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 changes to the Reflection extension

The Reflection extension is used to perform introspection on objects, classes, methods, and functions, among other things. ReflectionClass and ReflectionObject produce information on a class or an object instance respectively. ReflectionFunction provides information on procedural-level functions. In addition, the Reflection extension has a set of secondary classes produced by the main classes mentioned just now. These secondary classes include ReflectionMethod, produced by ReflectionClass::getMethod(), ReflectionProperty, produced by ReflectionClass::getProperty(), and so forth.

You might wonder: Who uses this extension? The answer is: any application that needs to perform analysis on an external set of classes. This might include software that performs automated code generation, testing, or documentation generation. Classes that perform hydration (populating objects from arrays) also benefit from the Reflection extension.

Tip

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