The Laravel News site has posted a quick guide for those wanting to use ElasticSearch along with their Laravel applications. The post lists several libraries and resources that can help you get started quickly.

Elasticsearch allows you to search & analyze data in real time. Even though it’s extremely powerful working with delta’s and querying data is not that simple.

If you are using Laravel here is a list of packages and tutorials to help you easily integrate this into your app.

The packages include Plastic and Spatie Searchindex while the tutorials cover things like installing ElasticSearch on Homestead and integrating it with your application.

On the DotDev.co site they've posted a tutorial showing you how to create your first Laravel application. In their case they show how to create a simple link collection tool to help illustrate the process.

The Laravel framework has experienced exponential growth since it’s initial release in 2011. In 2015 it became the most starred PHP framework on GitHub and has risen to be the go-to framework for people all over the world. [...] My goal with this is to create a guide for those just learning the framework. It is setup to take you from the very beginning of an idea into a real deployable application.

He starts by pointing out some prerequisites you'll need (like a local PHP environment and having PHPUnit installed). He then gets into the first step in any good application, planning, and some recommendations to think about. Once the planning is done, then the real code starts. He's broken it up into a few sections to help make it easier to follow:

• The first steps (setting up the basic Laravel application)
• Building a list of links
• Submitting Links

In each step he also provides examples of tests that can be written and used to ensure your application is working as expected. Templates for the link output and the submission form are also included.

Now that PHP 7 has been released, it's time to catch up with what this new major version has to offer. In this tutorial from SitePoint you can learn about what the latest features and changes are in this release (including what happened to PHP 6).

PHP 7, the next version of the world’s most popular programming language, has been released. We’d love to shoot fireworks and get drunk with our newfound power (seriously, the language is in the true big leagues now, functionality and performance-wise) but we’re sure the rest of the internet will do this for us. Instead, we’ll focus on compiling a (perpetually up to date) list of resources to get started with version 7 – posts describing what’s new, books helping you kick things off, and more.

The post starts by answering the "what happened to PHP 6?" question, listing a few resources with some more information on the topic. Following this it gets into the "what's new" of PHP 7 including:

• Links to guides to the features themselves
• Tools to help you get a PHP 7 environment set up
• Other PHP 7-related tools

There's also some other miscellaneous things mentioned including the gophp7-ext project trying to get as many extensions PHP 7 compatible and some sources for more "live" help for your questions.

Jonathan Hill has posted the video of his recent presentation at the Atlanta PHP User Group, "Multi-tasking in PHP".

When it comes to multi-tasking and interacting with the operating system, PHP is no lightweight. In this December 6, 2012 presentation Jonathon Hill (@compwright) explores PHP's little-known POSIX, Process Control, and Semaphore extensions and shows you how to introduce a parallel dimension to your applications.

His presentation covers the use of multi-tasking to accomplish some common tasks in PHP (like batch processing or creating daemons). He talks about multi-processing vs multi-threading, forking, race conditions and semaphores.

You can watch the video of the presentation over on Vimeo and check out the software and links to other resources mentioned in the talk in this link bundle.

On his blog today Chris Jones has posted a long list of resources that the PHP developers using Oracle as a backend could find useful in their development.

He's broken them up into categories to help split things out a bit:

• Some overall links
• The OCI8 extension
• Databases like Oracle Express Edition, MySQL, Oracle Berkley DB
• the NetBeans IDE
• Oracle Linux and Tuxedo
• Oracle Instant Client

Several of the descriptions also come with their own "Install Now" links to help you get started using them quickly. There's lots of tutorial links peppered through out the post too.

Kevin Waterson has posted a new tutorial to the PHPro.org website today stepping you through the automation of handing reciprocal links.

This tutorial looks at the process of reciprocal links. That is, links generated from websites that have links to your own page. These links back to a page can be detected from the HTTP REFERER which, in PHP, can be detected via the super global variable $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']. Care should be taken when using this variable as it is set from userland and, as such, should not be trusted.

His method stores the linking information (gathered from the referrer) and calls an addLinks method that checks to ensure the page format is valid and that it's a real site before putting it into the table. Complete code for this, a fetch method and a simple database layer to put it on top of are included.

Nick Halstead has pointed out a website, written in PHP he's created to help make a little bit of sense out of the links that go flying past in your twitter client - tweetmeme.

What is it? It tracks the public timeline from twitter and picks up any links that get posted. It then follows each link to find final destination and then categorizes the content into blogs / video / images / audio. This project really shows what is possible using PHP if you know what you are doing.

Most of the work was done by another developer, Stuart Dallas as one of four that worked on the project together. It's written in PHP5 and uses only about 20 PHP files to get the job done. You can also check out the launch post over on tweetmeme's blog for more information on the service.

Rich McIver has provided a guide of sorts for companies out there to help "attract, retain and utilize rock star programmers" for their business:

There are plenty of programmers out there, but rock star programmers? They are few and far between. Learn how to locate these gems and keep them happy with the resources below.

The article is broken up into five different sections:

• Job Sites
• Locating Quality Programmers
• Screening
• Care and Feeding of Programmers
• Other Considerations

There's tons of links under each with some good advice not only for those doing the interview but also for the interviewee trying to land the job.

Rich McIver has provided a guide of sorts for companies out there to help "attract, retain and utilize rock star programmers" for their business:

There are plenty of programmers out there, but rock star programmers? They are few and far between. Learn how to locate these gems and keep them happy with the resources below.

The article is broken up into five different sections:

• Job Sites
• Locating Quality Programmers
• Screening
• Care and Feeding of Programmers
• Other Considerations

There's tons of links under each with some good advice not only for those doing the interview but also for the interviewee trying to land the job.

Making a good thing out of a bad situation, Mike Potter has a new post on the RIApedia blog today detailing issues he's had at this year's php|tek conference surrounding his machine.

I was all set to present at the PHP|Tek show here in Chicago yesterday when I encountered a very (very very) ugly hard drive failure, 3 slides into my deck. [...] If you're looking for similar slides, these ones from a previous presentation in New York are close [pdf], though not exactly the same.

So, in lieu of the slides, he's shared lots of great links for the things he was going to talk about in his presentation including:

• Picnik
• the Flex Showcase
• Cal Evans' Flex and PHP tutorial
• the JSON library and AMFPHP combination