Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

PHP 7 comes with a myriad of new features and great tools to optimize your code and make your code perform faster than in previous versions. Most importantly, it allows you to maintain high traffic on your websites with low-cost hardware and servers through a multithreading web server. This book demonstrates intermediate to advanced PHP techniques with a focus on PHP 7. Each recipe is designed to solve practical, real-world problems faced by PHP developers like yourself every day. We also cover new ways of writing PHP code made possible only in version 7. In addition, we discuss backward-compatibility breaks and give you plenty of guidance on when and where PHP 5 code needs to be changed to produce the correct results when running under PHP 7. This book also incorporates the latest PHP 7.x features. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the tools and skills required to deliver efficient applications for your websites and enterprises.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PHP 7 Programming Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter we will move directly into PHP 7, presenting recipes that take advantage of new high performance features. First, however, we will present a series of smaller recipes that serve to illustrate the differences in how PHP 7 handles parameter parsing, syntax, a foreach() loop, and other enhancements. Before we go into depth in this chapter, let's discuss some basic differences between PHP 5 and PHP 7.

PHP 7 introduced a new layer referred to as the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), which effectively decouples the parsing process from the pseudo-compile process. Although the new layer has little or no impact on performance, it gives the language a new uniformity of syntax, which was not possible previously.

Another benefit of AST is the process of dereferencing. Dereferencing, simply put, refers to the ability to immediately acquire a property from, or run a method of, an object, immediately access an array element, and immediately execute a callback. In PHP 5 such support...