B - Glossary of Ecosystem Terms

Defined by what each one does for you, not by its formal definition.

Adapter A small piece of code that makes one thing (a storage backend, a search engine) speak the interface your application expects, so swapping the underlying service doesn’t mean rewriting the application. See League/Flysystem.

Attribute A piece of metadata written directly above a PHP class or method (#[ApiResource], #[IsGranted('ROLE_ADMIN')]) that a framework reads at runtime to decide how to treat it, replacing what used to require separate configuration files.

Bundle Symfony’s word for an installable package that adds a feature to an application: the Security Bundle, the AI Bundle. Roughly equivalent to a Laravel package or a WordPress plugin.

Facade A Laravel convention: a simple, static-looking call (Storage::get(...)) that’s actually backed by a real, swappable object underneath, giving you a short, memorable syntax without losing the flexibility of dependency injection.

Fiber A PHP 8.1 feature that lets a single process pause and resume execution at will, holding many things “in flight” at once without needing a thread per task. What makes Reverb’s WebSocket server possible.

Hook / Filter WordPress’s extension mechanism: a named point in core code where a plugin can run its own function (add_action), or modify a value as it passes through (add_filter), without editing WordPress core itself.

Migration A version-controlled, incremental change to a database schema, written in code rather than applied by hand, so every developer and every environment ends up with the same database structure by running the same migration files.

ORM (Object-Relational Mapper) The layer that turns database rows into PHP objects and back (Eloquent in Laravel, Doctrine in Symfony), so most day-to-day code works with $product->price instead of hand-written SQL.

Provider (Service Provider / Service Container) The part of a framework responsible for constructing objects and handing them to whatever needs them, so a class can simply declare “I need a logger” in its constructor without knowing how that logger gets built or configured.

PSR A PHP Standards Recommendation: an agreed-upon interface (PSR-3 for logging, PSR-7 for HTTP messages) that lets independently built packages, from different vendors, work together without one needing to know the other’s internals.

Resource In an API context, a single type of thing your API exposes (a Product, an Order), along with the operations available on it. Also used more narrowly in Laravel for the class that shapes a model into JSON.

Webhook A callback: instead of your app repeatedly asking a service “did anything happen yet,” the service sends your app an HTTP request the moment something does. How Stripe tells your app a payment succeeded.

Worker A long-running process that pulls tasks off a queue and executes them, separate from the process handling web requests, so slow work doesn’t block a user waiting for a page to load. See Shipping Background Work.