The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted today that wants to help you understand StackPHP, the project centered around middleware, specifically related to the Symfony2 HttpKernelInterface.

Today we are going to look at StackPHP and try to understand what this thing is all about. Although this post will have some code, this article will be rather theoretical as we are interested in learning what StackPHP actually is, where it comes from and why it is useful. As the front page of the StackPHP project says, Stack is a convention for composing HttpKernelInterface middlewares. But, in order to actually understand this definition, we will have to cover a few concepts first. At the end, we will also illustrate the concepts we learned in the context of StackPHP with some example code.

They start with a brief look at the HttpKernelInterface and how it works with the overall request and response flow of a typical application request. From there they describe the Decorator design pattern that will be used to augment the request/response objects as they're going through the middleware process. Following this they look at how StackPHP fits into this picture and provides a few code examples showing both basic and a bit more complex middleware handling (including the use of StackBuilder).

Barry vd. Heuvel has a new post sharing a method he's found for using StackPHP middleware with Laravel 5 and provides a library of his own to make moving between the middleware types easier.

In version 4.1, Laravel introduced compatibility with StackPHP middleware. [...] In Laravel 5, a lot of things changed. And with those changes, Laravel also removed the support for StackPHP middleware and introduced its own middleware contract.

As the two types of middleware have interfaces that slightly conflict, he shows how to convert from one to the other (a relatively simple change). He then shows how to use the middleware in a Laravel 5 application, but brings up a "chicken and the egg" situation where a wrapper for the HttpKernelInterface is needed for correct injection. To that end he created two simple wrappers, the ClosureMiddleware and ClosureHttpKernel handlers that can be used to simplify this middleware translation.

On the ServerGrove blog today they've posted the second in their series focusing on individual components of the Symfony2 framework. In this new post they look at the HttpKernel component, another of the foundational blocks of the framework.

In the second post of the Symfony2 components series we are going to talk about the HttpKernel component. If the HttpFoundation component provided the building blocks of the HTTP protocol, the HttpKernel component makes use of them to define an abstract process for converting a Request into a Response.

The post looks at the HttpKernelInterface, the "front door" to the component that takes in a Request object and makes its contents accessible. Also included is a list of some of the configuration options that can be used to alter its behavior, all based on events that fire during execution (the kernel is driven by events). There's also an example included of using the StackPHP middleware as decorators on the kernel.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the second part of a series from Vikram Vaswani about using the Stack Exchange API to pull questions and comments users have posted to the site. In this second part of the series he shows how to get more information about those users and their activities.

The thing to remember about questions, answers and comments, though, is that they don't exist in a vacuum. They're created by users, and it's the users that make the site tick. That's why the Stack Exchange API includes a large number of methods designed to let developers access user profiles and timelines, and unearth the relationships between users and their posts. This article will focus primarily on this dimension of the Stack Exchange API, illustrating how to search for users, obtain user profiles and timelines, and retrieve information on a user's questions, answers, comments, badges and tags.

You'll need to get the StackPHP PEAR package to follow along with the code examples (it does some of the hard work for you). He shows how to:

• Grab a list of users ordered by reputation
• Search for usernames matching a string
• Get badge information (in general and for a user)
• Finding a user's activity timeline

Near the end he also includes an example of using the Zend_Paginator component of the Zend Framework to filter down the results to a more manageable size.

On the Zend Developer Zone today the first part of a series from Vikram Vaswani has been posted. This new set of articles will look at how to use the Stack Exchange API from your PHP applications.

The thing about Stack Overflow, though, is that it has a geeky secret of its own. Like many Web 2.0 applications, it exposes its data to the public via the Stack Exchange Web service API, making it possible to develop customized applications that run on top of the base service. This API allows access to a number of important functions, including searching for questions, retrieving answers and comments, accessing user profiles, and working with tags and badges. It's also pretty easy to integrate this API into a PHP application - and this two-part article will show you how!

In part one he introduces you to some of the conventions and tips you'll need to know when reading through the article. He shows how to get and parse a sample response (with json_decode). He also uses the proposed StackPHP PEAR package to make requests for general question information, specific details, tags, comments and search results.