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

Discovering core OOP coding differences

There are a number of significant changes to how you are able to write OOP code in PHP 8. In this section, we focus on three key areas that might present you with potential backward-compatibility breaks. The areas we address in this section are common bad practices associated with making static method calls, handling object properties, and PHP autoloading.

After reading this section, and working your way through the examples, you are in in a better position to spot OOP bad practices and to learn how PHP 8 has placed restrictions on such usage. In this chapter, you learn good coding practices, which will ultimately make you a better programmer. You will also be able to address changes in PHP autoloading that can potentially cause failure in an application migrated to PHP 8.

Let's first look at how PHP 8 has tightened up on making static calls.

Handling static calls in PHP 8

Surprisingly, PHP versions 7 and below allowed developers...