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

Chapter 1. Setting Up the Environment

PHP 7 has finally been released. For a long time, the PHP community was talking about it and has still not stopped. The main improvement in PHP 7 is its performance. For a long time, the PHP community faced performance issues in large-scale applications. Even some small applications with high traffic faced performance issues. Server resources were increased, but it did not help much because in the end the bottleneck was PHP itself. Different caching techniques were used, such as APC, and this helped a little. However, the community still needed a version of PHP that could boost the application's performance at its peak. And this is where PHPNG comes in.

PHPNG stands for PHP next generation. It is a completely separate branch and is mainly targeted for performance. Some people thought that PHPNG is JIT (Just In Time) compilation, but in reality, PHPNG is based on a refactored Zend Engine, which was highly optimized for performance. PHPNG is used as a base for PHP 7 development, and according to the official PHP wiki page, the PHPNG branch is now merged into the master branch.

Before starting to build an application, the development environment should be finalized and configured. In this chapter, we will discuss setting up the development environment on different systems, such as Windows and different flavors of Linux.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Setting up Windows

  • Setting up Ubuntu or Debian

  • Setting up CentOS

  • Setting up Vagrant

All other environments can be skipped, and we can set up the environment that we will use.