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

Understanding the PHP async programming model

Before we get into the details of how to develop PHP applications using asynchronous libraries, it's important to step back and have a look at the PHP asynchronous programming model. Understanding the difference between this and the conventional synchronous programming model opens a new world of high performance for you to utilize when developing PHP applications. Let's first have a look at the synchronous programming model, after which we'll dive into async.

Developing synchronous programming code

In traditional PHP programming, code executes in a linear fashion. Once the code has been compiled into machine code, the CPU executes the code one line after another in a sequential manner until the code ends. This is certainly true of PHP procedural programming. Surprising to some, this is also true for object-oriented programming (OOP) as well! Regardless of whether or not you use objects as part of your code, the OOP...