Front Line PHP Building modern applications with PHP 8

250 Pages·2020·1.156 MB·English

by  Brent Roose

Front Line PHP
Building modern applications
with PHP 8
Brent Roose

Front Line PHP
Building modern applications
with PHP 8
Brent Roose
Published 2020 by Spatie.
Reviewers: Freek Van der Herten, Matthias Noback, Stephen Moon, Wouter Brouwers
Design & composition: Sebastian De Deyne, Willem Van Bockstal
This book is a distillation of the lessons learned by the Spatie team the past three years:
Adriaan, Alex, Brent, Jef, Freek, Niels, Rias, Ruben, Sebastian, Willem, and Wouter.
Version 5bc80b1-4
To report errors, please send a note to [email protected].
Created in Belgium

Table of Contents
Foreword ..........................................................................................................................7
Preface .............................................................................................................................9
PART I: PHP, the Language ...........................................................................................10
01. PHP Today 11
02. New Versions 13
03. PHP's Type System 25
04. Static Analysis 43
05. Property Promotion 53
06. Named Arguments 65
07. Attributes 77
08. Short Closures 95
09. Working with Arrays 99
10. Match 107
PART II: Building With PHP .......................................................................................... 114
11. Object Oriented PHP 115
12. MVC Frameworks 137
13. Dependency Injection 155
14. Collections 167
15. Testing 171
16. Style Guide 179
PART III: PHP In Depth .................................................................................................190
17. The JIT 191
18. Preloading 201
19. FFI 215
20. Internals 219
21. Type Variance 225
22. Async PHP 231
23. Event Driven Development 235
In Closing .....................................................................................................................247

Foreword
By Roman Pronskiy
PHP has changed the world. More than 5 million developers are now using this lan-
guage worldwide to create a variety of applications. But the world is changing PHP as
well. Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the language, once noted that "a good solution
should steal/borrow existing technology". And this is true. PHP takes the best ideas
from other ecosystems and improves on them.
It's been 5 years since the release of PHP 7.0. In this time, as the community has
matured and needed new features, the language team has been listening to the com-
munity and implementing the features. This is what has led PHP to introduce stricter
typing, more concise syntax, static analyzers, etc.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that sur-
vives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” - Leon C. Megginson’s interpre-
tation of Darwin’s ideas is an insight that guides PHP year after year.
I was still in school when I first saw PHP, and at the time I had no idea that I would go
on to work with it professionally. Back then, in 2004, the main problem the internet
had was searching for information. Today, because so much information is readily
available, the problem is not searching information but filtering and identifying what is
useful. It is, to lean on an old cliché, like looking for a $needle in a $haystack – or was
it the other way around? Anyway, how do we dig up the really valuable things in these
endless feeds mixed with ads and notifications?
8
It's impossible to give a comprehensive answer for all areas, but for PHP the answer is
here – Front Line PHP.
This book gives a core of knowledge about everything that concerns the PHP’s devel-
opment today and in the near future. This is not a paraphrase of documentation, but
rather a thoughtful and meaningful development experience in short and clear for-
mulations. It offers a fresh look at the newest features of the language, as well as at
some that are already familiar.
Writing quality code in PHP has simultaneously become both easier and more com-
plicated. On the one hand, there are many new features and tools at a developer's
disposal. On the other hand, you need to juggle them elegantly in order to solve real
problems beautifully and easily.
That’s what this book is really about. Complex things in simple words. How to apply
them. Principles and practices. It is a fishing rod, in a sea full of fish.
There has never been a better time to work with PHP. And this book is one of the best
ways to learn it.
I hope you enjoy it!