

Allow to count and iterate Phalcon\Session\Bag as in 1.3.x

Renamed getEventsManager to getInternalEventsManager in Phalcon\Di to avoid collision   with existing services

Added constants FILTER_* to Phalcon\Filter for filters names

Fixed multibyte characters in cssmin/jsmin filters

Added Phalcon\Security::destroyToken() to remove current token key and value from session

Restored alternative hash algorithms in Phalcon\Security that were available in 1.3.x

Fixed bug that makes instances returned in Model::findFirst to be not completely initialized

Added support for general SELECT ALL/SELECT DISTINCT in PHQL

Added support for "not in" test in Volt

Phalcon\Debug\Dump -- Renamed method var() to variable() -- Renamed method vars() to variables()

Phalcon\Mvc\Model::findFirst() now allows hydration (#10259).

Fixed high memory consumption when serializing Cache\Backend\Memory.

Update/Upgrade

This version can be installed from the master branch, if you don’t have Zephir installed follow these instructions:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master cd ext sudo ./install

The standard installation method also works:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master cd build sudo ./install

If you have Zephir installed:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master zephir fullclean zephir build

Note that running the installation script will replace any version of Phalcon installed before.

Windows DLLs are available in the download page.

See the upgrading guide for more information about upgrading to Phalcon 2.0.x from 1.3.x.

Thanks to all the collaborators and the community!

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 2 released!

The wait is over! Phalcon 2.0 is here!

After more than a year of development, we're extremely excited to announce the release of Phalcon 2.0 (final).

Those that have been following the project closely, know that this has not been a small feat.

We had to create a brand new language Zephir which allows developers to write PHP extensions easily.

We had to completely rewrite most of Phalcon 1.3.x, offering the same functionality as before so as to ensure that upgrading will be very easy.

Zephir had to be adjusted and enhanced as we moved through the rewrite, offering more functions and options to developers.

Additional features were implemented for 2.0, mostly thanks to our contributors!

The results are something that we are very proud of:

Phalcon 2.0, offering compatible functionality (and more) as before

Zephir, allowing developers to write their own extensions easily without the need to know C.

Installation

This version can be installed from the master branch, if you don’t have Zephir installed follow these instructions:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master cd ext sudo ./install

The standard installation method also works:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master cd build sudo ./install

If you have Zephir installed:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout master zephir fullclean zephir build

Note that running the installation script will replace any version of Phalcon installed before.

Windows DLLs are available in the download page.

See the upgrading guide for more information about installing and updating to Phalcon 2.

What’s next

Our release schedule will be every one or two months (unless we need to issue a security fix, which will be near instant). The target will be the most requested features by the community, although with Zephir, contributing to Phalcon will be a breeze. We can't wait to see those pull requests coming in :)

Smaller changes and fixes that can be bundled in a minor version will be released as soon as we can. We will also be working on a LTS (Long Term Support) model for our community.

Finally we are going to start the research on PHP 7, so that we can adjust Zephir accordingly and of course Phalcon. This task will require a lot of preparation and work but we have our targets set on it due to the new functionality and features it offers.

Conclusion and acknowledgments

We are super excited about this release and are looking forward to the future. A big thank you to all the contributors and donors! We could not have done this without you. And of course, we would like to thank everyone that tested the alpha, betas and release candidates and finding, filing issues and providing feedback. We really hope you enjoy this release.

We would like to express our deep gratitude for tremendous efforts migrating and testing the code in this version, specially to:

Andres Gutierrez

Nikolaos Dimopoulos

Vladimir Kolesnikov

Eduar Carvajal

Dreamszhu

Dmitry Patsura

Vladimir Khramov

Piotr Gasiorowski

Olivier Monaco

Sid Roberts

Ivan Zubok

Max Galbusera

Yvan Taviaud

Rian Orie

Brainformatik GmbH

Mariusz Łączak

Nikolay Kirsh

Kamil Skowron

Serghei Iakovlev

Richard Laffers

Nikita Vershinin

Olivier Garbé

Robert Smolarek

Simon Karberg

Soufiane Ghzal

Kenji Suzuki

Vladimir Metelitsa

Carlos Guimaraes

Thanks again to all! Enjoy Phalcon 2 <3

[phalconphp-blog]

Guide: Upgrading to Phalcon 2

Phalcon 2 is the a major upgrade to the framework and will be released April 17th, 2015. This new version is a rewriting of about 85% total code from C to a high-level language we have created called Zephir.

Upgrading to the latest version has several benefits:

New features and improvements are added and bugs are fixed

Upgrading to the latest release available makes future upgrades less painful by keeping your code base up to date

Older version of Phalcon will eventually no longer receive bugs, security or feature updates

If you're upgrading an existing application, it's a great idea to have good test coverage before going in. You should also first upgrade to Phalcon 1.3.4 in case you haven't and make sure your application still runs as expected before attempting an update to Phalcon 2.

Most of the development of Phalcon 2 has been focused on maintaining backwards compatibility with 1.3 and thus make the upgrade as easy as possible. However being a different version with many internal changes, existing applications may require some minor changes. Here are some things to consider to help make your upgrade process as smooth as possible.

Interfaces and parameter types Phalcon 1.3 sometimes does not validate data types and interfaces compliance in parameters with the rigourousness as Phalcon 2 does. In many cases this should not be a problem. If you're implementing your own adapters or components based on Phalcon's interfaces then will be necessary to update the method prototypes:

use Phalcon\Di\InjectionAwareInterface; class MyComponent implements InjectionAwareInterface { public function setDi($di) { } }

Must be changed to:

use Phalcon\DiInterface; use Phalcon\Di\InjectionAwareInterface; class MyComponent implements InjectionAwareInterface { public function setDi(DiInterface $di) { } }

If for any reason, a wrong type is passed to methods that are not suppose to, you will probably have to change it:

// Passing a number as route ??? $app->add(100, function() { // ... })

Must be changed to:

// Passing a number as route ??? $app->add("100", function() { // ... })

Protected methods To improve performance some protected methods have been marked as final. It is a good practice not to override these methods as these might change in this or future versions and break applications.

Dependencies In most cases it will be necessary to upgrade to the latest version of your dependencies as well. If the Phalcon version was recently released or if some of your dependencies are not well-maintained, some of your dependencies may not yet support the new Phalcon version. In these cases you may have to wait until new versions of your dependencies are released.

PHP compatibility Like Phalcon 1.3, Phalcon 2.0 requires PHP 5.3.21 or above, however we will no longer deliver Windows DLLs for 5.3.x as it is considered an outdated and obsolte version. Additionally, you should know that many performance improvements have been particularly focused on PHP 5.6, so if you want to get the best performance we recommend to use this version.

Installation

This version can be installed from the 2.0.0 branch, if you don’t have Zephir installed follow these instructions:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 cd ext sudo ./install

The standard installation method also works:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 cd build sudo ./install

If you have Zephir installed:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 zephir build

Note that running the installation script will replace any version of Phalcon installed before.

Windows DLLs are available in the download page.

Deployment When you are sufficiently confident your application is working with Phalcon 2, you're ready to go ahead and deploy your upgraded Phalcon project.

Happy Upgrading!

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 2 Release Candidate

Today we're pleased to announce the first release-candidate for Phalcon 2.0. This release has been quite a while in the making, and includes new features, improvements and a clean and friendly code base.

As with all pre-release packages, this is not for production use. But if you'd like to take some of the new features for a spin, or to help find and fix bugs (which should be reported to the issue tracker).

We're also preparing a new website and documentation for your joy.

This version can be installed from the 2.0.0 branch, if you don’t have Zephir installed follow these instructions:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 cd ext sudo ./install

If you have Zephir installed:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 zephir build

It's almost here!

[phalconphp-blog]

Lezgro: Phalcon Framework Remains Solid Choice Among Technology Stack We Work With!

This post has been cross posted from Lezgro's blog, written by Pavlo Pastushenko

We established partnership with Phalcon Team – people who stand behind the fastest and robust PHP Framework that offers high performance and lower resource consumption. We provide advising to everyone who interested and glad to keep strong relationship with the company. Phalcon is always discussed as a framework to work with in terms of our Development Team as we always see lots of different ideas where its implementation would be a way to go.

Phalcon is a web framework implemented as a C extension. It is a full stack framework for PHP 5 with the functionality exposed as PHP classes. It offers the classic features of a modern PHP MVC-framework so it is comfortable to use. You will be amazed how fast your project will develop and progress. It’s simplicity empowered us to develop using Phalcon, so now we want to share this experience with you. Working in stable state and having that fast development so and further performance of the applications – no regrets are intended.

You may submit your PHP code to us for its possible inclusion into Phalcon (with NDA on it). Lezgro Development Team promises you the immediate vision on how your process of development will get much more efficient. And if everything is in place – there is a possibility of our mutual cooperation.

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 2 (beta 3) released

Today we're very excited to announce the release of the third beta (and possibly last one) of Phalcon 2!

Phalcon 2 is almost fully functional and stable as Phalcon 1.x, virtually all tests in 1.x are now passing 2.0. If you haven't tried Phalcon 2 out, it's time to give it a shot!

Preparing your migration to Phalcon 2

Interfaces and type checkings

Thanks to Zephir, Phalcon 2 performs a greater number of type and class checks, and as a result this make the whole framework more stable and consistent. If a wrong type or class is passed to a method you'll see the relevant exception with a verbose message. If you have created user adapters or extended framework components and they do not implement the necessary interfaces and/or types you may need to fix them.

Catchable fatal error: Argument 2 passed to Phalcon\Mvc\Model\Query::__construct() must implement interface Phalcon\DiInterface, instance of stdClass given in /home/scott/test.php on line 17

Better debug information

Zephir provides the exact place where an exception was thrown and it will provide more information as to where the error occurred.

Exception: The static method 'someMethod' doesn't exist on model 'Robots' File=phalcon/mvc/model.zep Line=4042 #0 /home/scott/test.php(64): Phalcon\Mvc\Model::__callStatic('someMethod', Array) #1 /home/scott/test.php(64): Robots::someMethod() #2 {main}

This could help you to find solutions for your problems by just looking at the framework source.

Error Handling

Phalcon 2 provides better facilities to handle exceptions, for instance, in micro applications you can use the new error handler which will allow you to do something like this:

use Phalcon\Http\Response; use Phalcon\Mvc\Micro; $app = new Micro(); $app->map('/say/{name}', function ($name) { throw new \Exception("An exception has occurred"); }); $app->error(function($e) { return new Response('Internal error'); });

These facilities were easily implemented thanks to the low-level exception system provided by Zephir.

Performance Improvements

Zephir/Phalcon 2 takes advantage of the improved way to return values in PHP 5.6. This optimization greatly reduces the number of unecessesary copies improving the performance.

Phalcon 2 new look

Our community have contributed 4 amazing proposals for the new design in the Phalcon 2 era. Contribute by voting your favorite design here.

Want to contribute?

From the beginning, Phalcon has been a different framework than any other framework out there, providing developers with many components and functionality in a single PHP extension. If you want to contribute in Phalcon 2, being a part of something unique and amazing, the simplest way is to look through the issue tracker for issues, bugs or features to implement. Help us to make Phalcon the greatest framework for PHP ever! Your contributions are very valuable.

Codeception

An important work has been done migrating and simplifying tests for Phalcon 2 into a single test-suite powered by CodeCeption. See the migrated tests here.

Help with Testing

This version can be installed from the 2.0.0 branch, if you don’t have Zephir installed follow these instructions:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 cd ext sudo ./install

If you have Zephir installed:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 zephir build

We hope that you will enjoy these improvements and additions. We invite you to share your thoughts and questions about this version on Phosphorum.

;3

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 1.3.3 released

This version is maintenance release of the Phalcon 1.3.x branch and it has a contributions from our community and fixes to the framework. We thank everyone that has worked on this release, especially with their contributions both to 1.3.3 and our work in progress 2.0.0.

Many thanks to everyone that have contributed either on Github or through discussion in our forum to this version.

From now, we encourage all the community to dedicate some time to test and improve Phalcon 2 our next big release.

Thank you!

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 2 beta 2 available

It's been a while since we last communicated with our community. Rest assured our resolve and determination towards the project remains the same :)

We're in the process putting the final touches on the second major release of Phalcon in its two years of life. Phalcon 2 is powered by Zephir a brand new high-level language that makes the development more enjoyable and easier.

Phalcon 2 now implements most of the functionality that Phalcon 1.x offers and it's now passing an important number of tests in Travis. Yay!

Phalcon 2 new look

We're looking for a enthusiast graphic designer/company who want to contribute a new look for Phalcon when releasing Phalcon 2. Check this forum thread for more information.

Want to contribute?

The simplest way is to look through the issue tracker for issues or features to implement. Also fixing the necessary code to make some unit-tests pass on Phalcon 2 would help a lot.

Codeception

With 2.0 we are moving our whole test suite to Codeception. Initial work has been done and we will start pushing the base structure upstream while "moving" existing tests to the new Codeception powered suite. We will need a lot of help to get that task completed so if you want to contribute, keep an eye out in our forum in the very near future for the relevant announcement.

Help with Testing

This version can be installed from the 2.0.0 branch, if you don't have Zephir installed follow these instructions:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 cd ext sudo ./install

If you have Zephir installed:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 zephir build

We rely on the feedback from everyone in the community to flush out bugs and upgrade issues ahead of a big release like this. So please give Phalcon 2 a try on your app, and if you're starting a new app today, you should also probably try the beta2 for that, if you're just the least bit savvy with Phalcon.

[phalconphp-blog]

BuiltWith Phalcon

Today we are launching a new site that would help us spread the word about Phalcon and show where Phalcon is used, whether this is production applications, hobby projects or tutorials.

Introducing builtwith.phalconphp.com

Taking the example from our friends at AngularJS we have cloned their repository and we have Phalcon-ized it. Special thanks to the AngularJS team as well as Ole Aass (website) who is leading the project.

The new site has a very easy interface that users can navigate to and even search for projects with tags. 

You can add your own project by simply cloning our repository and adding your project as well as a logo and screenshots and then issue a pull request for it to appear in the live site.

Looking forward to seeing your projects listed up there!

<3 The Phalcon Team

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 1.3.2 Released

We are today releasing the much awaited 1.3.2 version. 

This version has a ton of contributions from our community and fixes to the framework. We thank everyone that has worked on this release, especially with their contributions both to 1.3.2 and our work in progress 2.0.0.

Many thanks to dreamsxin, mruz, kjdev, Cinderella-Man, andreadelfino, kfll, brandonlamb, zacek, joni, wandersonwhcr, kevinhatry, alkana and many others that have contributed either on Github or through discussion in our forum.

The changelog can be found here.

We also have a number of pull requests that have not made it to 1.3.2 but will be included to 1.3.3. We need to make sure that the fix or feature that each pull request offers are present both in 1.3.3 but also in 2.0.0

A big thank you once again to our community! You guys are awesome!

<3 Phalcon Team

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 2 (beta 1) released!

Eight months ago we announced the creation of a new high-level compiled language called Zephir which we used to completely rewrite Phalcon 2.0.

Zephir's purpose is to offer a new and easier syntax of writing PHP extensions, translating its PHP/JS inspired syntax to C instructions and thus allowing more and more developers to be involved with the project. In addition, it offers the ability to create new PHP extensions without the need to know C or any of the PHP internals.

For us and thanks to Zephir, the development of Phalcon is now more enjoyable. We have to deal less and less with low-level details and our base code is more readable for anyone who wants to understand, contribute and improve Phalcon.

During these we have been implemented several interesting features in Zephir, that have enriched the quality of Phalcon and have made the development more robust:

Static Typing

Named Parameters

Getter/Setter shortcuts

Return Type Hints

Use static types as objects

And more...

The result of all this hard work is now available for all to use. Today, we are excited to announce the release of Phalcon 2 beta 1!

To showcase our trust in our work, the following Phalcon powered software uses Phalcon 2.0:

Official WebSite

The official Phalcon website was one of the first Phalcon applications that we have focused on, to make sure that the Phalcon 2.0 code base is compatible with it and thus compatible with Phalcon 1.x.

Today, it runs entirely on Phalcon 2.0. If you have visited our site in the last few days, you have contributed in testing Phalcon 2.0.

INVO

INVO was the first application we launched several months ago to show how an application can be created using Phalcon. It's also now fully compatible with Phalcon 2.0.

Phosphorum

Phosphorum is the software that powers our discussion forum. Everyone that has used Phosphorum in the last couple of weeks has been using an application that is powered by Phalcon 2.0 in production!

Is Phalcon 2/Zephir ready?

All the functionality available in Phalcon 1.x has not yet been completely migrated to Phalcon 2.0. For example, only support for MySQL is available with regards to database adapters at the moment. Other adapters are missing but they will be implemented in the very near future.

There are for sure some bugs and issues to resolve and we need to enhance the test suite to cover more of the code base. However we are confident that with your help we will achieve a stable version very soon.

Regarding Zephir, while the progress made is quite significant, there is much work to do as with any language:

Increase stability

Improve documentation

Increase debuggability

Improve performance in certain scenarios, etc.

With the contributions of the community and the use case available through Phalcon 2.0, Zephir will undoubtedly evolve even more.

Help with Testing

This version can be installed from the 2.0.0 branch:

git clone http://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon git checkout 2.0.0 cd ext sudo ./install

We welcome your comments regarding this new release. If you discover any bugs, please (if possible) create a failing test and submit a pull request, alongside with an issue on Github.

Want to contribute?

The simplest way is to look through the issue tracker for issues or features to implement. Also fixing the necessary code to make some unit-tests pass on Phalcon 2.0 would help a lot.

Next Steps

While with the help of Zephir the maintenance of Phalcon 2.0's code should be much easier now, we know that it could be even better. One disadvantage of the compiled languages in a large code base, such as Phalcon's, is that compilation takes away several seconds and introduces undesired pauses in the development.

That is why we recently started developing something called Zephir "Runtime". With all the experience we have acquired over the last few years and following the same philosophy we used on the code generation in the Zephir AOT, started to implement a JIT compiler for Zephir.

This JIT compiler will aid in making development and testing with Zephir much faster and in the long run become an alternative to the Zephir compiler itself, achieving similar or better performance depending on the scenario.

Zephir Runtime is still in its infancy and right now only supports a minimal subset of the Zephir language.

The following video shows how it works:

As you can see, there is no need to invoke the Zephir compiler so as to recompile your extension after changes were made. Just by refreshing the page, the Zephir code is compiled on-the-fly using LLVM as backend.

Zephir Runtime is still in the earliest stages and we’re hopeful that by announcing it early in its lifecycle and open-sourcing the code, we can collaborate with the community throughout its development.

We hope you all have enjoyed these great news, in the next few weeks we will be announcing new betas and more news.

Thank you!

<3 The Phalcon Team

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon Community Hangout

Yesterday (2014-04-05) we had our first Phalcon community hangout. The main purpose of the hangout was to meet the community, discuss about what Phalcon is and what our future steps are, and hear news, concerns, success stories from the community itself.

We are excited to announce that the first Phalcon community hangout was a great success!

We had an awesome turnout from all around the world, with members of the community filling the hangout (10 concurrent users) and more viewing online, asking questions and interacting with the team.

We talked about where we are, where we came from and what the future steps are with Zephir and Phalcon 2.0. Contributions, bugs and NFRs were also topics in our discussion, as well as who are team and how Phalcon is funded.

More hangouts will be scheduled in the near future, hopefully making this a regular event for our community. We will also cater for members of the community that are not English speakers, by creating hangouts for Spanish speaking, Russian etc. The goal is to engage as many members as possible!

The love and trust you all have shown to our framework is what drives us to make it better, push performance, introduce more features and make Phalcon the best PHP framework there is. 

For those that missed it, the video is below.

<3 The Phalcon Team

[phalconphp-blog]

Introducing "Pokémon: Phalcon Edition"

Today, we have an important announcement to make. A few weeks ago we received an interesting proposal from an important japanese video-game company. They wanted us to create a game that would help children to become interested in web programming including open source alternatives like Phalcon. We are no video-game experts by far, but we decided to give it a try and the result is simply amazing.

"Pokémon: Phalcon Edition" is a new member of this saga and it is sure to be one of the favorite of its fans.

The spokesman of this company was very excited about this new project:

We never doubted that Phalcon Team could get on track with this new project. We have rescued the art of Pokémon battle in 2D, but we have introduced elements of the web programming world. 

This game will include a new Framework Pokemon type, the 19th type of Pokemon to be introduced to the franchise. The Framework type is super effective against bugs and bad programming practices.

I can't say more but It will certainly be one of the most exciting games of this year!

A sample of the progress of the game can be seen in the following video:

The game will be available for iOS and Android starting this summer!

Enjoy!

Update: No Pokemons were harmed in the making of that video, that was our April Fool's Joke LOL :D

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon statistics

As with any project, statistics are always good to have around. Whether this is personal curiosity or showing off, statistics help us make decisions.

For those that are wondering what languages are used to make Phalcon, below is a table that might prove helpful.

The output has been created with cloc.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Language files blank comment code -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C 361 108511 46708 327574 PHP 255 7816 6557 35404 Bourne Shell 14 5891 5302 34188 m4 9 2263 882 20732 Bourne Again Shell 10 2738 4109 16963 SQL 3 250 250 13336 C/C++ Header 344 5653 6621 10799 yacc 3 710 57 2032 make 5 52 0 1065 XML 2 15 15 119 awk 2 15 22 70 Python 1 20 1 53 YAML 1 7 0 31 CSS 2 2 0 12 Pascal 1 4 4 4 Javascript 2 0 0 2 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUM: 1015 133947 70528 462384 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

C is king. However things will change once 2.0.0 is out, making Zephir the top language.

<3 The Phalcon Team

[phalconphp-blog]

Phalcon 1.3.0 Released

Right after our 2 year celebration and several months of development, more than 1,500 commits and a lot of improvements and fixes, Phalcon 1.3 is finally released!

Many important internal aspects of Phalcon have been rewritten and enhanced without breaking compatibility with older versions.

Phalcon 1.3 consolidates the research, testing and implementation of new ways to improve the performance in the Phalcon kernel, which is also the heart of the extensions created by Zephir in Phalcon 2.0.

The CHANGELOG for this version is huge. Some key improvements are:

Disabling Literals

Literals can be disabled in PHQL, this means that directly using strings, numbers and boolean values in PHQL strings will be disallowed. In Phalcon 1.3 this option has been improved and now works with most query builders, finders and PHQL generators.

Phalcon\Mvc\Model::setup(array('phqlLiterals' => false)); $phql = "SELECT Robots.* FROM Robots WHERE Robots.type = :type: LIMIT :limit:"; $result = $this->modelsManager->executeQuery($phql, array( 'type' => $this->request->getPost('name') 'limit' => $this->request->getPost('limit') ));

Registry

A widely requested by the community component, Phalcon\Registry is introduced in this version. This component implements the Registry pattern, allowing the developer to store and retrieve all kinds of values using simple keys.

$registry = new \Phalcon\Registry(); //Store a simple value $registry->mydata = "hello"; //Store a complex resultset $registry->robots = Robots::find();

Registries can be iterated as arrays:

foreach ($registry as $key => $value) { var_dump($key); var_dump($value); }

And can be accessed as objects or arrays:

echo $registry->key; echo $registry['some key']; echo $registry[$key]; echo $registry->{$key}; echo $registry[0]; echo $registry->{0};

Ini Settings

Phalcon 1.3 introduces php.ini settings to alter the global behavior of the extension:

; Enables/Disables globally the internal events phalcon.orm.events = On ; Enables/Disables virtual foreign keys phalcon.orm.virtual_foreign_keys = On ; Enables/Disables column renaming phalcon.orm.column_renaming = On ; Enables/Disables automatic NOT NULL validation phalcon.orm.not_null_validations = On ; Enables/Disables throwing an exception if save fails phalcon.orm.exception_on_failed_save = On ; Enables/Disables literals in PHQL phalcon.orm.enable_literals = On ; Enables/Disables auttomatic escape phalcon.db.escape_identifiers = On

PSR-3 Logger Implementation

Phalcon\Logger now implements the PSR-3 standard for loggers which allows this component interoperate with other frameworks that also implement this standard.

In addition to this, Phalcon optionally provides C implementations of the interfaces and traits required by this standard as part of the extension:

Psr\Log\LoggerInterface,

Psr\Log\LoggerAwareInterface,

Psr\Log\LogLevel,

Psr\Log\LoggerAwareTrait and

Psr\Log\LoggerTrait.

You can enable/disable them via the following php.ini directive:

phalcon.register_psr3_classes = On;

This also would allow other components implement and use these interfaces directly where Phalcon is installed.

Image Manipulation Component

A component that was conceived and implemented by our wonderful contributors Phalcon\Image is available for developers that need to manipulate images using GD or Imagemagick. A unified interface is provided to manipulate images using either library.

use Phalcon\Image\Adapter\GD as GdAdapter; use Phalcon\Image\Adapter\Imagick as ImagickAdapter; $image = new GdAdapter('my-logo.jpg'); $image ->crop(200, 200) ->resize(70, 50) ->save('new-logo.jpg');

For now only the most commonly used functions have been unified and implemented since both libraries provide different functionality.

Performance Improvements

TLDR: Phalcon is now faster!

The following performance improvements have been implemented in this version, they are a bit technical, you can skip them if you want:

Polymorphic Function/Method cache Functions and methods are called directly by Phalcon using C calls taking advantage that compilers know their address/location at compile time, however, others only exist temporarily at runtime and must be resolved by Phalcon in the PHP userland. Version 1.3 has introduced a cache that remembers (when possible) the location of these very dynamic functions and methods and reuse those locations in subsequent calls to the same method/function in order to improve performance.

Global constants Some simple and constant values such as: null, false, true, 1, 0 and others, are often used by Phalcon throughout its execution cycle. Previously, these values were (in some cases) allocated or duplicated unnecessarily. Phalcon 1.3 just made one allocation per request for these values and then they are shared everywhere where they are used reducing overall memory usage.

Memory Management A global memory tracker is used by Phalcon to track every segment of memory allocated by the framework in order to accordingly release and free that memory when required. Earlier versions of Phalcon needed to request additional memory to track those memory segment. Phalcon 1.3 does not need to do this in most execution cycles, thus improving performance.

Internal Properties Many of the properties previously implemented classes were Phalcon PHP userland properties. Now many of them have been rewritten to take advantage of internal properties that have a much lower overhead when reading and writing. For example, Phalcon does not need to check whether the visibility of these properties is public, protected or private, the framework knows exactly whether they can be read or updated.

Hidden Symbols Most of the symbols and names of internal functions and structures are not exported publicly anymore allowing the compiler to perform more aggressive optimizations by knowing in advance the address of functions and knowing that those will not be overridden externally.

Acknowledgments

Big kudos to main contributors on this version: Vladimir Kolesnikov, Dreamszhu, Piotr Gasiorowski and all the army of developers behind this project that make Phalcon possible:

Conclusion

We hope that you will enjoy these improvements and additions. We invite you to share your thoughts and questions about this version on Phosphorum.

Enjoy and thanks for using Phalcon!

<3 Phalcon Team

[phalconphp-blog]

3ACEC916AE9C026594FE0562EF3013BE2CF47247

We are humans. We want to better ourselves. Taking different paths and exploring new opportunities we all want to make the world a better place for everyone that lives in it.

This has been the drive of many innovators throughout the years, who, through determination and hard work, made a difference, change minds, offering tools and ideas that make our lives easier.

Two years ago (actually our two year anniversary was in January but this will do), a crazy idea was formed, to create the fastest and most feature rich PHP framework as a PHP extension.

Phalcon was born.

3ACEC916AE9C026594FE0562EF3013BE2CF47247 marks one of the first commits made in the cphalcon repository in Github, but in fact, one of the most significant because it declared our mission starting that day.

Very early days back then, extremely few followers, a lot of things to learn, many bugs and many features missing.

Since then, so many things have happened, we have been delighted to see new contributors to our project, new testers, new users and new applications every day.

Thank you all! Without you we could have not gone this far. 

Happy birthday Phalcon Project!

<3 Phalcon Team