Book Image

Learning PHP 7 High Performance

Book Image

Learning PHP 7 High Performance

Overview of this book

PHP is a great language for building web applications. It is essentially a server-side scripting language that is also used for general-purpose programming. PHP 7 is the latest version, providing major backward-compatibility breaks and focusing on high performance and speed. This fast-paced introduction to PHP 7 will improve your productivity and coding skills. The concepts covered will allow you, as a PHP programmer, to improve the performance standards of your applications. We will introduce you to the new features in PHP 7 and then will run through the concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP 7. Next, we will shed some light on how to improve your PHP 7 applications' performance and database performance. Through this book, you will be able to improve the performance of your programs using the various benchmarking tools discussed. At the end, the book discusses some best practices in PHP programming to help you improve the quality of your code.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning PHP 7 High Performance
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Miscellaneous features and changes


PHP 7 also introduced some other new features with small changes, such as new syntax for array constants, multiple default cases in switch statement, options array in session_start, and so on. Let's have a look at these too.

Constant arrays

Starting with PHP 5.6, constant arrays can be initialized using the const keyword, as follows:

const STORES = ['en', 'fr', 'ar'];

Now, starting with PHP 7, constant arrays can be initialized using the define function, as follows:

define('STORES', ['en', 'fr', 'ar']);

Multiple default cases in the switch statement

Prior to PHP 7, multiple default cases in a switch statement were allowed. Check out the following example:

switch(true)
{
  default: 
    echo 'I am first one';
    break;
  default: 
    echo 'I am second one';
}

Before PHP 7, the preceding code was allowed, but in PHP 7, this will result in a fatal error similar to the following:

Fatal error: Switch statements may only contain one default clause in…

The options array...