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.

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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Conventions used
Get in touch
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1
Section 1: PHP 8 Tips
Section 1: PHP 8 Tips
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: Introducing New PHP 8 OOP Features
Chapter 1: Introducing New PHP 8 OOP Features
Technical requirements
Using constructor property promotion
Working with attributes
Incorporating match expressions into your program code
Understanding named arguments
Exploring new data types
Improving code using typed properties
Summary
3
Chapter 2: Learning about PHP 8's Functional Additions
Chapter 2: Learning about PHP 8's Functional Additions
Technical requirements
Working with new PHP 8 operators
Using arrow functions
Understanding uniform variable syntax
Learning new array- and string-handling techniques
Securing SQLite databases with the authorizer
Summary
4
Chapter 3: Taking Advantage of Error-Handling Enhancements
Chapter 3: Taking Advantage of Error-Handling Enhancements
Technical requirements
Understanding PHP 8 error handling
Dealing with warnings that are now errors
Understanding notices promoted to warnings
Handling the @ error control operator
Summary
5
Chapter 4: Making Direct C-Language Calls
Chapter 4: Making Direct C-Language Calls
Technical requirements
Understanding FFI
Learning where to use FFI
Examining the FFI class
Using FFI in an application
Summary
6
Section 2: PHP 8 Tricks
Section 2: PHP 8 Tricks
7
Chapter 5: Discovering Potential OOP Backward-Compatibility Breaks
Chapter 5: Discovering Potential OOP Backward-Compatibility Breaks
Technical requirements
Discovering core OOP coding differences
Navigating changes in magic methods
Taking control of serialization
Understanding PHP 8 expanded variance support
Handling Standard PHP Library (SPL) changes
Summary
8
Chapter 6: Understanding PHP 8 Functional Differences
Chapter 6: Understanding PHP 8 Functional Differences
Technical requirements
Learning key advanced string handling differences
Understanding PHP 8 string-to-numeric comparison improvements
Handling differences in arithmetic, bitwise, and concatenation operations
Taking advantage of locale independence
Handling arrays in PHP 8
Mastering changes in security functions and settings
Summary
9
Chapter 7: Avoiding Traps When Using PHP 8 Extensions
Chapter 7: Avoiding Traps When Using PHP 8 Extensions
Technical requirements
Understanding the shift from resources to objects
Learning about changes to XML extensions
Avoiding problems with the updated mbstring extension
Dealing with changes to the GD extension
Discovering changes to the Reflection extension
Working with other extension gotchas
Summary
10
Chapter 8: Learning about PHP 8's Deprecated or Removed Functionality
Chapter 8: Learning about PHP 8's Deprecated or Removed Functionality
Technical requirements
Discovering what has been removed from the core
Examining core deprecations
Working with removed functionality in PHP 8 extensions
Dealing with deprecated or removed security-related functionality
Summary
11
Section 3: PHP 8 Best Practices
Section 3: PHP 8 Best Practices
12
Chapter 9: Mastering PHP 8 Best Practices
Chapter 9: Mastering PHP 8 Best Practices
Technical requirements
Discovering method signature changes
Working with interfaces and traits
Dealing with private methods
Controlling anonymous class usage
Understanding changes in namespaces
Summary
13
Chapter 10: Improving Performance
Chapter 10: Improving Performance
Technical requirements
Working with the JIT compiler
Speeding up array handling
Implementing stable sort
Using weak references to improve efficiency
Summary
14
Chapter 11: Migrating Existing PHP Apps to PHP 8
Chapter 11: Migrating Existing PHP Apps to PHP 8
Technical requirements
Understanding development, staging, and production environments
Learning how to spot BC breaks before a migration
Performing the migration
Testing and troubleshooting the migration
Summary
15
Chapter 12: Creating PHP 8 Applications Using Asynchronous Programming
Chapter 12: Creating PHP 8 Applications Using Asynchronous Programming
Technical requirements
Understanding the PHP async programming model
Using the Swoole extension
Using selected PHP frameworks in async mode
Learning about PHP 8.1 fibers
Summary
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16
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Learning about PHP 8.1 fibers

A Request for Comments (RFC) was published in March 2021 by Aaron Piotrowski and Niklas Keller, both PHP core team developers, outlining the case for including support for fibers in the PHP language core. The RFC was ratified at the end of the month and has now been implemented in the upcoming 8.1 version of PHP.

The fiber implementation is low-level, meaning that it is mainly designed to be used as part of a PHP async framework such as ReactPHP or Amp, or an extension such as the Swoole extension. Because this will, as of PHP 8.1 and beyond, be a core part of the language, developers will not have to worry so much about which extensions are loaded. Also, this greatly enhances PHP async frameworks as they now have low-level support, directly in the language core, greatly improving performance. Let's now have a look at the Fiber class itself.

Discovering the Fiber class

The PHP 8.1 Fiber class offers a bare-bones implementation upon which...

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