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

Performing the migration

Performing the actual migration from your current version to PHP version 8 is much like the process of deploying a new set of features to an existing application. If possible, you might consider running two websites in parallel until such time as you are confident the new version works as expected. Many organizations run the staging environment in parallel with the production environment for this purpose.

In this section, we present a twelve-step guide to perform a successful migration. Although we are focused on migrating to PHP 8, these twelve steps can apply to any PHP update you may wish to perform. Understanding and following these steps carefully is critical to the success of your production website. Included in the twelve steps are plenty of places where you can revert to an earlier version if you encounter problems.

Before we get into details, here is a general overview of a twelve-step migration process going from an older version of PHP to PHP...