Software

Hot New Web Dev – July 2023

Welcome to Hot Web Dev July 2023, featuring the latest web development. This month features news of a brand change, another brand upsetting its users and despite the haters, PHP is making a comeback, of sorts. If you have never programmed PHP then now is a good time, just don’t listen to all the haters. As usual, we have our coding resources and our tool of the month. Enjoy.

Table of contents

Goodbye Twitter, Hello X
Goodbye Reddit, Hello Lemmy
Coding Resources
OnClick Updates
Web Tool of the Month
The Best of the Rest in July 2023

Goodbye Twitter, Hello X

Want to tweet with Twitter? Not any more. You can create X’s with X though. In a highly controversial brand change, Twitter is now X. Elon Musk took over Twitter in the latter half of 2022 and is now rebranding anything Twitter-related to X.

Photo by greenwish _ on Pexels.com

One of his reasons is that he likes the letter, X, after all, he owns Tesla which has a Model X. He founded an aerospace company called SpaceX. He owns an AI company featuring the letter X and a banking company called X, which merged with another to form Paypal. His son is called X for short. Why not? He also envisions more for X than just a social media platform. It’s going to take a while for everyone to get used to the change but in ten years time, Twitter will be a thing of the past.

Sources

NYT

Goodbye Reddit, Hello Lemmy

Reddit the popular social news aggregator recently announced that they were going to bill people to use their API. This caused controversy with popular apps such as Apollo which estimated that the change would cost $20 million a year. As a result, they would be abandoned and now no longer function.

One of the downsides was that Apollo made Reddit more accessible to those with accessibility issues, unlike the official app. You could change the fonts, increase the magnification and remap the controls to aid a better user experience.

Enter Lemmy, which is an open-source alternative that is growing in traction. Built using the Rust programming language it has a web app and apps for both iOS and Android. If you are an avid Reddit follower and dislike all the changes that have been made it is a viable option.

Coding Resources

Both JavaScript and PHP have got a bad reputation for how they used to function in the past. JavaScript is increasingly popular since the creation of the Node server and TypeScript further aids the development of JavaScript apps. PHP fell behind a little in the popularity stakes during this time and was known for its sluggish speed. Since the release of PHP 8 things have changed.

PHP now has a JIT compiler which allows you to compile code into machine code at runtime. This can significantly improve the performance of PHP applications. Other new features include named arguments. This allows you to specify the names of the arguments you are passing to a function, which can make your code more readable and maintainable.

At the end of the day, PHP is still powerful. As of 2022, WordPress is still the most popular blogging platform and Laravel is still a widely used server-side framework. It even has its own MacOS software called Herd. Maybe 2023 is the year for you to become interested in PHP and forget about the past.

OnClick Updates

I have been informed that OnClick is under new ownership so I will not report any further updates. I wish the new owner all the best and hope he can repair the damage done by Victor Bastos.

Web Tool Of The Month

SonarLint is an advanced linter that encourages the use of clean code when programming. It supports all major programming languages including C++, Java, TypeScript and JavaScript. It works on all popular software including Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDEs. It offers you real-time analysis to catch bugs and mistakes. With over 5,000 rules covering a wide range of issues, the extension can help you learn to write better code.