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

Examining the FFI class

As you learned in this chapter, not every developer has a need to use the FFI extension. Having direct experience with the FFI extension deepens your understanding of the internals of the PHP language, and this deepened understanding can have a beneficial impact on your career as a PHP developer: it's quite possible that at some point in the future, you will be employed by a company that has developed a custom PHP extension. Knowing how to operate the FFI extension in this situation allows you to develop new features for a custom PHP extension, as well as helping you to troubleshoot extension problems.

The FFI class consists of 20 methods that fall into four broad categories, outlined as follows:

  • Creational: Methods in this category create instances of classes available from the FFI extension application programming interface (API).
  • Comparison: Comparison methods are designed to compare C data values.
  • Informational: This set of methods...