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

Learning where to use FFI

The potential for importing C libraries directly into PHP is truly staggering. One of the PHP core developers actually used the FFI extension to bind PHP to the C-language TensorFlow machine learning platform!

Tip

For information on the TensorFlow machine learning platform, head over to this web page: https://www.tensorflow.org/. To see how PHP can be bound to this library, have a look here: https://github.com/dstogov/php-tensorflow.

As we show you in this section, the FFI extension is not a magic solution for all of your needs. This section discusses the main strengths and weaknesses of the FFI extension, as well as giving you guidelines for its use. A myth we debunk in this section is that making direct C-language calls using the FFI extension speeds up PHP 8 program execution. First, let's have a look at what took so long to get the FFI extension into PHP.

Adopting FFI into PHP

The first FFI extension was actually introduced for PHP...