Book Image

Mastering PHP 7

By : Branko Ajzele
Book Image

Mastering PHP 7

By: Branko Ajzele

Overview of this book

PHP is a server-side scripting language that is widely used for web development. With this book, you will get a deep understanding of the advanced programming concepts in PHP and how to apply it practically The book starts by unveiling the new features of PHP 7 and walks you through several important standards set by PHP Framework Interop Group (PHP-FIG). You’ll see, in detail, the working of all magic methods, and the importance of effective PHP OOP concepts, which will enable you to write effective PHP code. You will find out how to implement design patterns and resolve dependencies to make your code base more elegant and readable. You will also build web services alongside microservices architecture, interact with databases, and work around third-party packages to enrich applications. This book delves into the details of PHP performance optimization. You will learn about serverless architecture and the reactive programming paradigm that found its way in the PHP ecosystem. The book also explores the best ways of testing your code, debugging, tracing, profiling, and deploying your PHP application. By the end of the book, you will be able to create readable, reliable, and robust applications in PHP to meet modern day requirements in the software industry.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
16
Debugging, Tracing, and Profiling

Session handling


Sessions are an interesting mechanism in PHP, allowing us to maintain state in what is overall a stateless communication. We might visualize them as a per-user serialized array of information saved to a file. We use them to store user-specific information across various pages. By default, sessions rely on cookies, although, they can be configured to use the SID parameter in a browser.

The cookie version of the PHP session works roughly as follows:

  1. Read the session token from the cookie.
  2. Create or open an existing file on disk.
  3. Lock the file for writing.
  4. Read the content of the file.
  5. Put the file data into the global $_SESSION variable.
  6. Set caching headers.
  7. Return the cookie to the client.
  8. On each page request, repeat steps 1-7.

The SID version of the PHP session works pretty much the same way, aside from the cookie part. The cookie here is replaced by the SID value we push via the URL.

The session mechanism can be used for various things, some of which include user login mechanisms...