Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

Thanks to its ease of use, PHP is a highly popular programming language used on over 78% of all web servers connected to the Internet. PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices will help you to get up-to-speed with PHP 8 quickly. The book is intended for any PHP developer who wants to become familiar with the cool new features available in PHP 8, and covers areas where developers might experience backward compatibility issues with their existing code after a PHP 8 update. The book thoroughly explores best practices, and highlights ways in which PHP 8 enforces these practices in a much more rigorous fashion than its earlier versions. You'll start by exploring new PHP 8 features in the area of object-oriented programming (OOP), followed by enhancements at the procedural level. You'll then learn about potential backward compatible breaks and discover best practices for improving performance. The last chapter of the book gives you insights into PHP async, a revolutionary new way of programming, by providing detailed coverage and examples of asynchronous programming using the Swoole extension and Fibers. By the end of this PHP book, you'll not only have mastered the new features, but you'll also know exactly what to watch out for when migrating older PHP applications to PHP 8.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: PHP 8 Tips
6
Section 2: PHP 8 Tricks
11
Section 3: PHP 8 Best Practices

Examining core deprecations

In this section, we examine functions and usage that are deprecated in PHP 8. As the PHP language continues to mature, the PHP community is able to suggest to the PHP core development team that certain functions, classes, or even language usage should be removed. If two-thirds of the PHP development team vote in favor of a proposal, it's adopted for inclusion in a future release of the language.

In the case of functionality to be removed, it is not immediately taken out of the language. Instead, the function, class, method, or usage generates a Deprecation notice. This notice serves as a means to notify developers that this function, class, method, or usage will be disallowed in an as-yet-unspecified release of PHP. Accordingly, you must pay close attention to Deprecation notices. Failure to do so inevitably causes a code break in the future.

Tip

Starting with PHP 5.3, an official Request for Comments (RFC) process was initiated. The status...