Book Image

The Art of Modern PHP 8

By : Joseph Edmonds
5 (1)
Book Image

The Art of Modern PHP 8

5 (1)
By: Joseph Edmonds

Overview of this book

PHP has come a long way since its introduction. While the language has evolved with PHP 8, there are still a lot of websites running on a version of PHP that is no longer supported. If you are a PHP developer working with legacy PHP systems and want to discover the tenants of modern PHP, this is the book for you. The Art of Modern PHP 8 walks you through the latest PHP features and language concepts. The book helps you upgrade your knowledge of PHP programming and practices. Starting with object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP and related language features, you'll work through modern programming techniques such as inheritance, understand how it contrasts with composition, and finally look at more advanced language features. You'll learn about the MVC pattern by developing your own MVC system and advance to understanding what a DI container does by building a toy DI container. The book gives you an overview of Composer and how to use it to create reusable PHP packages. You’ll also find techniques for deploying these packages to package libraries for other developers to explore. By the end of this PHP book, you'll have equipped yourself with modern server-side programming techniques using the latest versions of PHP.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1 – PHP 8 OOP
Free Chapter
2
Chapter 1: Object-Oriented PHP
5
Section 2 – PHP Types
7
Chapter 5: Object Types, Interfaces, and Unions
9
Section 3 – Clean PHP 8 Patterns and Style
13
Section 4 – PHP 8 Composer Package Management (and PHP 8.1)
16
Section 5 – Bonus Section - PHP 8.1

Meta-programming with reflection and attributes

The phrase "meta-programming" describes a technique where your code and runtime become data that you can work with. It can be a bit mind-bending, but also awesomely powerful.

Reflection

PHP comes with something called reflection, which allows you to examine your code and objects at runtime.

PHP: Reflection - Manual

https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.reflection.php

I think the name "reflection" is really apt. It brings to mind a monk, meditating on their own nature and searching for a path to enlightenment.

Reflection is most useful in library code and is used extensively in projects such as Doctrine ORM (which you really should have a look at if you want to work with databases).

GitHub - doctrine/orm: Doctrine Object Relational Mapper (ORM)

https://github.com/doctrine/orm

Let's have a look at some simple code using reflection to meddle with a simple PHP class.

First, we have our simple...