Yii news 2020, issue 7

samdark · November 11, 2020, 11:05pm

https://opencollective.com/yiisoft/updates/yii-news-2020-issue-7

Hello everyone! It is another issue of Yii news. As usual, we have Yii 2 releases, Yii 3 updates, important Yii 1 updates and other news. Have a good read and stay healthy. - Alexander Makarov

Foundation

Since last time I had to spend some time taking care about the foundation. Notable, the way funds are transferred from GitHub Sponsors to OpenCollective. They went from GitHub alright but where to was a big question. It took time to figure it out but now it’s solved.

Another foundation-related thing is that the author of httpsoft/http-message, Evgeniy Zyubin, will likely join the team full-time to speed things up if/when I’ll find extra funds for it.

Infrastructure

We’re constantly improving testing process of all the packages:

Added Roave backwards compatibility check to packages with stable versions.
It verifies that public API is not broken compared to the latest stable version.
We are further moving from Travis to GitHub actions for both Yii 2 and Yii 3.
They proved to be awesome and Travis recently cut OpenSource support, so it is great we have started early.
We decided not to send coverage from PHPUnit to Scrutinizer CI anymore but generate it with Scrutinizer itself.
It is way faster with the same result.
Psalm proved to be very useful. Highly recommend it for your projects as well.
Colors were added to GitHub actions console. Looks way better!

A few adjustments were made to the website. Mostly these are GitHub API deprecation fixes and minor frontend adjustments.

Yii 2 and Yii 1 PHPUnit compatibility patches were extracted into separate repository so in case you need to test your application on PHP 5.3 - PHP 8 range, these will be handy.

Yii 1

Yii 1.1 will be supported for one more year thanks to Skillshare and Onetwist Software.
Marco van 't Wout from Tremani web agency officially joined Yii maintenance 1.1 team.

Yii 2

Yii 2.0.39 was released enhancing dependency injection container and fixing more PHP 8 compatibility issues.

From the less visible improvements, we’ve changed the way annotations are generated for magic properties so now some IDEs, including PhpStorm, will recognize read-only and write-only properties.

The following extensions were released as well:

Yii 3

The following package releases were made since last time:

Overall plan is to prepare the packages listed in this Trello card.

There are multiple interesting decisions:

All stable releases will start with 1.0.0. Previously a variant of starting with 3.0.0 was discussed.
Yii 3.0 packages will support PHP 7.4.
Default configurations were added to majority of packages. Most will work without any extra configuration or with minimal of configuration.
Configuration providers are mostly removed from packages and apps.

There is a Trello board with tasks we’re working on including ones not
reflected in GitHub issues.

Nearly every package received cleanup, PHP 8 compatibility and bug fixes. Below are some selected highlights.

New packages

Some new packages were created both as a result of extracting common parts of existing packages and new ideas.

JWT authentication method.
Yii Swagger.
Draft version of API template was created. It is more like a demo now but later part of current code will be deleted, so it will become a real template to start your APIs with.
Request model. It helps to validate and transform request data before using it.
Middleware dispatcher was extracted out of the router and request-model.
Error handler was moved out of yii-web.

Development tool

Dependencies were revised and Dockerfile was added.
Ability to semi-automatic release tagging was implemented.

Composer config plugin

Temporary PHP 8 support was added. It’s not the same as our AST effort and is meant to ease checking things for PHP 8 while we’re finishing AST version.

Container and factory

Dependencies were actualized for both packages.
Self-referencing container definition hack is no longer needed.
Support for PHP 8 union types.
Dependencies are now resolved for both constructor and method when calling non-static factories such as 'engine' => [EngineFactory::class, 'createMethod'].
Definitions are now resolved in array configs.
Callable arguments are now resolved from DI container. Added Reference::toCall().
Any definition could now be used for constructor arguments.

Cache

Removed cache key normalization and non-string keys support.

Bulma

More docs, better naming.
Added ability to use icons in dropdown menu.
All widgets were made immutable.

Router

Router internals and configuration were both made simpler by extracting routes collection into separate class.
UrlMatcherInterface::getLastMatchedRequest() was removed and getCurrentUri() was added.
UrlMatcher is now optional which is handy for console applications.

Application templates and demo

NodeJs is no more required. Assets are fetched from asset packagist.
Configs were significantly cleaned up. In the app, they were split per-package.
Self-referencing container definition hack was removed.
Swagger was added to yii-demo. It can be accessed via /swagger.
Multiple refactorings were made in yii-demo.
yii-demo PSR-7 implementation was switched to httpsoft/http-message.

Var dumper

Added asPhpString() method to export anything as code including closures.

Files

filterPath method was improved to allow callback-filters.

Cycle

File schema is now writeable and supports multiple files to read from.
Our own DI container / factory are now used so Cycle integration is now PHP 8 compatible.

Data

Interfaces were adjusted a bit.

DBAL and ActiveRecord

Both DBAL and ActiveRecord ported from Yii 2 have lots of refactoring to be done despite functionally they were significantly cleaned up and mostly work.

Arrays

Removing value by path was moved to a separate method.
ArrayHelper::isTraversable() was removed in favor of using is_iterable() directly.

HTML

Cleanup was made.
Added Html::generateId().
Added option “wrapInput” for checkbox and radio.
“aria” was added to data attributes.
Removed Html::getAttributeName.
Removed escapeJsRegularExpression, add normalizeRegexpPattern.
Added encoding methods for different contexts: HTML attribute, HTML attribute without quotes, JavaScript string value.
decode() was removed.

Debugger

Queue

Significant cleanup, more tests.
Signal loop was improved by introducing soft memory limit, extra events and signals config.
Documentation was updated.
Separate payloads were removed simplifying everything.

Translator

i18n packages were deprecated, translator packages were introduced with adjusted design.

New and adjusted docs

Reading recommendations and other news

On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project. W3C, an organization that works on web standards, chose Yii2-powered Craft CMS to power their website.
Composer 2 was released. We are ready, so you can upgrade and get significant performance improvement.
Yii 2 PhpStorm plugin was updated to fix compatibility with latest IDE versions.
PHP 8.0: What’s New and Changed.

Thank you!

I’d like to thank all backers and contributors making Yii 3 possible.
We are moving it forward together.

Special thanks for Yii 3 code contributions goes to:

arybalko · November 12, 2020, 6:38am

Great job!