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 about changes to XML extensions

XML version 1.0 was introduced as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification in 1998. XML bears some resemblance to HyperText Markup Language (HTML); however, the main purpose of XML is to provide a way to format data that's readable to both machines and humans. One of the reasons why XML is still widely used is because it's easily understandable and does a stellar job at representing tree-structured data.

PHP provides a number of extensions that allow you to both consume and produce XML documents. There have been a few changes introduced to many of these extensions in PHP 8. For the most part, these changes are minor; however, it's important to be aware of these changes if you wish to be a well-rounded and informed PHP developer.

Let's first have a look at changes to the XMLWriter extension.

Examining XMLWriter extension differences

All XMLWriter extension procedural functions now accept and return XMLWriter...