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

Discovering method signature changes

Several method signature changes have been introduced in PHP 8. Understanding these signature changes is important if your code extends any of the classes or implements any of the methods described in this section. As long as you are aware of these changes, your code will function correctly, resulting in fewer bugs.

The signature changes that were introduced in PHP 8 reflect the updated best practices. Accordingly, if you write code that uses the correct method signatures, you are following these best practices. We will begin our discussion by reviewing PHP 8 changes to magic method signatures.

Managing magic method signatures

In PHP 8, the definition and use of magic methods has taken a significant step toward standardization. This was accomplished by introducing precise magic method signatures in the form of strict argument and return data types. As with most of the improvements seen in PHP 8, this update was included to prevent the misuse...