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

Working with other extension gotchas

PHP 8 introduced a number of other noteworthy changes to several PHP extensions other than the ones already discussed in this chapter. As we have stressed time and again in this book, it's extremely important for your future career as a PHP developer to be aware of these changes.

Let's first have a look at changes to database extensions.

New database extension operating system library requirements

Any developer using MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or PHP Data Objects (PDO) needs to be aware of new requirements for supporting operating system libraries. The following table summarizes the new minimum versions required in PHP 8:

Table 7.4 – PHP 8 database library requirements

As you can see from the preceding table, there are two main library changes. libpq affects both the PostgreSQL extension and the driver for the PDO extension. libmysqlclient is the library used by both the MySQL Improved (MySQLi...