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

Dealing with changes to the GD extension

The GD extension is an image-manipulation extension that leverages the GD library. GD originally stood for GIF Draw. Oddly, the GD library had to withdraw support for the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) after Unisys revoked the open source license for the compression technology used when generating GIFs. After 2004, however, the Unisys patent on this technology expired and GIF support was restored. As it stands today, the PHP GD extension offers support for the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG or JPG), Portable Network Graphic (PNG), GIF, X BitMap (XBM), X PixMap (XPM), Wireless Bitmap (WBMP), WebP, and Bitmap (BMP) formats.

Tip

For more information on the GD library, see https://libgd.github.io/.

Let's now have a look at the impact of resource-to-object migration on the GD extension.

GD extension resource-to-object migration

As with other PHP extensions that previously used resources, the GD extension has also primarily...